Tag Archives: attention

Screen Fixation and Attention Deficit Disorder

Posted on by
Reply

While searching for information about the relationship between ADD and different types of monitors, I came across a touching story in the New York Times. Published in 2011 by Perri Klass, M.D., the article titled “Fixated by Screens, but Seemingly Nothing Else” began with the story of boy whose teacher thought he had attention deficit disorder. The teacher urged the boy’s mother to have him tested: “He can’t sit still … He’s always getting into trouble.”

The mother felt her son could not have attention deficit disorder because he could sit for hours concentrating on video games. The physician had heard it all before. He said, “Sometimes parents make the same point about television: My child can sit and watch for hours — he can’t have A.D.H.D.”

“In fact, a child’s ability to stay focused on a screen, though not anywhere else, is actually characteristic of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. There are complex behavioral and neurological connections linking screens and attention, and many experts believe that these children do spend more time playing video games and watching television than their peers.”

But researchers, the article continues, are still trying to determine whether the screen fixation is a cause or an effect of attention disorders.

Some researchers, according to Klass, feel that flickering screens may reward the brain by releasing the neurotransmitter dopamine and therefore attract children with deficit disorders. The brains of these children may be deficient in dopamine and they are, in effect, self-medicating with video.

Other researchers fear video may cause deficit disorders. Klass says, “Some studies have found that children who spend more time in front of the screen are more likely to develop attention problems later on.”

He cited a 2010 study in the journal Pediatrics. It found that viewing more television and playing more video games were associated with subsequent attention problems in both schoolchildren and college undergraduates. The theory goes something like this. In video games, the need to keep responding rapidly in order to win creates hyper-alertness that makes the real world seem under-stimulating by comparison.

My Take

Regardless of the cause/effect question posed above, these studies show that exposure to television and video games can affect brain chemistry over the long term. These visual mediums have the power to affect how we feel, how we think, and how we interact with those around us. Tomorrow, I will write about several affective disorders related to television usage that I have personally observed and documented.

When Smartphones Undermine Essential Business Skills

Posted on by
Reply

Adults have been complaining about the decline of arithmetic skills since students began relying on pocket calculators in the 1970s. When personal computers became widely adopted in the 1980s, they complained that keyboards contributed to the loss of handwriting skills. Then in the 1990s, when spell- and grammar-checkers become popular, people complained about the demise of spelling and proofreading skills.

FamilyCell

Smartphones contain all of the tools above plus many others. Since 2000, smartphones have become so ubiquitous, even among young children, that they are affecting the way we conduct business.

The Big Questions

Despite their undeniable benefits, do smartphones sometimes undermine essential business skills? If so, how?

The Dumb Side of Smartphones

I recently asked a group of business owners and academics this question and got an earful. Below is a small sample of their answers.

  • A librarian told me students are so addicted to Internet browsers and search engines that they are not learning how to use libraries. She worries that this blocks them from using knowledge accumulated before the digital age and from using current information that may not be online.
  • A restaurant owner complained that her cooks were having trouble reading orders placed by young waiters and waitresses who had better texting than writing skills.
  • A retailer complained that his clerks were so dependent on the calculators on smartphones that they could not make accurate change unless the cash register told them what to give back.
  • A pharmacist complained that his younger employees could no longer visualize quantities associated with prescriptions because they could no longer do simple addition, subtraction, multiplication and division in their heads.
  • A store manager complained that over-reliance on calculators (which express quantities solely in terms of numbers) blinded young people to other ways of expressing numeric values. He overheard a customer ask one of his employees for a dozen eggs. The employee said, “We don’t have a dozen. We only sell cartons of 6 or 12.”
  • A delivery-service owner told me about an employee who relied on his cell phone’s turn-by-turn navigation. When the phone’s battery went dead, the employee wound up on the wrong side of town even though he had a key map.
  • A physician was late filing urgent pathology reports because her transcriptionist couldn’t access her medical spell-checker during a system changeover.
  • An owner of a service company complained that clients rarely answered phone calls anymore. They replied to questions with texts while they were in meetings. Problem? They rarely read past the first line of an email to get the full gist.
  • Many owners complained about multitasking-induced errors, i.e., that employees were distracted by texts and emails when they should have been attending to business.
  • Many owners worried about the loss of productivity because people were spending too much time on social networks during work hours.
  • An owner of a company that relied on research felt the convenience of search engines caused many people to confuse thorough, valid analysis with quick, easy answers.
  • Another retailer worried that many young cashiers don’t even look at customers anymore. “They simply stare at their screens and push a button that dispenses change.” He worried that the “personal touch” was being replaced with emotionless transactions that left customers cold, inviting them to go somewhere else.

