Short Attention Span Theatre

It’s no secret that American’s aren’t as focused as they once were.  USA Today blames it on television.  In a 2004 story they said the more television infants and toddlers watch, the more likely they are to have trouble paying attention and concentrating during their early school years.

We’re all used to seeing somewhere between 3000-4000 advertising messages a day.  http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=56750

We block out and filter the worst of them, tend to remember only trace amounts of the best ones, and tend to focus only on those that hold something special for us.

Realizing this, we decided to try something different with our latest round of online ads for FedEx.  We went to a 10 second format which sped up one of our standard 30 second TV commercials and fast forwarded through it so that people could get to the content they wanted even faster.  After all, FedEx = fast.

This special pre-roll ad takes all of this in to account and has been running across several websites for a couple weeks now.  Yesterday, the folks at Twitter sent us the attached “Tweet” about the execution.

It’s really more like ten seconds, but either way it’s great to see that the content developed for a specific medium is doing its job.