SPEAKER: Good afternoon and welcome to Talks at Google.
We are very pleased to bring the author and entrepreneur
Ben Parr to campus today.
This Princeton native, that would be Princeton, Illinois--
being from Champaign, I definitely
respect that-- was also voted in 2012 one of the Fortune 30
under 30.
So that's pretty cool.
His career in the Valley and in tech
has really spanned a wide variety of areas
from working at "CNET" and "Mashable" to currently
with "Inc." magazine and the VC DominateFund.
Today, he's speaking to us about yonder book, "Captivology,
discusses the psychology of attention,
and includes a variety of interviews with thought leaders
on that subject.
It is truly the fundamental currency of today's economy.
And we'll have some time at the end for questions,
but for now, Ben Parr, you now have our attention.
Welcome to Google.
BEN PARR: Thank you.
But you've all seen "Up," right?
And you've seen Doug.
I feel like Doug the dog, screaming "squirrel"
everywhere all the time.
And we live in this kind of new era in the last decade
where we are bombarded with more information than ever.
And yet, we have the same 24 hours a day.
In 1986, we were presented with approximately 46 newspapers
worth of information, according to one research study.
And by 2006, that number had increased
to 176 newspapers worth.
Today it's actually seven full HD DVDs worth of information
that we are exposed to on a daily basis.
And so you combine that with our multitasking
habitats--that's my actual TweetDeck.
It looks like someone vomited on something.
And this is the kind of thing all of us
are dealing with daily.
And our multitasking habit, which is not actually
helping us all that much.
In fact, there's another study that
found that those who consider themselves heavy multimedia
multitaskers are actually the least effective
when it comes to completing tasks and switching
between tasks and accuracy.
And so you have this combination of way more information
than ever and us having bad habits
to manage that information.
And you have a world where it is both extremely difficult
to capture attention and to stand out with your idea,
whether it's a project, it's a start up, it's a passion,
it's a charity, and having it be seen by the world.
And at the same time, defending our attention
by all of this kind of information,
understanding which things are worth our time and attention.
And so that's kind of the reason, the impetus,
for why I wrote "Captivology."
And "Captivology" is about the science and the psychology
of attention, and why we pay attention to certain people
and products, and how to utilize that science to capture
the attention of others.
And so I'm going to talk a little bit about the research
I did for "Captivology"-- over 1,000 research
studies, interviews with dozens of PhDs,
and everybody from Steven Soderbergh, Adrian Grenier,
the people behind the Old Spice campaign,
Sheryl Sandberg, David Copperfield,
people across industries.
I'm going to talk about the three stages of attention
and my model of attention and, more importantly, what I call
the seven captivation triggers.
And these are seven psychological triggers
that capture attention across all these stages.
And so let me get into attention.
And so I kind of describe attention as a bonfire.
And your goal in capturing attention
is to walk people through the three stages,
is to grow the fire because you can't just
start out with a bonfire.
You have to start with the spark.
And then you go through the kindling.
And then you go and you finally get to the logs in the bonfire.
And so the first stage is immediate attention.
The second stage is short attention.
And the last stage is long attention.
And let me explain a little bit about each stage.
Stage one.
Immediate attention.
It is our immediate and automatic reaction
to certain sights, sounds, and stimuli.
It's how we react if someone does this, for example.
[POP]
I love doing that every single time.
It's how we automatically react to when there's sights, sounds,
something like that.
When someone puts a gunshot, or launches a confetti cannon,
we're going to pay attention.
And I'm sorry to the janitors in a little bit.
But the reason why we react is because it's
a defense mechanism.
We're trying to protect ourselves.
Imagine if you had to think every time a car was
coming at you.
We'd be dead human beings.
We'd be a dead species.
And so it's a protection mechanism.
And you'll see that a lot of attention
is a defense mechanism.
And a lot of it is activating those defense mechanisms.
The second stage is from subconscious
automatic attention to conscious, directed attention,
is when we start concentrating on something like a test,
or a speaker, or a dress.
That goddamn dress.
But it's when we actually start focusing.
And it is a kind of short-term thing.
And it's run by a system called working memory.
And working memory is this short-term memory system
that processes the sights and sounds
around us and the other stimuli and helps us determine which
things are worth our time and attention
and, more importantly, which things should
be stored in long-term memory.
