We’re living in dangerous times. Information indigestion is the next silent killer amongst our midst. Today, everything we ever wanted to know is literally at our fingertips, urging us to search incessantly for answers in real time, thumbing the questions into the search bar of our mobile/laptop/tablets compulsively.
There is little tolerance for the unknown, or the unexpected, our patience waning, our focus often tugged into continuous states of partial attention. In our quest for all the knowledge that we can latch our slippery hands on, it feels like something else is also taking place….dear reader, meet “Filter Failure”. We’re gorging down so much information that we don’t have enough time to process, or find the connections and turn them into meaningful knowledge.
We seemingly struggle with the onslaught of information being fed at us, feeling small at how much there is that we don’t know, and soon, we encounter moments where we feel like the odd dead pixel in the picture, irrelevance at play perhaps? How did we get ourselves into such a fix…
Soon, we will prefer to curate our own news, rely on feeds we have subscribed based on our own prediction engines, and learn how to group our friends and family into different lists to keep our social identities intact. We will depend on Facebook to show us only what’s most relevant to us in the main news feed, use twitter and foursquare and pinterest to keep us subscribed to information that we asked for, we search and seek out views to reinforce our own. We will create groups of friends based on interest groups in Whatsapp and WeChat on our mobiles and stay busy gossiping with each other.
Maybe it’s time for advertisers to stop waiting and start leading in the leap forward to bring us into our next stop. Stop chasing after our own tails….
1. Stop information dumping.
Why are we so focused on giving out meaningless information if it can’t add any value to consumer’s life? What purpose does it serve to clutter up the marketplace with messages that speaks at us, but doesn’t speak to us?
2. Stop chasing the tail end of shifting behaviors.
We all know trends and try to latch on to the next train but how can we shape these trends into something useful for your own brand. Soon, we’ll all face contest fatigue, like fatigue, jaded by the next most ridiculously crafted message that thinks we are mindless fools that will snap at the hook without and giving people what they wanted.
3. Stop trying to out shout each other in the marketplace
or spend all your budget building the next product with the most advanced technologies and sell them for a premium when you jolly well know that even the savvy consumer will probably only need the few most important functions, the rest is just to make him feel good.
Instead, think about what we should do to stay relevant in the consumer’s mind. How will we live beyond the advertising message and create real value in the lives of our consumers? Relevance, expected or unexpected will be the one key test to how a message will stick in this time of information overload.
It’s time to try creating serendipity for a change.
