Storytelling Strategies for Digital Marketing
We’ve heard quite a bit over the past few years about how the web has changed the way we read, even the way we think. In particular, the often publicized worry is that the change has been a negative one—that we no longer read deeply, and that we can no longer focus our thinking as we did before. There are plenty of voices in dissent on this opinion, though they don’t tend to dispute the fact that the web has changed us rather than the judgement that said change is for the worse. As a result, those of us in the digital marketing space are caught up in a quite tumultuous time, seeking out any trick we can find to get people to pay attention to our messages online. But I don’t think there is any “trick” to be discovered. While I may personally worry about the effects of the web on our brains, the reality seems to be that we do not actually have an attention problem. The problem lies in our failure to imbue marketing with information worth paying attention to. No matter what happens with the web, people still fervently seek out entertainment. Every year, more books, television shows, movies, music and the like are created and voraciously consumed. But if that is the case, why do we believe this idea that the web has killed our attention? Perhaps the volume of content is increasing but the demands it makes on our attention spans are less? (In other words, is it possible that the web is helping us to create and sell more books, for example, that people aren’t actually reading?) I decided to take a closer look at the books, movies, and television we’ve consumed over the past twenty years to see if a clearer picture of what’s happening might emerge. I began by looking at the the top-selling books from the last twenty years, wondering if I might see any trends in length or subject matter. If our attention spans were truly waning, I guessed that shorter self-help books might be the most popular books in recent years. After gathering the top three books from each year, both in the fiction and non-fiction categories (which you can see plotted out in the graph above), I saw that my suspicions were completely wrong. In reality, the bestselling fiction books were longer and outsold the bestselling non-fiction…What We Pay Attention To
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