Which leads us-- well, before I tell you-- very complicated
system, by the way.
I won't go through the entire process
here, but suffice it to say it's a very complicated system
that runs our attention.
The final stage of attention is a stage called long attention.
I kind of use Beyonce as an example.
It's the difference between hearing and listening
to a Beyonce song in the car and joining the Beyhive
and becoming a lifelong fan and buying albums.
It's the reason why when Beyonce launched her last album,
she didn't have to do any marketing.
She just got to drop it and suddenly everyone bought it.
But it's because she earned long attention over time,
building those relationships, building that relationship
with her audience, building long attention and interest
from millions of people.
And so those three kind of things
combine to create this bonfire of attention.
Now how do you build that bonfire of attention?
You have to go through what I call
the seven captivation triggers.
And these are seven psychological triggers
I discovered over and over again that came up
in my research that capture attention
from immediate attention to long attention.
So let me tell you about the first one-- automaticity.
All right.
So pop quiz.
If you're a hitchhiker on the side of the road
and you want to have the best chance of being picked up,
what color shirt should you wear?
Guesses?
Red, white, I heard.
What else?
Orange.
Yellow.
I've heard everything.
Actually, usually someone says "naked."
You guys aren't dirty enough.
It's too early in the day or something?
It's a Monday.
Fair enough.
Maybe during Burning Man.
So the answer is actually, it's gender specific.
If you're a man, on average, any bright color
will do because of the dark backgrounds
of the black roads, and the dark green grass,
and the brown dirt.
But if you're a woman, and there was actually
a French scientist who was like, I'm going to study this.
He wanted to find out who would get picked up the most.
So he had women wear six different colored shirts.
And on average, someone would pull over about 13%
of the time.
Unless they were wearing the color red, in which case
they were picked up 21% of the time.
And the reason for that is actually our subconscious
associations that we have with red and romanticism.
In fact, another study found if you just put a thick red border
around a person's face, the opposite gender, on average,
we'll rate that person as more attractive.
Reason why there's a red border there.
I also just like having an excuse to put that picture up
every time.
But the opposite gender will rate
that person as more attractive.
And even there was another study that
found that if a researcher is wearing a red shirt,
a person who doesn't know will actually sit several inches
closer to that person.
It's like an automatic invitation to be more intimate.
And so immediate attention is this automatic response
to different stimuli.
And it really comes down to two things-- contrast
and association.
And contrast is the contrast that something
has with its surroundings, and association is the subconscious
associations we have with a certain color, or symbol,
or sound, based on our cultural history, based on our biology,
based on other factors.
And so a key to capturing attention with automaticity
is to use the right color for the job.
So example is Amazon.
There's a reason why they use yellow and orange buttons.
They have high contrast with their surroundings,
with white and gray backgrounds.
And they perform really well.
But most bright colors will actually perform very well.
However, give me some word association game.
Give me words you think when you see this.
"Dutch" is usually the first thing.
Give me more.
Anyone else?
Usually someone says "prison."
But actually, here's my point.
AUDIENCE: White collar prison.
BEN PARR: White collar-- there you go.
So orange and yellow actually have the lowest correlation
with competence.
Teal and blue actually has the highest,
which is why my cover has blue and teal on it.
But think about it.
If someone like this walked into most offices,
maybe not Google, but most offices,
you'd laugh their ass out of the room.
And it's because of that correlation.
And there's all these kind of different correlations
we have with different colors and sounds.
In fact, let's talk about smell.
So this flower, I believe the Camellia flower,
was used by Ralph Lauren in a perfume,
and it performed really well.
So like, let's expand it everywhere.
So we're going to take it to South America.
Problem is in South America, this specific flower
is used in funerals.
So when you sprayed it on, you literally smelled like death.
How do you think that performed?
Not well is the answer.
Trigger number two-- framing.
And so framing is that we pay attention
to things that fall within our frame of reference
or don't pay attention to things because
of our frame of reference.
And to describe this, I want to talk about deodorant.
Anyone want some free deodorant?
Specifically, I want to talk about a teenage entrepreneur
named Edna Murphy.
And so in the 1910s, deodorant wasn't a thing.
And antiperspirants weren't a thing.
