The New Attention Span: What 2022 Taught Us about Reaching People

Time flies. At this point twelve months ago, the world’s official recorded population was under eight billion, Will Smith was still invited to the Oscars, and Lionel Messi had never won a World Cup. Within the marketing industry, we saw a slew of transformative trends which changed our collective landscape. AI-generated art had a breakthrough year, the idea of Elon Musk buying out Twitter went from punchline to reality, and more brands began to put their money where their mouths are when it comes to web3 and the metaverse. 

A year, then, can make a world of difference. But what happens if we zoom out further? What can the cultural events of the last twelve months teach us, not just about the next twelve, but the broader future we’re headed toward? Perhaps most importantly of all, can reflecting on the past year help that future make some sense? 

These were the questions which were put to Five by Five LA’s president Jeff Henning, creative directors Stephen McGinnis and Jake Irwin, and VP of operations Jesse Knaack at the end of another challenging year within our industry and beyond it. To help them ponder it all and begin to map out a blueprint for where we might be headed, LBB’s Adam Bennett joined the quartet. 

The New Attention Span

“My wife is a therapist, which I find to be helpful in taking the pulse of how people are feeling right now”, says Jeff Henning. “ A word that continues to surface in conversation is ‘instability’”. 

As Five by Five LA’s President quickly points out, there’s more than one contributing factor to this trend - a lot more, in fact. “Issues which have been bubbling up for some time are now hitting boiling point - the climate crisis, for example - combined with news stories from the past year including war in Europe, burnout in our professional lives, and escalating domestic political tensions”, he says. 

All of that plays out in front of a media backdrop which demands more content to fill up more of our time. As a result, as Stephen McGinnis puts it, “we’ve almost become too good at filtering out the noise”. A climate of instability means that we’re naturally self-defensive, and an overtly loud media environment has left us more protective of our time and space than ever before.”

The implications for brands are enormous - and they’re set to continue defining how we communicate well into the future. “This isn’t going away anytime soon - you only need to consider how the next generations are interacting with content to appreciate that”, continues Jeff. “My daughter has zero tolerance for anything she considers to be a waste of her time - which, as it happens, is most things online which aren’t extremely relevant to her, and can’t be consumed very quickly”. 

“It’s a truism at this point, but it comes back to an observation, that people aren’t willing to commit to a movie but they will sit and binge a 26-episode series”, says Stephen. “We’re rapidly approaching a scenario where we’ll be lamenting how people won’t commit to watching a series but they will sit and watch 10,000 TikToks back to back”. 

Finding a way to navigate this new attention span could be the difference between marketing success and failure. “It’s something that affects all kinds of levels of consumer engagement”, notes Jake. “In most cases, you’ll need an emotional hook within the first few seconds to grab anyone’s attention. That’s a challenge - and it’s also why, I believe, the metaverse as a concept has at times struggled to capture audience imaginations in the way it eventually will”.

For many, the metaverse was destined to have a breakthrough year in 2022. As that hasn’t quite happened in the way many had foreseen, we’ve still seen some landmark steps forward for web3 technology. For Jake, however, the metaverse’s true potential is linked to the current shift in attention spans that we’re adapting to. “Where the metaverse has potentially been falling down is in the way that people are too protective of their time to want to learn about this whole new thing which demands their attention”, he says. “But, fully realized, the metaverse won’t be competing with other platforms for your attention - it’ll be the place where you access those platforms. It’s not competing with Instagram and TikTok; it’s competing with the internet”. 

The Metaverse Takes Flight

To accurately depict the true potential of the metaverse, Jake starts with a surprising example: The Wright brothers. 

“Essentially since the beginning of time, human beings dreamt of being able to fly”, he says. “But how long did it take us to actually achieve that? Generations, spanning the rise and fall of civilizations, before it became a reality. The metaverse is like that - it’s so ambitious that expecting it to take hold of our culture within a few years is simply unrealistic. It’s going to take more time than that, but it will happen”. 

However, is that really an apt comparison? Can we accurately say that mankind has always dreamt of the metaverse? “I don’t think it’s a crazy comparison to make”, explains Jake. “Okay we haven’t always specifically yearned to exchange NFTs in Decentraland, but ever since the industrial revolution there’s evidence of how we’ve imagined a kind of alternate reality, a place in which to escape mundanity and let our imaginations run wild. That’s what the metaverse can be - it has the potential to cater to deeply set human needs”. 

For Stephen, it’s a potential with clear and exciting implications for how we communicate. “Where our current iteration of the internet falls short, and you could even say where traditional advertising falls short, is how two dimensional it is”, he says. “Increasingly few people want to sit through a traditional ad before they get to the content they want to watch, even if it's just six seconds. But if you then think about an artist promoting an album, and they can transport you to a live show for a few moments and give you a chance to own a piece of it with an NFT, that is a different proposition altogether”. 

And so, when fully realised, the metaverse could well prove to be the solution to the well-documented issues with our attention economy. “The metaverse has the potential to completely blow the lid off of the attention span thing”, says Jake.

Building on that, the creative director notes that adjusting our expectations could well be crucial in delivering this new paradigm shift that the metaverse promises. “I do think we sometimes over-index on this idea of escapism, versus the inevitable reality of the metaverse simply becoming a part of our daily lives”, he continues. “Because that’s when it will truly become ‘a thing’. People don’t love listening to brands, but they love listening to other people - why else do we spend so much time watching videos on TikTok? So what the metaverse needs is simply people, being creative, and existing. That’s when it will break through”. 

Some Hope To Hold Onto

Returning to Jeff’s point regarding ‘instability’, there’s another recurring psychological theme present throughout much of the past year - a push towards change. “If you look at the way some of the world’s biggest brands have been marketing themselves this year, you see something really interesting”, he says. “Amazon’s tagline is ‘Prime Changes Everything’. Lego says ‘Rebuild the World’. Adidas says ‘Impossible is Nothing’. There’s a kind of unspoken acknowledgement there of this desire for things to change, to improve”. 

That cultural desire for change does point toward one more somewhat uplifting trend for 2023 and beyond - hopefulness. “Almost three years ago now, we had the start of the pandemic, which was this enormous prompt for so many of us, people and businesses alike, to re-evaluate who we are and what we’re doing”, says Jesse. “That sense of upheaval hasn’t really stopped at any point in the following three years. On one hand it feels like we’re going from crisis to crisis, but on the other hand all this instability provides a massive opportunity to do things differently - be that by design or necessity”. 

In many ways, however, we have come a long way from the pandemic. “Something I’ve found so enjoyable about 2022 has been the beginnings of a return to what we might call ‘normalcy’, at least in a social sense”, says Jake. “It’s also been extremely rewarding to be a part of that through our work - helping people to reconnect with each other is so important. I think that our drive toward connection - actual human connection, not just following each other on social media - will be a big part of 2023 and beyond." 

Over the previous decade or so, we’ve heard a lot about ‘connection’ - and in a sense, we’ve never been as connected as we are today. “But why has that kind of digital connection ended up feeling so cheap and empty?”, asks Jeff. “If the story of the 21st century so far has been about that kind of hollow connection, there’s reason to hope that moving forward, the story is going to be about meaningful connections. People know the difference now, and we’ve never been so discerning about where we direct our attention."

For brands and marketers, then, there’s an overriding lesson to learn about the future based on the events of the recent past. In 2023 and beyond, success won’t be about how visible you are - it will be about what value you can provide.