Distracting a Constantly Distracted Audience.

This fall I’m helping coach a flag football team of 6-year-olds.

Biggest takeaways so far?

First-grade teachers should get paid much, much more. And the realization that the most important part of practice planning for this bunch is not what skills we are teaching but how we can get their attention to teach the skills. If we can’t get their attention, we don’t have a chance.

The same goes for health care advertising. If no one notices your advertising, your marketing investment is worthless. Attention is advertising job one.

Like it or not, consumers are simply not interested in your ads. As Howard Luck Gossage said, “Nobody reads ads. People read what interests them, and sometimes it’s an ad.”

The thing is, it’s getting harder and harder to interest them. The people at the World Advertising Research Center tell us we’re living in a “distraction economy.” The basic premise is that attention is an increasingly scarce, yet valuable, commodity. You might say our challenge as advertisers is to distract a constantly distracted audience.

With our 6-year-olds, we use constant activity, time-limited drills and fun devices to capture and recapture attention. But what’s a health care advertiser to do?

Here are a few things to try:

Be different. Gaining attention is about being different, challenging category conventions, leveraging emotion, and being entertaining. None of which come naturally in the world of health care advertising.

It’s more often than not a very quiet, look-alike, internally focused advertising space.

Health care and entertainment seem like very far-apart things. But like it or not, entertainment is why people scroll social channels, listen to Spotify or turn to YouTube. Entertainment is funny, relevant and stimulating. There’s a reason TikTok is so popular.

Here’s a bit of evidence to help make your case. According to the market research firm Ipsos, taking an unconventional creative approach produces longer viewing time on average for skippable ads.

And Peter Field and Les Binet’s famous “The Long and Short of It” modeling tells us that emotional advertising campaigns, in particular those that are highly creative and generate powerful fame/buzz effects, produce considerably more powerful long-term business effects than rational persuasion campaigns.

It’s time more of us set out to be different, just like Dove’s Real Beauty, Allstate’s Mayhem and Nike’s Like a Girl. And category campaigns like Penn Medicine’s Revolution and Banner Health’s Our House.

As legendary creative director Dave Trott says, “Creativity may well be the last legal unfair competitive advantage we can take to run over the competition.”

Make it fast. While distractions are on the rise, attention spans are getting shorter. So, we have to get attention fast. And even faster in the digital world.

Recent research by Amplified Intelligence tells us 2.5 seconds is the new attention threshold. The study also showed that 85% of Facebook and Instagram ads fail to reach this threshold. “If you want to grow your brand, you need to hit the 2.5-second mark,” says Amplified Intelligence CEO Dr. Karen Nelson-Field.

YouTube advises advertisers to build videos for attention, starting fast to immediately engage the viewer. That means you should do something intriguing and entertaining at the beginning of your spot; don’t wait to pay it off at the end.

Tailor it. One last tip to consider. Too often campaigns simply cut and paste an execution to each media channel in their campaign mix.

Research from Kantar suggests we should take a tailored approach to each media channel. They tell us that ads tailored specifically for the channel have a 13% greater impact on brand equity than simply running the sameads from channel to channel.

This is about: 1) matching the channel format and audience and 2) leveraging the channel environment.

The first is the easiest. A TikTok ad needs to look and act like a TikTok ad looks and acts. The second is where the fun begins. It’s an opportunity to relate to theaudience’s channel experience. IBM’s Smarter World did it well. And McDonald’s makes it an art.

Hopefully these thoughts will help you gain more attention for your brand and performance communications. If you have any advice for getting my first graders’ attention, send it my way.