In fact, this is what they literally
used to protect themselves-- cotton pads and dress shields.
And there were two reasons why antiperspirants and deodorants
weren't a popular thing back then.
First reason was that people thought
it was going to kill you to use one, to have antiperspirants.
And it was going to kill you.
But the bigger and second reason was because it was not
a thing you talked about.
Bodily fluids, sweat, any of that sort of thing,
it wasn't ladylike.
It was not a thing you talked about in proper conversation.
And so Edna Murphy, teenage entrepreneur, her father,
a surgeon, invented an antiperspirant for his hands
because he wanted to not sweat doing surgeries.
And she's like, you know, I could put those in my armpits.
So she does.
And she gets a $500 loan from her grandfather
and she creates Odo-Ro-No.
Greatest name ever.
In fact, I found one.
I don't think they make these anymore.
Odo-Ro-No.
So she goes out and she starts selling
and she gets a little bit of traction.
But she's finding it very difficult
to get the product above that plateau
because of the two reasons I just told you about.
Now she had to get past it.
So what she did was she teamed up
with a guy named James Webb Young who would eventually
become the first chairman of the Ad Council.
And together they decided they had
to go in and tackle these frames of reference,
these perceptions people had.
First, how do you get people to realize
it will not kill you to wear antiperspirant.
Well, it was invented by a doctor.
And so they really advertised that fact hard.
And this is actually one of the original advertisements.
And you'll see, Odo-Ro-No being used
and recommend by leading physicians skin specialists.
That helped double sales, when we
started advertising that fact.
But they still had the bigger issue
of how do you get people to actually talk about it?
And so they put out this ad.
Now this ad talks very frankly about body orders.
It says, "a frank discussion of a subject too often avoided."
And it talks about body odor and how you don't have to have it.
And how you can use Odo-Ro-No to fix it.
By the way, this was in the most popular magazine
of the era, of 1919.
Does anyone want to guess which magazine that is?
What?
Nope.
Anyone else want to try?
I'm going to take some out to dinner if they guess this.
No one's ever guessed this.
No.
Answer is "Ladies Home Journal."
And so this was put in "Ladies Home Journal."
And when it was put in "Ladies Home Journal,"
it was actually one of the most controversial things if 1919.
Hundreds of women canceled their "Ladies Home Journal"
subscriptions in protest of this ad.
But guess what?
The ad changed people's frame of reference.
They started actually talking about deodorants.
And suddenly it was OK to talk about antiperspirants.
And sales went through the roof.
And a few years later, Edna Murphy
was able to sell her company for millions.
And so what she did was she adapted her audience's frame
of reference.
And she helped re-frame the conversation.
And Odo-Ro-No did this by adapting to the fact
that people were worried about health concerns
so they brought in the fact that a doctor invented it.
And they re-framed the conversation
by making it OK to discuss.
And so frames of reference and framing
is this incredible power in which we can pay attention
to certain things and not others based on our backgrounds
and worldview.
It's the reason why if you talk about climate change
or you talk about vaccines, one group
is going to have a very different reaction
than another.
And in a funny way, it does make sense sometimes
because if someone comes to us and is telling us
how the earth is flat, why the fuck should we listen to them?
It makes sense, but then sometimes we
get into this kind of rut where we miss important things.
There are a couple ways to create frames of reference
and to change frame of reference.
One big one is scarcity.
So who likes Twinkies here?
Oh, thank God.
No one.
But Twinkies, as you probably may remember,
a few years ago, the company that owned them,
Hostess, went bankrupt, right?
And suddenly, millions of people went to the stores
to grab these things.
And it was not for the reason that they tasted any better.
They still tasted like shit.
But suddenly, they became very popular.
And the reason, actually, the science
shows that we assign higher value to things
that we feel are scarce.
Specifically, when we believe something
is scarce due to outside circumstances.
If something is scarce because it is popular,
it does not raise in value and we
don't pay more attention to it.
But if something is scarce because of an outside force,
because of a manufacturing or some other thing,
we assign much more value.
In a Google example, let's think about Gmail invites.
I actually, someone paid me $100 once for one
of my original Gmail invites.
I was like, why the f--oh, here you go.
Thank you for the $100.
