Announcing Attentional Blink

During 2005 researchers at the University of Wales in Bangor released findings that show that each of us experiences around 3500 adverts a day which is around one every 15 seconds, including ads on billboards, public transport, television, shop fronts, radio, in magazines, and of course in direct mail.  However, the research also showed that under 1% of these adverts can be recalled without prompting by the next day.  We’ll call this, rather obviously, the Overload Theory.

It is quite clear from these figures that if you want your advert to make an impact you have to start by catching attention - exactly as the theory predicts.  If you don’t catch attention, nothing much happens.

Also in 2005 researchers at University College London added an extra dimension to the debate by showing that once the brain has started to focus on something (an advert, a road sign, a teletext page, this article), it has a greatly reduced ability to focus elsewhere for a short time afterwards.   In other words when you turn away from this page your brain will struggle to take in the very next thing you see or hear.  It takes a moment for the brain to re-tune.  This is known as “attentional blink”.

So, from an advertiser’s point of view there is the rather frightening situation that most advertising fails either because we have been overloaded on adverts (overload theory) or because most of us are still thinking about something else when the advert hits (emotional blink).  Stick your advert on TV and the chances are that most of your viewers are still thinking about the end of the previous programme.

Traditionally the way around this has been to grab the recipient’s attention with something exciting (what we have already called “a grabby image”) and then intersperse your advertising material between such images.   But unfortunately, although this can overcome the problem of taking our attention away from whatever we were looking at before, we now give ourselves the same problem within the advert as we faced when starting the advert.   The brain has got excited by the grabby image and so tends to take no notice of the advertising message that immediately follows it.  

In fact, according to the UCL team, the whole traditional approach of advertising (grab attention, then sell the product) falls apart before it even starts.  (There’s an interesting debate to be had, which we will touch upon later, about what happens when an advertiser or an advertiser’s agency is faced with a situation in which it is pointed out that certain adverts don’t work or can’t work.  The usual response is Advertiser Denial, and it is a mechanism that has been used to keep much of the industry in stasis for many years.)

But this is not the half of it.   The research team at Bangor also showed that the way we pay attention to adverts is related not only to what we have just seen or heard, it also relates to our emotional response to the situation.  They found that if you are doing something intellectually demanding (like reading this paper, or trying to work out who is related to whom in an episode of Midsomer Murders) and then you get interrupted (for example by an advert), the emotional blink can lead to a strong emotional dislike of whatever interrupted you. In other words when you are trying to resolve a conundrum (“is she the niece of the bloke who got killed in the woods 20 minutes ago?” or “if all this stuff is true it sounds like all advertising is doomed to fail, so what am I supposed to do?”) you don’t want me popping up in the middle shouting, “Buy your mailing lists on-line at www.hamilton-house.com”.  In fact not only is the advert likely to fail, it is also likely to create an adverse reaction to Hamilton House Mailings such that you will reject the notion of using that company in the future, even though you have by then forgotten this advert.

Now if we return to Overload Theory and the fact that only 1% of all adverts and brands are remembered we find it is not just because we didn’t notice the advert in the first place.  It is also because we started to develop an antipathy to the brand itself – the emotional blink has led us to dislike this advertiser for interrupting us in such a rude way in the past.  Of course not all advertising is equally bad in this regard – telephone advertising and internet pop up’s are among the worst - although placements in movies, radio advertising and television adverts all have an element of interruption in them.

Images are thus a problem because they interfere with the words.  

This is countered by the commonplace phrase "a picture is worth 10,000 words" (often misquoted as 1000 words).   The most important thing to recognise of course is that just because a phrase exists it is doesn't have to be true.  In this case what we have to recognise is that both words and pictures can be worth 10,000 of the other.   The original Chinese phrase is best translated as A Picture's Meaning Can Express Ten Thousand Words, and one of the most famous pictures associated with the picture is of a little child and big dog looking lovingly at each other.   But equally the phrase "A horse goes into a bar" can evoke thousands of images not incorporated into the text.  Is it a wild west bar?  Is there a barman?  What sort of horse?  Are there people in the bar?   And so on - you fill in the image as you go.

The problem is not with pictures or words - but mixing the two.  Start the brain off with words and the picture becomes a grabby image giving you an emotional blink.  Start the brain getting interested in a text and the same happens the other way round.

The theory tells us to look at direct mail from the perspective of the recipient, and here we can see the recipient gets confused if you confuse the pictures and the text.

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The full set of pages covering The Theory of Direct Mail are shown below.  If you want to move to the next page, just click here

Below is a list of the factors that make up The Total Theory of Direct Mail:

1. Why most firms ignore the theory and produce direct mail that fails.
2. When and where the mailing is received - what the recipient is doing at the moment of impact.
3. The personality of the individual you are mailing, and how that affects the mailing.
4. The envelope - it is the first thing you see - does it make any difference?
5. The interaction between the brain and the paper - there are issues of neurophysiology at work which must be taken into effect.
6. The mail is opened - the next five seconds are vital; so what does mailsort do at this point? 
7. Differentiation - now the customer decides, "Have I seen this sort of stuff before?"
8. The customer decides to read - but then colour can get in the way.
9. Using images to try and hold attention - the grabby image problem.
10. Skipping - no matter what you try, most recipients do it.
11. The end - as likely to effect the result as the start
12. The second page - its function and layout.
13. Subsequent page interference - so unexpected most people refuse to admit it exists - but it really does happen.
14. What do you want the reader to do next?  
15. Ordering - are you making it easy?

This article is an extract from the book "Doubling Response Rates: The Theory and Practice of Direct Mail" (c) Tony Attwood 2006