Less attention => new forms of Advertising

We’re all under flooded and overwhelmed by advertisement, so everyone of us have developed different ways to address the problem, some called the ad-blindness, others advertising counter measures, some more conscious others not so much, but in the end they all resume to forms of ignoring advertising…

At this point I need to say that it has worked rather well for me, nevertheless yesterday I was caught by surprise with a campaign by Apple on NYTimes. Strangely the AD was pretty normal, no fancy graphics, no key images, just the same two guys they’ve been running for a while. What caught my attention was how somehow their behavior didn’t make sense, until I finally noticed that the campaign was run over multiple AD tiles on one same webpage!

Brilliant I tweeted!

Although the quality, immersion and interaction is completely different I managed to record a small video from it, just to be able to mention it here:

Back, while, when I was still working at SAPO I realized that stupidly running regular advertisements is much simpler and require less work than to actually plan and deliver a successful campaign, it’s not the same to say that the more money you spend, the more results you’d get (that’s yet another problem!), in a sense that if a company really need to put out their message, and especially in this times of financial burdens it requires to be a step ahead and in this case by being ingenious and deeply smart!

Embrace the FLOW

During the London Barcamp, I’ve found myself attending a rather unusual presentation by Janette Girod entitled “Finding Flow“.

Everyone, more or less often experiments it: developers like myself have it when we’re actively coding, it’s probably like being on dopes: we think faster, better and somehow have the sensation of bending time, peripheral vision narrows and all we seem to care about it’s what’s in front of us, more precisely the action we’re actively engaged in. People experience this sort of feelings when in distress, situations were our “subconscious mind” assumes the leading role, all our attention span is dedicated to urgent needs, like survival. Studies so far show that this state of hyper concentration and rapid judgment is activated by the production of certain types of chemicals inside our blood stream, but for the purpose of this post, what Janette was actively trying to teach us and what really matters is to find ways to active this state of mind and make sure we’ll take the most of it!

So lets start by defining what’s the Flow?

• A sense of effortless action – Mihaly Csikszentmihaly
• A highly productive state of concentration – Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams
• A Zen-like state of total oneness with the activity and the situation – Wikipedia

One common thing seems to be the fact that pretty much everyone experiences this state when they start paying more attention or concentrate about something. One side effect of that focused state is that we tend to, not only take more pleasure of that particular action or moment, but we also experience, longer memories from it, and more easily develop ideas upon whatever we’re dedicating that much attention. Exactly what we know that happens when we watch a movie, read a book, meet friends, or travel, etc.

During Janette’s presentation I got to know the “Csikszentmihaly’s 9 components of an experience of flow”:

1. Clear goals.
2. A high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention.
3. A loss of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
4. Distorted sense of time.
5. Direct and immediate feedback; behavior can be adjusted as needed.
6. Balance between ability level and challenge.
7. A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
8. Intrinsically rewarding action, so there is an effortlessness of action.
9. Focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself

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