But that scarcity element does drive attention
and drives a different frame of reference.
Trigger number three-- disruption.
We pay attention to the things that violate our expectations.
And I'll explain why in a moment.
So there's this one research study
where they want to see which things would
stick in the memory longest.
And so they would give subjects different sentences.
Standard ones like, the maids were plating the food
on the table versus the maid licked
the ammonia off the floor.
Now which one do you think people had a better memory for?
It's actually a scientific term called the bizarreness effect.
And the reason we remember this is actually
because of something called violations expectancy theory.
So imagine, for example, we're on a date.
All right.
And we're just like sitting down and suddenly, two giant clowns
come and just sit down right next to us, right?
We're going to be paying attention to them.
But the reason why is because we make an automatic threat
assessment.
We have to figure out whether this is a positive development
or we should run the fuck away.
Maybe this is our good friends who
are about to go visit a children's hospital
or maybe they're about to mug us and we're about to die.
Either way, we're going to turn our attention to something
that violates our expectations because we
have to protect ourselves.
If you think about how we originally
were as hunter gatherers when our attention was scanning,
we were looking for things that were out of place.
Maybe it's a saber tooth tiger, maybe it's a potential food.
We have the same kind of instincts.
And that's why we pay attention to things
that violate our expectations.
And there's a couple examples, especially in advertising,
that work really well.
This is a campaign a couple years ago from Patagonia.
They did a campaign.
It was called Don't Buy This Jacket.
They're a clothing company.
They're not supposed to fucking say that.
But they explain, when you go into the ad
deeper for that, the reason they're
saying this is because they don't
want people to unnecessarily buy more stuff.
They want to help repair your clothing if you can.
And of course, they'll sell you a jacket if your jacket is old.
But they'll help you repair and they want
to protect the environment.
Funny enough, this ad telling people not to buy their stuff
made more people buy their stuff-- double
the amount within nine months.
A whole ton of people started buying their jackets
because people paid attention.
It was a positive experience.
The Old Spice guy's another great example of this.
Of positive destruction.
Every five seconds diamonds are suddenly coming out
of people's hands and he's suddenly
on horses and diving into cakes and who knows what else.
But it's a very kind of positive experience.
And every few seconds something is
happening different that violates
your expectations of how the world is supposed to work.
The disruption has to match your values is a very key thing I
want to mention.
There is such a thing as positive
versus negative attention.
I think about what Nationwide did at the Super Bowl
commercial.
And the only thing I think of Nationwide
now is that Nationwide kills kids.
Now I'm going to show you the actual ad from a few years ago.
This one.
This was an ad for Quiznos.
And they had weird, freaky, mutant, fucking rodents
advertising sandwiches.
Why the fuck would you want any of these things near your food?
How does that make any sense at all?
And yet, a bunch of execs decide,
you know what, this is going to be a great idea.
They went bankrupt last year.
There is such a thing as negative attention.
This make no sense at all.
It did not match their values.
It was disruptive.
People paid attention.
But it didn't make people buy their sandwiches.
There is a clear difference.
Trigger number four-- reward.
And so I learned some interesting things
about the reward mechanisms of the brain.
Most people think of dopamine as the system
that creates pleasure but that's actually a misunderstanding.
I interviewed Dr. Kent Barich, a leading researcher
in dopamine and reward systems of the brain.
And what he did is this famous experiment
where he took the dopamine out of lab mice
and he wanted to see what would happen.
And what he found was that the mice could still feel pleasure
even with no dopamine.
If you gave the mouse sugar water,
it would still find pleasure drinking the sugar water.
What happened though was that the mice lost all motivation.
These mice were so demotivated, in fact, that they would rather
starve to death than eat.
And almost all of them died because they had no motivation
to live or to find any kind of survival.
And so dopamine actually creates wanting.
It creates a wanting response in the brain.
Opioids actually create the actual pleasure.
But when it comes to attention, what's important
is our desire for something.
We pay attention to when we desire a reward,
whether it is an intrinsic or extrinsic reward.
Extrinsic rewards are the kind of physical ones
that you're very well familiar with-- money, food, sex.
Very, very, clear things.
And they really do capture our attention in the short term.
In fact, there was a study that found
that if you associate an object with monetary gain,
with money, even just a few cents,
people's eyes will automatically gravitate towards that object,
even after that object is no longer associated with money.
