Two great interview shows for you this weekend:
The Attention Economy – A study by Dentsu Canada and interview with Walter Flaat, Chief Data Officer
In 2015 Time Magazine published a story with the headline “You Now Have A Shorter Attention Span Than A Goldfish.”
Supposedly this was based on a study by Microsoft that stated that the average attention span of a goldfish was 9 seconds. But humans, with our digital lifestyle, in 2015 now lose attention after 8 seconds.
According to the story, “Researchers in Canada surveyed 2,000 participants and studied the brain activity of 112 others using electroencephalograms (EEGs). Microsoft found that since the year 2000 (or about when the mobile revolution began) the average attention span dropped from 12 seconds to eight seconds.”
A new study from Dentsu Canada called Attracting Attention & the Power of Compassion (registration required) has some good news and some bad news on this subject. First, the bad news.
If the original study was correct, and our lesser attention span was based on our brain’s adaptation to the amazing amount of stimuli that we take in, we are in trouble. The amount of stimuli, according to this study. We have moved from consuming 55 hours of content in a week up from 49 hours in 2015. And we take in double the amount of advertising moving from 5 thousand ads a day in 2015 to 10 thousand ads a day in 2023.
The good news? We are better at multitasking :-).
Seriously, the study does have some surprising ideas, not how to fix the attention span problem, but at least how to cope with it. My guest is Walter Flaat, Chief Data Officer for Dentsu Canada.
Bring Back the Bookstore – An interview with James Daunt, CEO of Barnes & Noble
Books stores are dead, right? They’ve been killed off by the unstoppable force of internet commerce and ebooks, right? I mean, nobody is interested in going to an actual store, wandering around looking at books when you can just download to your Kindle or Kobo or whatever.
That may be what people think. It has to be true. After all, you’ve read it on the internet or perhaps heard some expert say in on a podium.
But like the famous Mark Twain quote, rumours of the death of bookstores may also be exaggerated.
At least one bookstore chain is actually seeing a resurgence and are doing very well, thank you very much. And this time it’s the New York Times that broke the story about James Daunt and the incredible story of Barnes and Noble.
Daunt did what others would call impossible. He brought Barnes & Noble back to not just profitability, but growth. The company is actually expanding its number of stores. And he shares that strategy and more with us on this special “in the summer” interview, originally broadcast in my other series “Leadership in the Digital Enterprise.”
I hope you enjoy both of them. And of course, please let me know what you think. There’s a check mark or X you can select under this article and your comments go straight to my desk. And even if I’m reading a book on the dock, I still make time to read every comment, even if I have to refocus every 8 seconds.