The art of storytelling is an old one.
As commercial transactions have changed over the centuries from being
relationship and proximity based to impersonal and transaction based, the length of
the sales pitch has diminished. This inexorable
march continues today as content delivered to the end user needs to be more and
more compact. The coming shift to mobile devices further exacerbates this, as
marketing content needs to be shortened even further to fit on smaller devices. The competition for attention has become
intense and pitches are ever shorter.
The broader implications of this trend on society as a whole mean that
we are become much less likely to spend significant amount of time researching
and making decisions, and will become more accustomed to smaller and more
compact presentations of persuasive data.
This is evident today in reading rates and consumption of literary
content. Shorter blogs, condensed news
stories and other summaries are becoming increasingly popular. Where as 50 years ago one had to turn to long
books and newspapers to get information, today the byline and tweet sized
segments are the customary delivery vehicle of data. There are both costs and benefits to
this. The major costs are that we have a
superficial understanding of the things we read, because we spend less time
overall analyzing issues in depth. The positive side of this is that we have a
broader range of data and inputs which we consider, which allows us to compare
and transfer analysis from one area to another.
The implications for online marketing are that the overall trend to
shorter and smaller displays/presentations of content will likely continue. How
fast/short/intense an advertisement will have to be in 50 years is beyond the
predictive capabilities of this author, but one strong bet is that it will be
*really* short. The implications for
future digital marketing are that whoever is able to condense the most into the
least amount of space/shortest amount of time wins.
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