NAB
Grabbing people’s attention in the
first few seconds has become de facto metric for brands and advertisers that
applies across mediums from TV to TikTok. When the average person is exposed to
as many as ten thousand ads a day, the aim is to hook audiences quickly to
generate brand awareness, but how do we cut through the noise and effectively
grab a consumer’s attention?
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A panel of experts at the 2023 NAB Show took to the
stage to share their views in a session entitled “How to Stand Out in a 3 Second World.”
“The three seconds should be inviting
someone in, opening the door, and then, like, keeping them on long enough so
that they actually stay and meaningfully engage with the content,” said Clare
Stein, executive creative director of ATTN.
ATTN has a creative checklist to
gauge whether a piece of content is gaining attention. “It’s not a science,
it’s not something that we’re like bureaucratically crossing things off, but it
can help.”
Stein suggests creating a “curiosity
gap” right upfront in the sense of explaining to the audience what they’re
going to get in the video, but not giving it all away. “Otherwise, they’ve kind
of gotten what they’ve needed, and they can move on. But you also want to show
you’re providing some real value to the audience.”
Another best practice is to elicit
human emotion as a compelling way to open a video.
“I see a lot of clients who want to
open a video with beautiful aerial drone shots to set the tone, and maybe
that’s great in a longer-form documentary, [but] that is the worst possible way
to start a video [on social]. You need to give the viewer someone to connect
with. I think it’s just like human psychology.”
Her third tip is to provoke and
surprise. “It’s really hard to break through if you’re not doing something
different,” Stein said.
She cites a viral video for Adidas
promoting a line of shoes the company had made from recycled ocean plastic.
“Our opening clip was a squid trapped in plastic that was really close up, you
couldn’t quite tell what was going on. And we had a lot of internal debates of,
like, is this a good opening? Like, it’s not a person, we can’t really tell its
nature, we can’t really tell what’s going on. But because of that I think it
caused people to continue watching the video and ultimately led to its
success.”
Chris Di Cesare, head of creative
programming at Dice Creates, said that judging the success of a campaign
ultimately means “becoming a part of the cultural zeitgeist.”
Added Ian Grody, chief creative officer at Giant
Spoon, “When the work that we do is getting picked up in The New Yorker and
it’s on the news and people are talking about it on social, that to me is true,
meaningful success. It’s success that has resonated in a truly authentic way.
And it’s not something that we fool ourselves into believing is success. It’s
something that we’ve earned.
“We are building these Trojan horses
that contain brand messages,” Brody continued, “but [they] need to arrive in
the form of culture that you seek out, that you would pay to watch, pay to
attend, instead of the thing that you pay to skip.”
The panel also touched on the impact
of AI, viewing it generally as a force to be harnessed. When anyone can
generate content in the style of, say, Wes Anderson, or Marvel or Star Wars,
then “increasingly the emerging coin of the realm is going to be originality,”
says Grody.
“Originality is going to become the
most precious commodity in the advertising space, full stop. It’s going to be
those people who can really operate at a high level, generating original work
that are going to continue to break through as the playing field is levelled.”
Stein said she was excited and
interested to see how creative agencies and brands can harness the
“decentralization of creativity that exists when anyone can have a voice.”
She added, “One of the trends I
really like seeing on TikTok is people making commercials for products and
brands that sometimes are funny, and they’re parodies. Sometimes they’re really
good.”
Agreeing with this, Grody said, “the
fact that so many people who were creatively disenfranchised before now have
the opportunity to make the stage and to have their work seen is a wonderful
place for brands. [Brands] can continue to elevate co-creation opportunities
because now you have all of these potential partners out there who are willing
to participate, who are hungry for even more exposure, and brands can be
collaborators, brands can be amplifiers.”
In order to do all of this
effectively, agencies are advised to populate their team with “people who live
and breathe the culture that you end up wrapping that story in,” said Grody.
“I have made it a huge priority, as have other
people within the organization, to defy the advertising industrial complex, and
reach out to different patches and pluck this incredible Ocean’s 11 of
experts with unique passions that are meaningful to our clients. So, when we’re
working on Activision, we have gamers on our team. The answer to me is that it
all comes down to your people, who you staff, and making sure that you have the
right people to meet all of these challenges.”
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