EXPLORE
Why does attention matter?
The impact of attention on content effectiveness
Content is king
The attention economy
The science of attention
Attention economics
More attention = more revenue
The famous statement made by Bill Gates in 1996 rings truer with every passing day. We all know that modern customers demand the right content at every step of their journey to stay informed, navigate crowded marketplaces, and make better decisions.
Yet how many of us really understand the science behind what makes “great” content? How many of us are clear on the true value of reader attention and how to get more of it? And how many of us really understand the underlying psychology behind content engagement and influence?
Over the following pages, we’ll take a closer look at these subjects, examine the relevant research and psychology, and come to some actionable conclusions about how we can capture more attention, engagement, and business value through the content we all produce.
So let's dive in…
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Every single day, we are each inundated with hundreds – if not thousands – of options for what to read, what to watch, what to eat, what to listen to, and what to spend our time and money on. Even a king or queen at the turn of the 20th century had nothing like the range of choice we each take for granted every single day of our lives in the 21st century.
And this range of choice is forever expanding and diversifying as the world around us becomes more connected, markets mature, and new, innovative providers spring up in every corner to meet unfulfilled needs.
On the one hand, this is excellent for business – we can now connect instantly with many thousands of new potential customers around the world who were previously inaccessible to us.
On the other hand, this is terrible for business – because so can our competitors! As a result, every business on the planet finds itself engaged in a continually evolving battle for the same thing: your attention.
Because if we are to thrive in this ever-more connected and accessible global marketplace, we need to be seen, heard, and recognized before we can begin building the relationships we need to grow our businesses.
It’s tempting to think that an intuitive understanding of “attention” is enough to allow us to begin planning how to get more of it. However, many traditional or obvious measures of attention and engagement can be incredibly misleading.
Simplistic metrics such as clicks, opens, and downloads have been used for decades as a way of measuring attention and engagement. But these low-resolution metrics will, at best, mask reality and, at worst, lead us in totally the wrong direction.
Company A spends $100 on Twitter adverts and $100 on LinkedIn adverts to promote a downloadable piece of content. After a week, they observe that each download from Twitter is costing them $1 and each download from LinkedIn is costing them $5. Very rationally, Company A redistributes their spend in favour of Twitter.
Wrong. What Company A couldn’t see is that while downloads sourced from Twitter were costing a fifth of those from LinkedIn, readers from this channel were reading the content for just a tenth of the time compared to a LinkedIn reader.
This is just one simple example of how attention is a tricky thing to measure and often eludes the metrics we typically have in place in our businesses.
In 2019, Dentsu Aegis launched “The Attention Economy”: a study designed to explore the connections between attention and consumer buying behavior. The study examined 3,400 people as they engaged with 17,000 different adverts across various channels. Attention was measured using state-of-the-art eye-tracking to establish how deeply an advert was engaged with, how long for, and what percentage of it was visible and in full or partial gaze of the recipient as they engaged with it.
Crucially, the study went further than just measuring attention and engagement. Dentsu Aegis used the concept of STATS (Short Time Advertising Strength) to correlate attention levels with commercial outcomes by making products available for consideration and purchase through a virtual store for a period after the study.
This revolutionary approach allowed the researchers to properly explore the connections between real engagement metrics and buying behavior to find a causal link and demonstrate the true value of attention.
The findings of “The Attention Economy” study were fascinating.
The key result was confirmation of the fact that the more time and attention we give to an advert, the higher our propensity to buy. Specifically, the study found that adverts viewed for a total of 30 seconds resulted in an almost 40% increase in likelihood to purchase versus an advert that was merely skimmed for a few seconds.
Every second counts, the longer people looked at an ad, the bigger the effect on sales uplift.
This finding was backed up by a similar result which showed a direct correlation between how intense the focus was on a given advert and a recipient’s propensity to buy, irrespective of time spent viewing the advert.
Specifically, an advert that received full attention resulted in a 15% increase in likelihood to buy versus one which was just glanced at.
Taken together, these two results confirm the idea that the more time and focus we dedicate to a particular message, the more likely we are to be persuaded and influenced by it.
With the link between audience attention and buying outcomes empirically proven, what can businesses do to remain relevant and competitive?
While the focus of “The Attention Economy” was predominantly on advertising, the same results hold true for other forms of customer engagement. From articles to videos and from emails to web pages – if we can get our audiences to spend more quality time engaging with our materials, we should expect better commercial outcomes for our businesses.
This all starts by ensuring that we are producing content on the right topics of interest for our audiences – but most businesses generally don’t struggle with this. Most of us are quite well attuned to what our customers want to hear about and where we can provide value to them on their buying journey.
Instead, the real struggle lies in communicating our message in a compelling and engaging way that maximizes reader attention and therefore business value. In other words, the struggle is not so much with the “message” but more with the “medium”.
But is it really possible to drive greater engagement just by rethinking our methods of content delivery?