But that's only short term attention.
Short attention.
That doesn't capture attention over the long term.
Intrinsic rewards capture attention over the long term.
Things like self satisfaction and purpose and mastery
and these kind of self type of things
that motivate us in our jobs, in our careers, in our lives.
And family and order and whatever things that
motivate you.
Those are the kinds of things that
make people stay long term.
You need both to capture and maintain attention.
But you can't just use one or the other and succeed.
And there are a couple ways to create motivation
and to create desire for a reward.
One is the power of surprise.
And so a couple years ago, a company called Skopje,
they wanted to get more engineers
because it is obviously a very, very competitive market.
And so they're like, how do we get some more engineers?
They're going to offer a bonus of $11,000 for signing up.
That's kind standard.
But they decided, you know, what we're
going to parody the most interesting man in the world
campaign.
So they wrapped $11,000 in cash in bacon.
And then they would also give you
Macoun 15, a oil painting of yourself,
and my favorite, a harpoon gun.
I don't know about you, but I want a harpoon gun.
Can I get a harpoon gun?
That would be nice.
So this actually, this campaign, got them
over 1,000 different applications.
And they were able to fill their engineering seats.
And so that surprise actually helps capture attention
when it comes to rewards.
But it's also just the fact of surprising people
with a reward.
And so there was a study that was
done-- there was a study that what happened
was that they would have subjects
and they would spray either water
or citrus into their mouths.
And what they found was that the people who could not
predict the order in which citrus or water were going
to be sprayed into the mouths felt much more pleasure,
had stronger member of the task, and overall
paid more attention.
It was a much more positive and pleasant experience.
And so most people deliver rewards in incentive form.
You do this, I'll give you this.
And that is actually the least effective type of reward.
There many other better types are rewards.
There's a company called Keep and what
they do is they specialize in post action rewards.
And what happens is like, you do a task.
Like you run two miles, you get a high score in a game,
and suddenly something pops up being like,
you've accomplished something.
We want to give you a gift.
A surprise gift.
Maybe it's a Gatorade, maybe it's an extra life,
maybe it's some points.
But that kind of surprise, where people didn't expect
to get a reward actually reinforces
behavior much stronger and increases
attention and overall is much stronger
when it comes to attention.
Practically every other type of reward delivery is better.
Gifting, for example-- you're very used to it,
like in a social game being able to give a life to your friends.
Even though, as you think about it,
you're not actually giving anything to your friends.
It's actually coming from the game.
It just makes it look like it's coming from you.
But it actually creates much more attention
because it feels like it's a more personal sort of thing.
Sneaky.
Trigger number five-- reputation.
So I'm going to put this on while we talk about reputation
in this interesting study.
So a few years ago, there was a study at Emory University
and what they did was they looked
at the FMRIs of students' brains as they
were making economic decisions.
I'm putting on a lab coat.
I'll explain why in a moment.
So they were looking at the FMRIs of students
and they were trying to figure out
how the brain works while during decision making in economics.
And so they would have to make economic decisions
with their money.
And as you could expect, the critical thinking decision
centers of the brain would light up
whenever they were making decisions with their money.
And this is the actual brain scans.
But in half the cases, they would have an expert come in
to give advice.
In this case, an economics professor.
And it would always be the conservative advice.
And what they found was when a subject was listening
to the expert, the decision making centers of their brain
would completely shut off.
It was as if they offloaded the processing power
of their brains to the expert.
And in fact, even when the advice
that the expert was giving was clearly wrong,
the subjects would more often go with that advice than the other
because they're not thinking.
And this is a phenomenon known as directed deference.
And directed deference helps drive our attention.
And so the reputation triggers that we pay attention
to repeatable sources, specifically authority figures,
the crowd, and most of all, experts.
In fact, and this is a fun study,
if someone puts on a doctor's coat and you tell them
it's a doctor's coat, and they do tasks,
on average they will have better attention,
they will make less mistakes, and they will complete tasks
more effectively.
Now if you give them the very same coat
and you tell them it's a painter's coat,
their attention will actually go in the opposite direction.
And they will complete less tasks
and they'll be less effective.
The mere perception of expertise increases attention.
