“Attention” can be thought of as a core product produced by media companies – under advertiser-supported models, media properties attract audiences whose attention is sold to advertisers seeking to reach groups of people. While this is not always the case, the increasing significance of product placement suggests even goods sold directly to audiences are subsidized by the sale of their attention.

This has been something that’s always intrigued me, and follows on a little from my last post. The importance of what we do as an Customer Experience team is to provide frameworks through which our content creators can capture more attention.

I’m wondering how long it will be before we start working more closely with advertisers to merge content with product placement, in more subtle ways than “skinning sites”.

Some researchers have tested how college students respond to fake dialog boxes in browser popup windows and found that the students are so anxious to get the dialog out of the way, they click right through obvious warning signs…

…Follow-up questions revealed that the students seemed to find any dialog box a distraction from their assigned task; nearly half said that all they cared about was getting rid of these dialogs. The results suggest that a familiarity with Windows dialogs have bred a degree of contempt and that users simply don’t care what the boxes say anymore.

This is interesting, though not that unexpected. We know that when performing specific tasks on a website, users are focused on this to be point of not noticing or ignoring things that would normally be obvious.

There are two take-aways I can think of from this. Firstly if you need to present users with important information in the midst of a task, you’ll need to go to great lengths to properly get their attention, and secondly that things like ads and ‘promotional features’ are unlikely to be noticed let alone comprehended when users are in this task mode.