It’s official – boredom is on the rise around the world, and digital media is to blame. So how does boredom relate to attention?

In a recently published study by Communications Psychology, Katy Y.Y. Tam and Michael Inzlicht found we are more bored than ever before, primarily driven by the advancement of digital technology. They demonstrated a rising trend in frequency of boredom between 2010 and 2017, concerning because “chronic boredom can undermine well-being, learning and behaviour”.

With the consolidation of our attention-time into a few platforms and people spending an average of 151 minutes per day on social media – up from 40 min in 2015 – it’s no wonder we’re seeing boredom en-masse.

 

Why is digital to blame?

Digital media creates high levels of stimulation which then makes people less interested in activities with lower stimulation (like reading a book), diminishes creativity when “boredom coping”, and divides our attention – and they find boredom is intricately tied to attention, an increasingly important measure within the marketing world.

The hypothesised drop in attention has been discussed in media agency circles for many years, put down to an increasingly fragmented media mix and constant stimulation at our fingertips. While useful context, we often didn’t have an answer for how to combat lowered attention, meaning the rise of boredom adds a new dimension to our understanding of the issue & offers potential solutions.

 

aipXa

At Anything Is Possible we’ve been working behind the scenes to account for attention scarcity in media. Earlier this year we released our own whitepaper explaining the reasoning and process behing attention-based media planning.

 

Prioritising attention

We’ve shifted to prioritise attention as an input into our media planning, a key variable behind channel choice and budget weighting. Each channel is scored using our aipXa metric, a measure that allows us to directly compare channels beyond simply reach or cost.

By optimising our media plans towards aipXa we ensure your ads have the best chance of reaching the right person, being seen by them, and being in the right environment for them to pay attention to it.

But we can go further. The paper explores situations that provoke the feeling of boredom – which we can use to create more engaging brand experiences. 

Tam and Inzlicht find that boredom arises when situations lack novelty, meaning, autonomy, sense of urgency and optimal challenge. You need to consider this set as you develop your marketing touchpoints; what news are you sharing, are they designed for engagement, do they create urgency and ask something relevant to your audience. 

What you should be asking is… Now you’ve got their attention, what are you going to do with it?