May I have your attention

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May I have your attention please?
Opinion LeaderBrain Game

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It sounds like a simple question – but
recent advances in neuroscience are
proving how complex a challenge
being noticed can be.

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Human beings are natural-born attention seekers.
We feel affirmed when we get noticed, when
we stand out from the crowd, or when we have
a loved one’s undivided attention. For those of
us working in marketing or advertising this is a
professional calling; marketers and agencies get
paid according to their ability to capture people’s
attention for brands. All of us know what it feels
like to capture somebody’s attention successfully
but we know very little about the systems within
that person’s brain that enable this to happen.
Until relatively recently, we have had a limited
understanding of what attention actually is – and
how it works.

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What is attention?
Advances in neuroscience are revealing that our
understanding of attention has been gravely
oversimplified for a long time. Attention is not a
self-contained act. Instead it is a series of rapid,
interacting mental processes that involve the brain
prioritising on the basis of what our senses tell
us is happening, and what our memories tell us
that we care about; and for much of the time, it is
not under our conscious control at all. The task of
capturing an individual’s attention is complicated,
because that person’s attention is a constantly
shifting target.
The human brain processes information at
breath-taking speed and in immense volumes –
but although it is hugely impressive in its processing
capacity, it is not limitless. Attention exists because
the brain needs a means of focusing its finite
resources and ensuring that we capture, process
and encode the information that is most important
to our survival and success. This involves constantly
selecting the things that we will pay closer
attention to at the expense of others. And this
selection process takes place extremely quickly.
In any given second, our brain can process up to 40
different sights, sounds, smells and other external
stimuli. It has the capability of processing quite a
few of these at what we might call a cursory level,
with very low involvement of brain resources that
never gets much beyond ‘semantic’ recognition
of what things are. The vast majority of stimuli
never make it any further than this; our brain stops
processing them before we notice them at any
conscious level. Only about four at a time engage
the higher-level involvement of our short-term
memory, at which point we become properly
aware of their presence.

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External (exogenous)
Senses (visual, hearing, etc.)
Objects and their features
Spatial locations
Temporal locations (points in time)
Based on cues (movement, contrast, abrupt changes, emotions)
Attention
Internal (endogenous)
Memories (short and long-term)
Decision-making between response options
Attending to thoughts
Task rules
Making it into memory
The question of how the brain decides which external
stimuli to process at a higher level, and which to ignore,
is therefore a crucial one for marketers. Which of the
advertising messages that a consumer is exposed
to are actually adding to our conscious memories
and associations for a brand? Which are really being
noticed? And how can a brand adjust its approach to
make sure that its messages fall into this category?
Answering these questions requires an understanding
not just of what our senses capture of the world around
us, but of how our brain sets about prioritising them.
Human beings have two forms of attention: external
and internal. Our external or exogenous attention
responds to the stimuli around us and allocates our
mental resources to them depending on how urgent
or important they inherently appear; our internal or
endogenous attention responds to our own promptings
about what’s important, such as a task that we are
consciously focused on. Our working memory, the
‘scratchpad’ part of our consciousness that puts
different pieces of information together to help us work
things out and accomplish tasks, balances the two
forms of attention. It judges what is most important at
the time – and directs our external attention that way.
Our attention forms a feedback loop – but a fluid one.
Figure 1: A simple outline of how stimuli create or add to our existing beliefs, memories and associations
Figure 2: Human beings have two broad types of attention: external and internal
Once something has our attention, we focus more of
our attention on the things related to it. Any alternative
stimuli must make a stronger case for cutting through
this process and directing attention elsewhere instead.

