Mobile is Everything for ESPN, and Soon Will be for Everyone Else

ESPN revolutionized TV. Almost single-handedly, it made cable TV a must-have service for tens of millions of people.

But now ESPN's future is in doubt as more people cut the cable cord. And where are those people going? 

To their phones.

To help it succeed on that platform, ESPN is developing "a smartphone-first content effort that combines personalization, journalism, video and personality,” as the internal memo announcing the change described it.

According to Chad Millman, ESPN's new vice president and editorial director for domestic digital content, the broadcaster is going in this direction because "mobile is everything. We always have to be thinking about mobile first. If we’re thinking about anything else, we’re failing the audience."

And what does it mean to do mobile first?

"You need to keep re-imagining how things look," Millman said in an article in Nieman Lab.

Among other things, this means how it looks on a phone and how long the headline is. 

"What is it (the headline) going to look like and where is it going to cut off on a mobile device," he said. 

What makes all of this challenging, he added, is that pages destined for mobile are designed on a desktop.

"There’s no magic formula to simulate what it looks like on a phone," he said. "So you’re decreasing your browser before you publish it, you’re checking it on your phone as soon as you publish it to fix something right away."

Creating for mobile also means not trying to make it look like ESPN on TV.

"We’re creating for the platform or device that we most expect people to see it on, and not thinking that we have to create something that looks like it belongs on television. 

"Can you understand the story with the sound off? How long should it be? When are people dropping out of videos? 

"All of that stuff makes us rethink how we might have produced something even two or three years ago."

One example of ESPN's mobile-first strategy is its 60-second preview of the week in the NFL. The minute-long segment is designed, produced, and edited with mobile in mind. 

"It is quick cuts, it is tightly written, and it gives you information, but it does it quickly and in a sort of whimsical way. That is something that we wouldn’t have done a year ago," he said.

How quickly things change—in  the mid-2000s, when the web began to take off as a main vehicle of communication, media and others started to move from thinking print-first to web-first. 

There was a lot of agonizing back then over the need for shorter articles, and the end of an edition or issue-based mindset (see Life and Communications Unbundled, on this blog.)  

Now here we are, about a decade later, and we're beginning to hear talk about doing everything mobile-first. Which isn’t surprising, considering the growth of mobile around the world.

Today, mobile is first for ESPN. Soon it will be that way for everyone else.

Study Shows Attention Spans Today Shorter Than Goldfish or, I'm Sorry—We're You Talking to Me?

Intuitively, we know it to be true. But now research from Microsoft confirms that people today have shorter attention spans than goldfish.

According to the study, which surveyed 2,000 Canadians last year, a goldfish has an attention span of nine seconds. 

But people today generally can only stay focused on one thing for eight seconds.

“Heavy multi-screeners find it difficult to filter out irrelevant stimuli,” said the report. “They’re more easily distracted by multiple streams of media.”

Added Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella: “We are moving from a world where computing power was scarce to a place where it now is almost limitless, and where the true scarce commodity is increasingly human attention.”

The study also found that 19% of people leave a website within the first ten seconds—if they don’t immediately see what they are looking for, they’re gone.

On the positive side, the report says that our use of multiple screens and devices is training our brains to be better at multitasking.

What this means for marketers

For those of us trying to catch the attention of people online, this inability to pay attention means a) it is hard to catch attention and, b) it is hard to keep it.

Says the report: “With today’s digital lifestyle, marketers need to make an almost immediate impact before consumers switch off/move on.”

It goes on to say that people are “suckers for novelty. It's more exciting to jump from subject to subject or device to device than to concentrate on a single thing at any one time.”

Get to the point—quickly. “Hook consumers right off the bat with clear and concise messaging that’s communicated as early as possible,” says the report.

And since many people won’t read much on a web page, “craft headlines that can say it all.”

Be personal and relevant. Make sure your brand is “personal and communicate clear consumer value. How will paying attention make their life be better?”

Today’s marketing, it goes on to say, “is about instant gratification and appealing to consumers’ needs and desires to ensure your message is relevant.”

Be short and clear. “What consumers can see in one glance has everything to do with what they’ll do next,” the report says.

“If overwhelmed by input . . . their brain will stop taking it in. Exclude unnecessary information. Stick to the main message. If something doesn’t play a significant role, it’s not needed.”

(Those who know how to write journalistically, using the inverted pyramid style of writing,  will have an advantage here.)

Use rich media and movement.”Human survival has been based on the ability to focus on what’s most important (generally what’s moving),” the report says. “Harness the power of peripheral motion.”