Despite these problems, we need to recognize and applaud the wonderful things that smartphones enable us to do. Imagine how dull life would be if it weren’t for texting while accounting.

Counterfeiting the Currency of Advertising

Posted on by
Reply

This is a corollary to yesterday’s post about research which found that three out of four people believe claims found in advertising are exaggerated.

Words and images are the currency of advertising. The U.S. Government won’t let people counterfeit its currency. But advertising industry professionals seem to have no problem counterfeiting theirs.

When industry professionals exaggerate, make false claims, or misrepresent the capabilities of a product or service, they don’t serve their clients’ best interests or their own.

False advertising may get people to purchase a product or service once. But the inevitable disappointment they feel can ruin the client’s reputation. The purchasers not only feel disappointed in the performance of the product or service, they feel they have been lied to. Trust is lost with the relationship.

False claims and impressions also counterfeit the currency of the industry. They undermine the industry’s credibility and the return that honest advertisers hope to gain from their investment in advertising.

Governments won’t let people counterfeit their currencies. Why do ad industry trade groups not raise a bigger stink about people who devalue their currency?

Credibility of Advertising

Posted on by
Reply

More than three in four consumers say most of the claims that brands make in advertisements are exaggerated, according to a study by Lab42.

Specifically, among surveyed consumers, 57.4% say advertising claims are “somewhat exaggerated,” and 19.0% say they are “very exaggerated,” Lab42 reported.

Only 2.8% of consumers surveyed say the claims in various ads are very accurate. For the full report, click here.

How did we come to this sad, sorry state of affairs? How did a whole industry undermine its own credibility without raising alarms? Here’s my personal take. The advertising industry I joined as a young man (at Leo Burnett in Chicago in 1972) was much different than the industry today. It seemed every commercial I wrote was scrupulously reviewed by agency lawyers, industry associations, and government regulators. Likewise, research ruled.

Commercials were tested, refined and retested in animatic form before production. Then commercials were tested again in finished form after production. Commercials were more trusted then and felt more compelling. They worked. Even clients believed … in the process.

Then during the Eighties, creatives revolted. They felt straight-jacketed.  They argued that:

  • Research forced everything into the same expected mold.
  • Lawyers sapped the fun out of commercials.
  • Advertising was failing to differentiate brands and make them stand out.
  • People didn’t watch TV to look at the ads; they watched it to be entertained.
  • Advertising needed to be more entertaining to succeed.

At that point, the race for eyeballs had begun. The creative development process was more about eye-candy. Writers and art directors argued that if people weren’t watching, there was no way the commercial could succeed. Of course, they were right.

But that logic contained several fatal flaws:

  • It assumed that people weren’t attending to commercials.
  • Gaining attention is only the first battle for customers’ hearts.
  • Unless advertising also manages to convert that awareness into interest and preference, it has failed.

While the Nineties were certainly a fun period to be in advertising, the industry was sowing the seeds of its own destruction. The eye-candy theorists failed to realize the devastation that unregulated, unpersuasive advertising would wreak on the industry.

Today, that eye-candy leaves many with a bad aftertaste. Perhaps it’s time for the pendulum to begin switching back. Better yet, perhaps it’s time for agencies to evolve to a higher level and to understand some basic truths.

In many cases, advertising makes people aware, but fails to gain interest. Therefore, prospects don’t seriously consider the client’s product or service. Said another way,  prospects don’t put the client on their shopping lists.

The process looks like this. Information needs increase at every level.

  1. Before people will purchase a brand, they must prefer it.
  2. Before people will prefer a brand, they must be interested enough in it to put it on their shopping lists and explore it further.
  3. Before people will be interested in a brand, they must be aware of it.

The battle for dollars takes place on four levels, not just one. Awareness, interest and preference come before purchase. Overlooking any of those steps is fatal to a sale.

And trust is essential to every single one of them. If people don’t trust you, they won’t do business with you. People don’t buy from advertising they don’t trust, and they certainly won’t buy from companies they don’t trust. Exaggeration for the sake of eyeballs does not serve clients well.