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A walk through Times Square
When a person walks through New York City’s Times
Square, each of the many ads on billboards has the
opportunity to grab their attention by persuading their
brain that they are important enough to be processed
by their short-term memory. The person is in what could
be termed an ambient state; their exogenous attention
is in control and this directs them towards the external
sights and sounds that appear most worthy of the
brain’s higher-level involvement.
The complicating thing for marketers and researchers is
that the mental playing field in which these ads
compete for attention is never completely level. Each
individual carries priorities and motivations encoded
within various parts of their brain that suggest their
own agenda to their short-term memory. These could
take the form of conscious tasks, such as looking for a
friend they have agreed to meet in the Square; recently
activated affective memories such as a long-forgotten
song that recalls their 10th birthday; or deep-rooted
convictions or loyalties such as support for the New
York Knicks basketball team.
Two of these examples would predispose an individual
towards noticing certain ads before others: the person
thinking about their 10th birthday may be more likely
to notice an ad featuring a bicycle, which echoes an
affective memory associated with that occasion; the
attention of the Knicks fan may move fastest to a Nike
ad featuring an image of the basketball player Carmelo
Anthony in action, because this supports the person’s
view that Anthony is the Knicks’ best player (a focusing
effect known as confirmation bias). The exception is
the person scanning faces looking for their friend. They
notice few ads because their brain has focused their
limited resources towards a specific task at the expense
of other stimuli such as ads. In this final case, control
has switched from exogenous attention, in which the
brain is directed by the urgings of the environment,
to endogenous attention, in which it is directed by a
conscious priority, and filters external stimuli according
to that agenda. Nike ads, bicycle-containing ads and
all other ads are dramatically de-prioritised as a result.
Even though all three of these people were theoretically
exposed to all the ads in the Square and had the same
opportunity to view them, their likelihood of noticing
each of them was really very different.
Figure 3: Attention can be directed in two ways: top-down (endogenous) or bottom-up (exogenous)

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The secrets of competitive stimuli
Competing for attention in such a complex mental
environment of existing biases and agendas can seem
daunting; but it shouldn’t. Human attention would be
of little evolutionary use if it were not capable of rapidly
readjusting when the occasion demands it. The key to
getting your messages noticed, and to judging when an
ad is likely to be successful, lies in understanding what
characteristics of external stimuli can cause attention to
be refocused in this way.
External attention takes several forms. The form most
relevant to marketers – and to our Times Square
visitors – is spatial attention, our ability to focus on a
specific region of space within an environment, shifting
the focus of our senses from left to right, from the
foreground to the background, from basketball star to
bicycle, or from face to face. Were our Times Square
visitors sat in their hotel rooms or apartments watching
TV rather than walking past billboards, we would
be more interested in their temporal attention. This
refers to our ability to notice things appearing in the
same place at different points in time, such as the ads
appearing one after another on the same TV screen.
In both cases, a stimulus has a greater likelihood of
engaging our conscious attention if it surprises us, if it
generates an emotional reaction, or if it aligns with our
existing motivations, priorities and sense of self.

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control, more novel features are likely to make it into
our consciousness; when our endogenous attention is
focusing us on a specific task, something that appears
unexpected enough can still cut through the clutter
and direct our attention towards it. The priority given to
novelty is the reason why humour is such an effective
vehicle for capturing attention, since the subversion of
the expected is typically what makes us laugh.
Emotion, brought about by the release of specific
chemical signals within the brain, is another mobilising
force ringing the alarm bell for external stimuli; it signals
Our awareness mechanism reacts very quickly to
movement, the appearance of something new or to
objects that contrast with their surroundings, but it also
jumps quickly into gear when confronted by something
novel that contradicts our brains’ expectations. If
something stands out from the way that we expect
the world around us to be, then our brain makes
sure we know about it. In order to support this, our
spatial attention is hard-wired to process particular
features of an object such as movement, colour
and the direction that it is facing, faster than others.
When our exogenous, external-facing attention is in
to our brain that something requires urgent attention
– and so stimuli that are associated with powerful
emotions such as fear, loss or the promise of reward, are
swiftly promoted up the queue for short-term memory
processing and arrival in our consciousness. Emotional
stimuli signal to our brain that our attention needs
diverting outwards – and so they too are able to over-
ride endogenous priorities when necessary.
In contrast, a stimulus can also increase its chances
of being noticed if it aligns with the things we are
focused on at the time, or on things we care about
that are embodied in long-term memory structures
such as affective memories. Our Times Square visitor
whose attention is drawn to the ad with the bicycle is
one example; as is a TV viewer who notices an ad for
private medical insurance during an episode of Grey’s
Anatomy. In this case, the stimulus is working with our
endogenous attention rather than seeking to interrupt
it. As a strategy for marketing, this can be highly
effective; however it depends upon a marketer’s ability
to either build relevant associations and memories
ahead of time, or anticipate what individuals will be
focusing on at a specific point and tailor their executions
to resonate with or cut-through in that situation.

