Yes, people pay much less attention to bad advertising than good advertising. Aiming to produce great advertising is the only antidote we have to fight this trend.

Marketers are very much like salmon these days. We swim upstream in a world where attention acts as a rapid current for our plans. Tough life! But wake up, there is little we can do to reverse the trend. We can understand precisely where attention is declining, we can create gold-fish analogies in powerpoint, but ultimately we can’t really shift the water direction.

The alarming decline in attention happens due to a saturation of time. Time is our only finite resource. We can’t generate more than 60 minutes in an hour. And back when we used to watch TV, we would have 10 minutes of advertising to fill the time. Today, while searching for entertainment and useful content, in a single hour we scroll through dozens of web pages and newsfeeds, skip stories and ads at an alarming rate, and are exposed to over 300 brand messages.

It’s not that we pay less attention to advertising, it’s just that we are stimulated by a much bigger number of messages, and naturally, we can’t fit all that in the “available time”.

But brands still grow, campaigns still get shared, SuperBowl ads are still sold, so there must be something that attracts attention disproportionately.

And that’s great advertising.

Ads like these:

Or like this:

Or like this

So, be the salmon that reaches the ocean. Make great ads!

Sorin Patilinet will be speaking at ATTENTION@MAD//Fest on 6th July