Your brain is the most expensive organ you own
The brain makes up about 2% of your body weight but burns around 20% of its energy. It's the most expensive department in the whole company. And like any sensible CFO, it cuts wherever it can.
That's why attention doesn't work like stadium floodlights that light up the whole field. It works like a flashlight. It lights up one spot and leaves everything else in the dark. When you're counting passes, the flashlight is on the ball. The gorilla walks through the dark.
Nobel laureate Herbert Simon put it in one sentence back in 1971: a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. He wrote that when the average American had three TV channels and a landline. Today he'd probably just smile and turn off notifications.
How much is coming at you every day
You've probably heard that people see 5,000 or even 10,000 ads a day. The number floats around at conferences, on LinkedIn, even in textbooks. It has one small flaw: nobody ever measured it. "As high as 5,000 ads a day" first appeared in a 1968 book by Harvard researchers Bauer and Greyser, who themselves called it a number from conversations, not measurement. In fact, they had 750 people count ads by hand and got 76 a day. The myth was dusted off in 2005 by J. Walker Smith's book, picked up by the media, and eventually gained an extra zero, because it looks better on a slide. Over 16 waking hours, 10,000 ads would mean one every six seconds. Including your toothbrush.
| Year | Who measured | Result per day |
|---|
| 1968 | Bauer & Greyser (750 people counted ads by hand) | 76 ads noticed |
| 2007 | Mark Blackwell (repeated the same experiment) | about 98 ads |
| 2014 | Ed Papazian, Media Dynamics (TV, radio, internet, print) | 362 ad exposures, 153 noticed, 86 consciously registered, 12 left an impression |
The 2014 estimate is one analyst's work, and social media and the phone on your nightstand have grown since. So today the number is higher. But we're still talking hundreds, not thousands. What's interesting isn't how many ads come at you. It's how many stick.
Btw, I watched this happen from the front row. In 2008 I set up the Facebook page for HC Sparta Praha, one of Europe's big ice hockey clubs. Facebook was brand new, and if you weren't on it, you were out. All you had to do was show up and people found you. On my watch the page grew from zero to about 20,000 fans; today it has 115,000. But thousands of other shop windows moved onto the same street. According to Social@Ogilvy, in 2012 an average brand page post reached about one in six fans; by February 2014, only around 6%. Facebook was just doing on a small scale what the brain does on a large one. Choosing.
The doorman: four floors every ad has to reach
Picture a doorman standing at the entrance to your head. He doesn't explain, doesn't negotiate, and decides in a fraction of a second who gets in. Every ad, every post and every email has to ride up four floors:
- Exposure. The ad appeared in front of you. This is what the company paid for. (362 a day)
- Noticed. Your eye stopped on it. (153)
- Registered. You know whose ad it was. (86)
- Impression. Something stayed with you. (12)
Most marketing is measured on the first floor, because that's where counting is easiest: views, impressions, reach. But you pay for the fourth. And between the first floor and the fourth, there's an elevator that only stops for the chosen few.
The doorman also learns. Over the years, internet users have learned not to look where ads usually sit. Researchers call it banner blindness, and eye-tracking studies (for example by Nielsen Norman Group) keep confirming it. People move their eyes away from ad space without even knowing it. They miss the gorilla because they're looking elsewhere. They miss the banner because they know exactly where it is.
What the doorman lets in almost every time
The filter isn't bulletproof. Since the 1950s, psychologists have described the so-called cocktail party effect: in a noisy room, you don't hear what the people next to you are saying until someone says your name. That you hear instantly. Which gives us three rules the doorman rarely resists:
- What's about me. My name, my problem, my neighborhood. Relevance is a key the doorman recognizes at a glance.
- What I don't expect. Something that doesn't fit a pattern the brain already knows. Careful, the gorilla alone wasn't enough. It has to show up when the flashlight isn't pointed elsewhere.
- What I feel. Emotion travels faster than reason. A laugh, a surprise, a slight unease.
How to get these three into a headline, a post or a sign is part three. But first we need to solve another problem. The people who do notice your message mostly don't read it. More on that tomorrow.
For a small beauty salon: your sign by the road, your Instagram post and your appointment reminder text each stand at a different door, but the doorman is the same. It doesn't matter how much you send. It matters whether your first line or picture gets through in the one second your client gives you. "Beauty salon – special offer" won't make it. "Your lashes have been asking for attention" has a chance.
For a corporation in Miami: same principle, more zeros. A media plan promising ten million impressions is promising the first floor. Ask about the fourth.
Expert perspective: "For twenty years I've heard that people don't like ads. It's not true. Most people never even see them. That's much worse news, because you can work with dislike. You can't work with invisible. First you have to get past the doorman," says Michal Krčmář, founder of Don Marketer and a CMO with nearly two decades of experience in global marketing.
The takeaway
Next time you're trying to figure out why an ad isn't working, don't start with "what did we say wrong". Start with "did anyone even see it?" Most ads don't lose because of a bad message. They lose earlier, at the door. And the gorilla that walked across the court and thumped its chest is the best proof there is: even the most obvious thing you can imagine disappears when people are looking elsewhere.
Part two drops on Tuesday: why people don't read, even when they notice your message. I'll give away just one number: 59% of the links people share are never opened. Not even by the people sharing them.
And if you want to know how much to put into brand so people remember you, and how much into performance so they find you, the Don Marketer calculator will work it out in 2 minutes.
Sources: Simons & Chabris: Gorillas in our midst (Perception, 1999, PDF); The Drum: How many ads do we really see a day? Spoiler: it's not 10,000 (2023; Bauer & Greyser 1968, Blackwell 2007, J. Walker Smith 2005); SJ Insights / Media Dynamics: New Research Sheds Light on Daily Ad Exposures (2014; 362 / 153 / 86 / 12); NSF: What happens in your brain when your mind is at rest (Marcus Raichle, brain energy use); Nielsen Norman Group: Banner Blindness; Netimperative: Facebook organic reach is destined to die out (Social@Ogilvy, 2014); Herbert A. Simon: Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World (1971); the author's own experience (HC Sparta Praha Facebook page since 2008).