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Beyond notice: the challenge of prolonged
attention
Applying these characteristics to advertising and other
marketing messages can win a brand the conscious
attention of the individuals within its audience.
However, the value of that attention depends on the
strength of the initial impression that a brand is able to
make, its ability to hold that individual’s attention, and
what that attention might influence him or her to do
next. Being noticed is an essential starting point – but
it is only a starting point. The most successful brands
are able to command attention repeatedly, in different
contexts and at different levels, all the while keeping a
sense of ‘fresh consistency’ that enables them to build
long-term brand memories over time.
The way in which an external stimulus is experienced
and the amount of resources that are involved in
processing it, influences the amount of attention that
is paid to it once it has been noticed – and the features
of it that register within the brain. As we have discussed
in previous papers, emotional experiences that resonate
with personal goals are particularly effective when it
comes to creating strong, long-term affective memories
that can impact future behaviour. However, the way in
which an individual’s attention has to work in order to
process stimuli can also have an impact on how long
those stimuli keep hold of their attention – and on their
capacity to create longer-term impact.
The complexity conundrum – and its solutions
More complex objects or messages demand more from
our brain in order to process them – and making it into
short-term memory is therefore more of a challenge
for them. On the other hand though, a message that
our short-term memory devotes more resources to
processing is more likely to create stronger, long-term
memories and be recalled in the future. This leaves
marketers with a dilemma: to be most effective they
need to challenge our brain’s processing capabilities
whilst convincing our attention that the challenge is
worth it.
Challenging our brain is the principle behind the
Zeigarnik effect, which describes our tendency to
remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better
than completed ones. This results from our inherent
striving to find meaning, to interpret and categorise our
experiences for future reference. When our attention is
drawn to something that does not immediately resolve
itself to our satisfaction, that something remains in
our memory for longer; it’s why cliffhangers are such
an effective strategy for TV scriptwriters; and it’s why
ads that are difficult to make sense of immediately are
often so effective. Our brain wants to process things as
quickly as possible; demanding its attention but then
denying it the opportunity to move on forces it to spend
more time with the message on which we want it to
focus.
When it comes to demanding attention for more
complex ideas, packaging them in a form that’s easier
to process can help to ensure that they engage our
awareness; this is where we can make use of our
attention’s ability to switch between specific features
and more general objects or concepts, chunking
relevant stimuli together into something instantly
recognisable: a clown rather than a man with a red
nose, oversized shoes and a bright coloured tie.

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When a brand’s messaging has consistent characteristics
that it is easy for our attention to associate together, it
makes that messaging more inviting to encode in all its
detail.
Beyond this, there are other strategies at our disposal
to make sure deeper messages that can engage our
attention over the longer term also have the capacity to
engage our awareness amid the split-second decisions
that our brains make about what’s important. This is
where aligning messages with our understanding of the
motivations and ambitions of individuals is a particularly
powerful approach, as is incorporating elements
that can generate an emotional response within that
individual’s brain.
Priming our attention through repetition can also
play a key role in easing the process by which objects
and concepts enter our consciousness – and this is
where brand logos or other visual stimuli that are
only processed at the very lowest level can still make
a contribution in paving the way for messages to
cut through in the future. Media schedules have a
significant role to play in ensuring that advertising
reaches consumers on a schedule that fits the natural
rhythms of temporal attention (giving our brains time
to absorb information and notice something new).
And effective media planning can position messages in
contexts where they are most likely to be noticed, either
through their contrast to the environment around them
or their resonance with the agenda that environment
suggests to the brain.
In these ways, the rapid growth in our understanding
of the mechanics of attention does far more than
demonstrate the complex nature of the task for
marketers; by understanding the various pulls on our
awareness, it equips marketers far better to ask for the
audience’s attention – and to get the response that they
need. By prioritising and measuring communications’
ability to deliver novelty, to resonate emotionally and to
reflect an individual consumer’s priorities and sense of
self, brands have a powerful playbook for capturing and
keeping attention in a way that counts.

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Going ape: three primate stories of
attention - Our growing understanding
of attention owes a surprising amount
to three ‘experiments’ involving
great apes.

