Gearing Up for the Snapchat Generation
The holidays are a time to get together with friends and family and learn just how inept you’ve become compared to your younger family members. Watching an experienced Snapchat user go to work as they respond, Snap and share is… impressive.
As a Millennial, I like to think I can consume a lot and respond quickly, but my generation will look incredibly slow compared to the next generation. Marketers should take note. They are not going to give marketers any time to make their cases. Marketers need to embrace the speed and responsiveness of the Snapchat generation.
Make It a Quick Get
The average human attention span has fallen to eight seconds, and you can be sure that’s not going to go up. Brand content needs to be a quick get. The message needs to be clear, easily understood and not require the audience to do any mental gymnastics to get to its meaning. This can be a tough pill to swallow because it does take a bit of the romanticism away, but being quick and easily understood doesn’t mean embracing the lowest common denominator. Instead, it’s an invitation to think around the challenge and create something unexpected.
That’s exactly what GEICO (a client of my employer) did with their Unskippable campaign, knowing that attention spans are lacking, it leaned into it, embraced the constraint and delivered something unexpected and easily understood.
Episodic Story Over Singular Narrative
A quick get doesn’t mean the content needs to be short, but it needs to keep the audience engaged. Tell the story you need to tell in the length you need to, but instead of one long story arc in a single piece of content, break it up into multiple beats that come quick, deliver the message and keep the audience’s attention. This audience isn’t going to wait for you to make your point.
Time Spent Doesn’t Correlate with Relationship
That leads to the final point. This generation processes information at an incredible rate, so don’t be surprised if they don’t spend a great deal of time with your content. Many times you can trust they got it.
Facebook has found that from the moment a video ad is viewed (even less than one second in), brands see lift in ad recall, brand awareness and purchase consideration. It doesn’t take long for a consumer to get the message, especially if the creative is designed to put what’s most important front-and-center.
Prepare for a New Era
Millennials were just the beginning. Now, as they start families, have kids and grow in the workforce, the next generation is coming onto the scene. Marketers will need to speak, move and act fast because they won’t wait around.