Framing the future of advertising.

They say the consumers shape the future of advertising. I say more specifically, it’s their attention spans do. So if we want to know what the future holds, all we have to do is look back in time.

I’d have loved to advertise to the cavemen. Those guys had crazy-long attention spans. For them, entertainment was a week spent stalking a woolly mammoth til it was riddled with enough spears to make it look like an 80’s cheese platter, at which point it would keel over and die, and only then would the show be over.

In the Roman era, plays would last for days. And it’s not surprising. Men were killed on stage back then, it takes a while for the plot-line to bring the crowd back around to a harmonious finish. They also had to have an interval whilst the blood dried. Health & safety has always been a hassle.

Over time, performance-length dwindled. Operas only lasted for a measly six hours. Plays pushed out to a few hours at most. The 90 minute film was born. Half-hour TV slots were shortened to 22 minutes, interjected with a series on intervals, or ‘ad breaks’ as they were known. YouTube gave rise to the 5 minute hit of entertainment, which has been stripped back to 1-2 minutes as the medium evolved. The spread of Vine is yet again threatening to condense audience attention spans, this time to just a few seconds.

It’s said a picture speaks a thousand words, but a six second video only speaks 140 characters; so it’s fair to say the future is condensed. In time, we’ll see content shrunk to shorter and shorter mediums until one day, our attention spans demand stories that are so short, there’s only time for a single frame. They’ll then be mounted and displayed on every surface visible to man. It’s inevitable.

So, if we can learn anything from history, it’s this: Print media isn’t dead, we’re just not ready for it.