Hello? Are you paying attention?

Our attention span these days is so short, its a wonder people can even manage to stay awake in class (but not yours sir, they're always wonderful of course). But its a real problem. We're exposed to thousands to images and ads a day, its a miracle we can even take a second to realize what ad we're looking at. With this much advertising coming our way on a daily basis, is it corrupting our attention span even more? Or is it just not fascinating enough for us to focus on?

Personal experience when it comes to paying attention to anything is my first rule of "tl;dr", which literally means "too long, didn't read." If I see something that needs my attention but has a gigantic block of text on it, I will most likely ignore it. I just don't have the attention span to read through a whole bunch of copy and stay interested after a few lines. I feel like advertising is the same. We see so many ads in a day that we just ignore it was a daily part of day that we take for granted. Its just there, it will always be there and if it was really important enough we'd have paid attention to it. Advertising today is fighting to keep us interested, fighting to keep especially the younger generation, raised on technology and social media, interested. We're online daily and it takes our attention away from mainstream advertising. Brands today have to now use social media sites more than ever to keep our interest and use those sites as a means of advertising. Did you know "social media expert" is now a paying job title? Companies have to pay someone to keep up with social media trends and know-how technicalities so they can keep up with their consumers.

I could literally be getting paid to know how to use facebook effectively right now. Seriously, should I have picked "communications" as a course after all?

With our attention span now as small as 5 minutes, its no wonder that advertising is becoming less and less appreciated. Does that mean they have to increase their advertising and throw more ads our way? I don't think so. I think brands have to become more creative if they want to capture our attention and keep us interested in the product. On the other hand, could it be all the advertising already getting thrown at us thats decreased our attention span to so little? I also don't think thats the case. I think its the growing use of technology and the fact that its now mobile so it goes everywhere with is thats keeping our attention short. We're so interested in the online world that we just don't notice things outside of it anymore. So if brands want to stay relevant, they only have 5 minutes to do so.