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Simons and Chabri’s Invisible
gorilla
In 1999, the researchers Simons and Chabri asked
a volunteer in a gorilla suit to walk through a circle
of people passing a ball between them, stopping
in the middle of the circle to beat their chest (who
said neuroscience was no fun?). This formed the
basis of a famous experiment demonstrating
‘inattentive blindness’. When people were asked
to watch a film of these goings-on and count how
many times the people in the circle passed the ball
between them, most didn’t notice the gorilla at
all. Their endogenous, top-down attention was in
control, devoting short-term memory to encoding
information about ball-passes and not information
about wandering gorillas.

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Defining novelty through
dopamine
Real apes took centre-stage in another experiment
demonstrating the power of novelty in diverting
human attention and producing a chemical
record of what takes place in the brain when this
happens. The apes were given food under different
circumstances: when they didn’t expect it and when
they did. The levels of dopamine in their brains were
recorded, showing major spikes in the chemical
when the surprise occurred and priming the apes
to expect the surprise to occur again in the future.
Dopamine is one of the ‘chemical currencies’ that
our brain uses to register surprise, re-tuning our
temporal and spatial attention towards it.

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The right kind of attention?
In 2007, Cadbury’s released a film of a drumming
gorilla, simply called ‘Gorilla’, that became one of
the most famous UK commercials of all time – and
has since triggered significant debate about what
makes an attention-grabbing ad, and whether
attention alone is enough to make an ad effective. In
many respects, ‘Gorilla’ could have been written to
a neuroscientific brief for attracting attention. It was
surprisingly different, not just to previous Cadbury
ads but to any ad appearing in a commercial break
before. It stood out through novelty and contrast,
it evoked emotion through its use of the Phil
Collins track ‘In the Air Tonight’ – and its peculiar,
unexplained nature triggered prolonged attention
through the Zeigarnik effect. The ad was considered
a great success at the time, it garnered huge press
attention, set the standard for viral marketing and
was credited with helping to increase sales year-
on-year. However, several have since argued that
since the ad evoked none of Cadbury’s traditional
brand values, it failed to focus long-term beneficial
attention on the brand itself. Others have argued
that the sales uplift may have been down to a cold
summer rather than any advertising impact. ‘Gorilla’
was novel and fresh – but was it consistent enough
to deliver the right kind of attention?

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About the authors
You may
be interested in...
Kyle Findlay is a Senior R&D Executive at the TNS Global
Brand Equity Centre (GBEC) in Cape Town, South Africa. The
GBEC develops and supports brand and communications
thinking and solutions within TNS. Kyle has been intimately
involved in the development of solutions such as the
ConversionModel and models of consumer influence.
Kyle’s work feeds his passion for uncovering what makes
people tick and sharing it with others. He has a strong desire
to bring the hard sciences to bear on the question of why
people do what they do. This passion has encouraged him
to delve into specific scientific areas such as neuroscience,
network theory and big data to produce international
award-winning papers in some of these areas.
Alida Jansen is a member of TNS’s Global Brand &
Communications practice, injecting strategic brand
expertise across the TNS network, driving the development
of the brand equity business by supporting new business
Making memories >
The secret life of the brain >
opportunities, and helping to secure existing tracking/equity
programs.
Before working across the Global Brand & Communications
practice, she worked at TNS’s Global Brand Equity Centre
based in Cape Town, collaborating closely with TNS teams
around the world to ensure that clients receive clear and
precise growth direction from their Brand & Communications
work.
She has written and presented various papers at South
African Market Research Association conferences, on topics
such as the accuracy of self-reported behaviour, cultural
response bias in research, sponsorship effectiveness,
incentivizing employees through brand KPIs, and brand
architecture.
Editorial support – Matthew Cowan

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About Opinion Leaders
Opinion Leaders is part of a regular series of articles from TNS consultants, based on their expertise gathered
through working on client assignments in over 80 markets globally, with additional insights gained through
TNS proprietary studies such as Digital Life, Mobile Life and the Commitment Economy.
About TNS
TNS advises clients on specific growth strategies around new market entry, innovation, brand switching and
stakeholder management, based on long-established expertise and market-leading solutions. With a presence
in over 80 countries, TNS has more conversations with the world’s consumers than anyone else and understands
individual human behaviours and attitudes across every cultural, economic and political region of the world.
TNS is part of Kantar, one of the world’s largest insight, information and consultancy groups.
Please visit www.tnsglobal.com for more information.
Get in touch
If you would like to talk to us about anything you have read in this report, please get in touch via
enquiries@tnsglobal.com or via Twitter @tns_global

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