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.