“Rich media ads help capture attention and dramatically improve engagement.”

Include calls to action. What do you want people to do once they have read your content? Is it easy to find a donate button? A link for more information?

It’s a big challenge, especially for small non-profits with limited resources. But there’s no way around it.

Fortunately, there’s a bit of good news. According to the report, our increasingly digital lifestyles is also making us more efficient at processing information.

We are, apparently, able to do and recall more—even with less ability to pay attention.

And it you made it to the bottom of this article, congratulations on your great attention span!

When it comes to being focused, you are much better than a goldfish.

Unfortunately, there's no direct link to the PDF of this report. For more information, Google Microsoft attention span study.

Informavores, Foragers and Web Snacking

The Canadian government is reviewing its website standards. A couple of analogies are being employed to help civil servants make websites that visitors find useful.

The first analogy is that of animals hunting for food.

Users, civil servants are told, are “informavores” who “forage” for information.

Like animals, the look for an “information scent” online. When they find one, they ask themselves: “Am I getting closer to the prey?” and “is it an ‘easy catch’?”

The closer they get, the more they want o know: “How ‘rich’ is this hunting ground?”

The second analogy is that of snacking.

In one section of the new guidelines, web content writers are encouraged to “Be a Snack” and to “avoid making readers/visitors sit down for a full meal!”

Still with the eating theme, another goal is to “trim the fat” by  removing “redundant, outdated and trivial” content from web pages.

The snacking analogy is backed up by a 2013 survey by Mobiles Republic, a global news syndication company in the U.S.

According to the survey, based on responses from over 8,000 News Republic app users, news consumption is rising, but people are reading less—they are checking the news more frequently, but for shorter amounts of time.

“Forget news reading,” says an article about the survey in Adweek. “Today, it’s all about ‘news snacking,’ meaning people are checking the news more often and typically on mobile devices.

“75 percent of readers with smartphones and 70 percent with tablets check the news more than once a day.”

And how do people find the news? 73 percent said they use aggregators, while social media (Facebook and Twitter) is on the rise. 

At the time of the survey, 43 percent of respondents said they used Facebook to check news.

What does this mean for communicators?

Understanding the habits of people looking for information on your website is key to developing the information that will attract them—and keep them coming back.

And today many of those users are informavores who are following information scents so they can forage for a quick snack.

So make sure you leave lots of information scents throughout the Internet.

And whatever you do, don't offer a full-course meal.

Banner Blindness, or Why So Few People Click on Online Ads

Do you suffer from banner blindness?

If you said yes, don't worry. Most people do.

What is banner blindness? It's a condition where people fail to notice banner ads on websites--much less click on them.

For those who buy advertising, including non-profit groups, banner blindness is an important issue.

It's doubly important for non-profits, since we have so little to spend on ads. 

Which is why buying banner ads on websites seems like such a good deal. Compared to print ads, they cost a fraction of the price.

The only problem is that they don't seem to work.

According to Infolinks, a digital advertising company, 86% of visitors to websites don't notice the ads. Of those who do notice them, 50% never click on them. 

Or, as Solve Media puts it, you are more likely to win the lottery, become a U.S. Navy Seal, or climb Mount Everest than click on a banner ad.

So why don't banner ads work?

One reason is they don't attract our attention. We see them, but we don't "see" them.

This is partly because they are small, and there are lots of them. With all that clutter, they just don't catch our attention.

Plus, that's not why we came to the website in the first place. We came there because we needed information, not to buy a product or give to a charity.

In 2007, Jakob Nielsen studied eye patterns.  His research concluded that banner ads simply don't work.

In an article on his study, he "confirmed for the umpteenth time that banner blindness is real. Users almost never look at anything that looks like an advertisement, whether or not it's actually an ad."

At all levels of user engagement, he wrote, "the finding is the same regarding banners. If users are looking for a quick fact, they want to get done and aren't diverted by banners; and if users are engrossed in a story, they're not going to look away from the content."

And even when viewers noticed a banner ad, they usually didn't remember the advertiser's logo or name.

The best way to engage viewers, he found, is to make the ad look like content--so-called "Native advertising."

"The more an ad looks like a native site component, the more users will look at it," he said.

What does this mean for non-profit groups? 

First, be careful when offered great deals for banner ads. They may not be worth it.

Second, if you offer the media what they need and want for their websites--news--they may gladly use it on their as part of their regular content.

Which isn't to say you shouldn't buy website ads. If you think it is right for you, and will reach the intended audience, you should give it a try. 

Just don't be surprised if the viewers you are trying to attract have banner blindness, too.