30 seconds to grab attention?
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Attention is hard won these days. With endless bombardments of content from all directions, the average consumer’s attention span is being increasingly lacerated into thinner and thinner slices. Your chances of standing out are shrinking by the day.
So what’s the secret to retaining your presence? Your ad content needs to be more refined than ever, and it needs to grab attention, fast. But how fast? This has always been up for debate, but a figure we constantly see getting bandied around is that you have 30 seconds to entice your viewer. This may have once been the case in a far less competitive and oversaturated online environment, but not now. The real figure is much less…
The 3 Second Rule.
Don’t overestimate your place in the eyes of the viewer. If someone isn’t engaged after 3 seconds, how can you expect them to pay attention for another 30 seconds?
When we reviewed our historical data alongside the London School of Economics, we found that the work an ad does in the first 3 seconds is a strong predictor of overall performance. On average, the top-performing ads in our database had more engaging starts, while the worst performing ads were less engaging in those opening moments.
Now, 3 seconds might sound like a short window of opportunity, but it’s still an opportunity. Irn-Bru used this opportunity to the full, which combined the bright and colourful Irn-Bru branding with a ‘wild west’ saloon fight. According to our findings, within 3 seconds of watching the ad, the audience’s attention had risen 2.5%. By 10 seconds? It had risen a further 5%.
The truth of the situation is – grab attention straight away, or not at all. Optimising and refining the initial seconds of your ad could be the deciding factor in whether or not your brand is remembered.
For more information on what makes an ad successful, and how you can join the crowd of effective, in-the-know advertisers, contact Trinity McQueen today.
