Attention is selective, finite, and voluntary – three characteristics with big implications for advertisers
William James’ definition of attention (right) may be over 130 years old, but it has many merits.
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Firstly, it assumes selection. When we talk about attention, we are usually talking about selective attention. Think of the game I-spy. When a child says ‘I spy with my little eye, something beginning with C’, the assumption is that there is a scene crowded with ’several simultaneously possible’ things you could attend to, only some of which are designated by a word beginning with the letter C and only one of which is a cat. Attention is like that. It is a choice between options.
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Secondly, it assumes attention is finite. We have enough cognitive resources to concentrate on one thing or another but rarely both at the same time. Sometimes we don’t concentrate on anything at all – but this not a normal or pleasant situation. In the very next sentence, James says that the concept of attention “implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatter-brained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German”. Attention is a finite resource, that gets used up by the process of attending to things, as Daniel Kahneman was to develop in Attention and Effort (1973).
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Thirdly, it assumes a (voluntary) process. You notice something and then you focus or concentrate on it, investing as much attention as required to make sense of the scene in a ‘clear and vivid form’. The ‘spotlight’ passes over something – a shape, a sound, an ad for offer that must end on Tuesday – and then doubles back, narrowing its focus to concentrate its beam on what it wants to attend to. But what gets looked at depends on your purposes, aims, and beliefs.
Building on James’ initial insight, researchers including Anne Triesman and Richard Gregory have suggested that people navigate the world via a process of ‘attentional satisficing’. You can’t look at everything so you have to come up with a shortcut for deploying limited attentional resources.
People either have a ‘pre-attentional’ stage, that fits very loosely-defined stimuli together to see if there is a pattern worth attending to properly given the current situation (Triesman’s FIT model) or else they are constantly guessing what is probably out there and then investing attention to confirm their hypotheses (Gregory’s ‘perceptions are hypotheses’ model).
Either way, our minds are not a blank slate, waiting passively to receive information from the outside world, but are actively-involved agents, choosing to attend to things based on our current aims and intentions. Attention and intention are close bedfellows. James’ definition of attention is very useful to advertisers. The concept of selective attention helps us understand that just because something is viewable it doesn’t mean that it will get viewed.
Most people ignore most things most of the time – including ads – so it’s important to measure what people actually look at, not just what they had the ‘opportunity to see’. Advertisers could also benefit from understanding that attention is a finite resource, that has to be earned rather than assumed. Many languages adopt an economic metaphor to conceptualise attention: you “pay” attention, or “earn” attention. If you are not careful, you will “waste” people’s time. Ads have to compete for this scarce resource – and they better be “worth” it.
Finally, the intentional model of attention helps us understand how and why people attend to the things they do – and ignore the rest. It is important to remember that consumers are in charge of their own attention, thank you very much. No one has to look at your advertising, and frequently they don’t (section 12 discusses quite how much – or how little – attention actually goes to advertising). It matters where and when you talk to them, what sort of mood they are in, and how relevant or useful your message is to them.
Howard Luck Gossage, the ‘Sage of San Francisco’, had it right when he said: “People don’t read ads. They read what they want. And sometimes it’s an ad.” Attention is selective. It is finite. And it is, to a great extent, voluntary. Understanding the reality of attention will help us buy better media in the short term and be better marketers in the long term.
Many languages use imagery that assumes attention is a commodity that can be given, traded, loaned or even sold:
The etymology of both the words we use in English to describe the phenomenon of attention contain a ‘commodity’ metaphor:
