Tap your PIN at an ATM. Watch Usain Bolt run 85% of a 100-meter race. Tie one shoe. Those are things you can do in eight seconds. Oh, or read about 26 words. Some say eight seconds are the most dangerous moments in sports. I say eight seconds is the most dangerous moments in media.
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That intro was a little north of two eight-second intervals. So? That’s two times longer than our average attention span these days. Again, so?
So, that means you have eight seconds to grab someone’s attention and do something with it. Until the whole cycle starts again. Oh, and, bee-tee-dub, that’s the average amount of time you have. Which means half the time, the people who have a moment won’t even give you that.
This sooooo matters in media. As you know, I googled my brains out yesterday to get a stat. The best I could get was promotional literature from the platform soon-to-be-formerly-known as TikTok. In 2019, to impress would-be advertisers they trotted out view times for videos from a real production company (StudioCanal) that they showed to their gen Z audience.
The average person viewed these videos for — drumroll — 3.33 seconds.
Is it just me or is it funny that they thought the three one-hundredths of a second was important to mention? Like 3.3 is nice. But, 3.33… wow. That’s impressive. Or, is funny that the number is exactly half of 6.66?
Anyhoo, it gets funnier. These three seconds “far exceeded” TikTok’s benchmarks. They got someone to watch a video for less than half of the average attention span and that beat expectations. How low were the expectations? Keep in mind, this is TikTok promotional material to get people to pay to advertise. TikTok thinks advertisers will think 3 seconds is REALLY GOOD.
Now… I’m old. Gen X. Only a couple of years removed from being a boomer. The people in my age group think these infinitesimally tiny attention spans belong to people who wear athletic dress shoes to look nice.
There’s no way smart, savvy people would lose focus so fast. We believe that the Patagonia vest wearers who dominate the worlds of venture capital, investment banking, and other sagaciously erudite fields pay acute attention to the finer details of Section 174 of the US tax code in LBO models. ← leverage buyout.
Guess again.
DropBox reviewed 100,000 pitch decks entrepreneurs sent to investors to raise their first money. The average deck had 19 slides. The average VC spent two minutes and forty-two seconds reviewing the deck. The math: 8.5 seconds. Per slide. On average.
VCs who ponied up dollars spent 28% more time on slides that showed a business had gained traction. That’s nearly 2½ extra seconds. Sort of weirdly, when VCs didn’t invest, they looked at the business model slide for 20 more seconds.
If you’re reading this (first, sorry, opt out any time) you do businessy stuff. You wear Patagonia to work. If you’re early career (more on that one day), you may be in the area where Venn circles of Patagonia and athletic dress shoes overlap. This eight second stuff matters to you.
That first slide you present in a meeting has 3.33 seconds to wow a Gen Z person tuning in on Zoom before She/he/it tunes out and fixates on whatever seems more fascinating on an Apple Watch. If you’re standing in front of 38 seniors teaching a course on startup financing, don’t get bogged down on the subtilties of capitalizing the labor cost of app development. Excite them about the magical time you rode that mechanical taurus in the one place in Brooklyn you could do that. Viva Toro. Before it closed. Tell them you hung on for eight seconds. Because eight seconds can be the most dangerous time in media.
No bull.