When Content Degrades and Distracts, Advertising Suffers Too

Advertising is a parasite that depends on the blood of its host—news and entertainment content—for its survival. When the body or in this case the media industry is sick, the parasite too will suffer.

This is the conclusion, although not the language, of Mike Follett, managing director of eye-tracking company Lumen Research (and a former agency-side account planner). He spoke to Nathan Heller of The New Yorker.

By many measures, Follett said, one of the very worst advertising environments is social media: ‘People are scrolling so tremendously quickly, like on a slot machine in Vegas—is it any wonder no one actually looks at these ads?’ One of the most valuable advertising spaces, according to his data, is next to long, absorbing articles from trusted publications.

‘It turns out that attention to advertising is a function of attention to content,’ he explained. A general schlock-ification of material may have helped create a mirage of shortening attention. ‘Maybe people do not have time to spend looking at a thirty-six-second ad—or maybe they just don’t do it on Facebook,’ he went on.

I don’t sense that Follett is longing for a long-lost literary past. These are the words of a person who uses the latest technology to reveal what’s interesting to people. And the tech indicates that people respond more positively to deep content versus shallow content.

Heller’s article is about attention and focused on a group of people who gather to gaze intently at art for 28 minutes at a time. They give the art in question ALL their attention. For our purposes here, I’m pulling threads from the fringe of the article, not its center.

For his story, Heller also spoke to Joanne Leong of Dentsu in New York. “Six years ago, the question was around ‘Can this usefully be measured?’ ” Leong said. Now it’s a circus. “There are companies that use eye tracking. There are companies that do facial coding”—reading emotions through micro-expressions. “It’s no longer a matter of convincing clients that this is something they should lean into—it’s how.”

The logical conclusion from companies leaning into eye-tracking is that they’re developing a keener understanding of how to fit their corporate messages into today’s media environments, and how to change media environments to make them better hosts for advertising. One might further conclude that we’re about to see a marked improvement in the effectiveness of advertising across the board.

But logic isn’t always the most powerful instinct in business. To turn the tide, first there has to be an honest reckoning with the problem, which includes accepting responsibility for making it worse, not better. How do advertising professionals make the attention deficit problem worse? By feeding the media ecosystem more Content Lite, hollow offerings that people scroll right by without regret.