10 Cats That Will Completely Blow Your Mind
I recently hid BuzzFeed from my Facebook and I’ve discovered I waste a lot less time on the Internet. Not that there’s anything wrong with sitting at home in your sweats browsing listicles every now and then, but it gets to a point that it becomes totally distracting.
You start to realize that most of it is all the same, and how many times can you really watch someone busting his ass on the pavement or a cat doing something in a box. I used to be an avid newsreader, but slowly found myself returning to listicles to get short pieces of information or entertainment quickly, instead of sitting down and reading an article.
My attention span was dwindling just like everyone else. This roundabout story is to say that hiding BuzzFeed was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. It’s nothing new that the majority of things online or on social media is meant to grasp our attention for a moment, and then we’re on to the next thing. It’s a trend I’ve noticed a lot in advertising. From exploring advertising sites and even award shows, most everything I’ve seen is either a quick visual solve or a gimmick. I honestly can’t think of a modern, award-winning campaign that involves headlines or even a paragraph of copy. Now it’s three images with a short tag, or a line that consists of five words or less.
I’m not sure how to take it. I can’t decide if it’s a good thing that advertising is merely keeping up with peoples’ inability to pay attention for longer than 8 seconds, or that the industry is falling into a trap and feeding into it. I don’t think it’d be so bad to make a person stop and think by showing them something that requires more depth of thought. But then again they may not even look at it in the first place.
It’s kind of a cynical point of view, and may be unrealistic to think that advertising is meant to make people think long and hard about a subject. But with everything I’ve learned in portfolio so far I refuse to believe that advertising is just another gimmick. We’re made to push our ideas beyond our limits and create something more compelling than most professional ads that are out there today.
If you really dig you can find great advertising out there that serves a larger purpose. I think the “Smarter Cities” is a good example. Although it may use a gimmick to get peoples’ attention, those outdoor ads represent a bigger idea. It causes a person to break away from the daily routine and notice something that’s not quite right, while offering a way for them to get involved and solve a problem.
Maybe that’s the answer. You have to offer a quick sell, and then end with something that makes a person think. Now the real challenge is learning how to do that with extravagant products or services. I won’t always get to choose what campaign I’m working on, and will I be ok with selling something the person doesn’t really need?