South African consumers’ lives are increasingly digital – at work, home and everywhere in between. News has been reduced to 140 characters and conversations condensed to emojis.  As more and more facets of South Africans’ lives go digital, marketers need to understand the impact today’s digital lifestyles are having on consumers and their attention. Increased media consumption and digital lifestyles reduce the ability for consumers to focus for extended periods of time. We have moved from an era where computing power was scarce to a place where it now is almost limitless. Right now the the true scarce commodity is increasingly human attention.

Microsoft conducted a study on attentions spans of Canadians and came up with the following key findings. Though the research was done on a completely different continent with a different technological, social and economic environment, I strongly believe that this applies to the South African audience which has become increasingly digital in the past 3 years.

Findings

• Media consumption, frequency of multi-screening, and social media usage are the main indicators of attention span variance
• Digital lifestyles deplete the ability to remain focused on a single task, particularly in non-digital environments
• Connected consumers are becoming better at doing more with less via shorter bursts of high attention and more efficient encoding to memory.
• Multi-screening trains consumers to be less effective at filtering out distractions – they are increasingly hungry for something new. This means more opportunities to hijack attention but also that brands need to work harder to maintain it

Human attention is dwindling

The ability to remain focused on a single task is most correlated with:

1. Volume of media consumption
2. Social media usage
3. Multi-screening behaviour
4. Adoption of technology

What can marketers do to win attention?

• Be clear, personal, relevant and (quickly) get to the point
• Defy expectations, leverage rich media and movement to grab attention
• Embed calls to action, be interactive, use sequential messaging, and build cohesive, immersive experiences
  across screens

Here is the full report