Bloom Thinks: Design vs Distraction Part 1

How to win attention in a distracted world

Distraction vs. attention is the tension of our times. Our attention is finite. The distracting content fed to us is virtually infinite - about 74GB of it every day. That’s 16 movies every 24 hours. You’d have to watch two at a time, on no sleep. oof.

This isn’t going to end soon. Brands need to think carefully about how to be heard, seen and noticed. When we all watched and read the same
things, at the same time, brands basked in our undivided attention. The audience was captive.

Today’s audience is sharply divided. Brands share our attention with so many other distractions. Some solve this by becoming content creators. But it’s not a sustainable strategy. Content-led brands like Prime and Liquid Death launch with a bang, then die with a whimper. They grab our attention, but without the substance to sustain it.

Design is the antidote - a better, more enduring way for brands to stand out in noisy times. And to give people relief from it. We’ll explain why.

We’re vulnerable to distraction for good reason. Until relatively recently humans were easy pickings for wild animals or wild weather. To survive our brains evolved to make us nervous animals. We had to be ready to react to any threat - more jumpy meerkat than easy elephant. So our brains tune in to any slight change in our environment, ready to turn and run, a hot sweaty mess of adrenaline and cortisol.

But it’s not just a matter of fight and flight. Our physical fragility is compensated for by being social animals. We’re stronger together. Our co-dependence means we’re highly attuned to what the group is doing and saying. To avoid falling behind, we’ve got to keep up.

So when the world is in our pocket, always-on, ready to notify us of any change, from trivial to terrifying, we’re going to be pretty distracted.

We long for respite; to log off, feel safe, slow down or merge with the crowd. The evidence is all around us; from the explosion in wellbeing to our unshakeable holiday habit; from binge streaming to burner phones.

But we can also lean in. We can seek out more absorbing, engaging things that deserve our attention and cure that distracted feeling.

To earn attention in a distracted world, brands need design.

From our very beginnings humans have used design to control and make sense of chaos. Anthropologists believe cave paintings were designed to influence the outcome of hunts. Pagan carvings were designed to be reminders of gods’ power over our fates. Early clothing and jewellery were designed as instantly recognisable short hands for family, tribe and creed.

Design still is an antidote to chaos and distraction. It’s a way of taking back control. The best design absorbs us and rewards our attention. Brands need it to stand out from the noisy content drip-feed. In no2 we’ll unpack how it works.