Attention Span & Advertising

In my opinion, I think our attention spans dwindled over the years because of the increase in the amount and method of advertising. 10 years ago, the average attention span was about 12 minutes; whereas today the average is 5 minutes. I think that the advance in technology and internet advertising is mainly the cause of this. 10 years ago, the internet was still in it's baby stage. It was only really accessible through a desktop or laptop. The fact that many people (at least people I knew) didn't have access to these devices, made advertising strictly print media, television and radio accessible. People weren't bombarded with as many ads as today. Comparing this to today, we can now access the internet almost EVERYWHERE. We can access it on our mobile phones. We can access it on our iPods, iPads, tablets, laptops and desktops. Wifi is also found in coffee shops now, even at MacDonald's! Almost everywhere you go, you can access the internet. This means that the amount of advertising just doubled if not tripled compared to 10 years ago because the internet is so easily accessible. The average person spends about 9 seconds looking at an ad on the internet. Why is this so low? Because they are EVERYWHERE! I can guarantee that people are so overwhelmed with ads on the internet that they do not bother to give a good 90% a second glance. Based on my experience, when I am scrolling through a web page on the internet, I ignore most of the ads. (Unless they are very interesting) Why you ask? Because there are so many that my brain won't remember most of them anyway. And you know what the companies do? They throw more at you. So we tune them out. This turns into a vicious cycle where we start to not care and they care too much. I think if brands focused more on coming up with a creative ad campaign instead of throwing a whole mess of them at their consumers, they would have better results and spend less money. I understand that this is how advertising works. You want to promote your brand so people will buy it. I just think that is they used their resources into a creative way that will catch their viewers attention, then maybe we would give them the time of day. 

The age generation gap also plays a huge role in this. Most adults over 40 don't use a computer all that often or don't need to access it everywhere they go, so they aren't as overwhelmed with advertisements. My generation grew up in the computer day and age, making it almost second nature to us. We just scroll on by and continue what we were doing. Maybe if they made the ads 15 seconds or less, they would keep up with our attention span. As demonstrated in this article.

http://tomfishburne.com/2013/09/short-attention-span-marketing.html
http://www.statisticbrain.com/attention-span-statistics/