ATTENTION MUST BE EARNED IN AN INSTANT
For decades I’ve had a similar feeling that attention of other age groups can be short when it comes to climate change. Pew Research Center recently described the tendency in a nuanced report about peoples’ climate change perceptions that, while based on a smaller group of participants than they usually work with for environmental issues, is a problem whereby people get turned off or suspicious of lengthy explanations of environmental facts. That same report indicated that they are more inclined to believe scientists, however.
Part of my longstanding concern has been over the fractured
nature of environmental advocacy groups (most of whom work with scientists if not their data) and therefore, their dissipated message. One statistic, published by Cause IQ cites “28,167 environmental organizations in the United States. Combined, these environmental organizations employ 127,332 people, earn more than $25 billion in revenue each year, and have assets of $68 billion”. Because the groups compete for money, and therefore attention, they all have different advertising campaigns. Social media would be the perfect opportunity for them to pull together for a unified, succinct message from scientists in the style of the GenZ advertisement approach described by eMarketer. Using hashtags to track down messaging about issues or events could help organize the thoughts and transcending political divides by showing simple messages from experts.
I feel like the shorter attention span is not just Gen Z but has to do with how quickly the world is moving these days. Back in the days of dial-up internet and cable TV, we had to wait to connect to the world online and were forced to watch commercials during TV shows that were 30 seconds long or more. Now, Gen Z and everyone else expects things to be so automatic that long ads or anything very long that we don't already hold innate interest in will lose us. Miranda Lambert's song "Automatic" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ksWKOy665o) illustrates this by looking back on how things were in the past and longing for that simpler time. Older generations (even millennials like me) have lost patience for long ads, while Gen Z were not raised with that same type of patience. Companies would do well to learn this from social media; short ads and interactive ones work better in the modern world.
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ReplyDeleteAgreed about the world in general because most of us can access so much more, so quickly; then we expect more and more, faster. The older teens division of GenZ seem to be in higher gear, though, because they channel so much social interaction on snapchat, etc. and in part, it's age-appropriate, My daughter is needing to shift gears to read things for college, including syllabi and instructions, and not have it float by her phone. Speaking of which, thanks for the Miranda Lambert song with the beautiful message and imagery -and only a few seconds wait to skip the ads!
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