That's why I'm wearing the coat.
And so as I said before, there are three key types
of reputable sources that we pay attention to.
Authority figures have power over us
and so we pay attention as long as they
have that power over us.
And the crowd kind of acts like an expert.
And you think about sites like Yelp or a lot of others
where we go into those the sites for ratings
and we trust their ratings because
of the collective knowledge of the crowd.
And we trust the crowd.
So there's another reason why we trust reputable sources
and experts.
And the answer is actually from this Edelmen Trust Survey.
We trust them more than any other type of spokesperson.
And so you can see here the most credible spokesperson out
of thousands and thousands of people surveyed are experts.
More than people like you, more than executives,
and definitely more than CEOs.
We really, really trust experts.
And government officials are somewhere in the basement
where they belong.
And so key brands and capturing attention
really revolves around leveraging experts,
and leveraging the power of experts,
and establishing your credibility as an expert
as well.
Odo-Ro-No did this by leveraging the fact that it
was created by a doctor.
And leveraging the fact that it was created by a doctor.
And this is also the same kind of reason
why things like Kickstarter do very well because it's
the crowd's expertise showing that a specific thing is
worth our attention and time.
Two more triggers.
Trigger number six.
I can take this coat off.
It's kinda hot.
I'm stripping for you all.
You're welcome.
Mystery.
So what movie is this?
Anyone want to guess?
That's right. "Cloverfield."
So I don't have time to show the entire trailer
of "Cloverfield."
But in the first trailer of "Cloverfield," what happens
is there's people at a party, suddenly there's a roar
and then the Statue of Liberty's head falls into the street.
There's no mention of the movie's name
or what it's called or what it's about.
And this is a huge impetus of the mystery trigger.
And this is a JJ Abrams movie.
He's a master at mysteries.
At both using mysteries to market his material because
for example, we know barely anything about "Star Wars"
and that's what he wants.
And also in his storytelling.
For "Lost," for example, famous for having that cliffhanger
that would get people to come back week to week.
And so there are actually two scientific reasons why
mysteries capture attention.
The first is something called the Zeigarnik Effect.
So in the 1950s, there was this Soviet researcher.
Her name is Bluma Zeigarnik.
And she is sitting in a restaurant
and she's curious about something.
The waiters who are taking her order
have perfect memory of her orders
until they actually drop it off over at the kitchen,
and suddenly, completely forget.
Now why is that?
She's curious.
So she gets a bunch of students and a bunch of kids
and she has them do puzzles.
But in half the case studies, she takes their puzzles away.
That's mean, right?
A couple months later, she would ask them
which puzzles they would remember.
And guess what.
The only puzzles they could remember,
the only tasks they could remember
were the ones that were incomplete.
We have a much stronger memory for incomplete the tasks,
incomplete thoughts, incomplete storylines.
Zeigarnik Effect.
Now there's a second reason.
Now, let's pretend you and I are on a date.
Actually, we'll go on a date.
We've been on a date before.
So pretend we're on a date.
Now if we're on a first date, what we're going to do,
typically, is small talk, right?
Kind of things like where are you from, what do you like,
that sort of thing.
And the reason why we do that is actually because of a thing
called uncertainty reduction principal.
And essentially, we don't like uncertainty in our lives.
It makes us uncomfortable.
And we meet a stranger, there's nothing but uncertainly.
We don't know anything about each other.
And so what we're trying to do is
relieve the uncertainty so we can figure out whether or not
I want to hang out with this person
or be friends or get the fuck away as far as I can.
All depends, right?
And so in the case of uncertainty reduction
principle, it applies all across the board.
When we're left with a cliffhanger
and we're left with a mystery, we
want to relieve that uncertainty.
We want to resolve that storyline.
And then when we don't, we start filling it
in with speculation and uncertainty.
The Malaysian Airlines disaster last year
is a perfect example of this.
It's not the first time a plane went down.
But planes aren't supposed to disappear.
And so when this one disappeared,
suddenly, it was on the media for months.
Why?
Because we don't like uncertainty,
so we start filling with speculation.
Especially CNN.
They loved filling it with speculation.
Thank you, CNN.
And they kept filling it with all this speculation.
Trying to-- what's going on?
Where did it go?
All that sort of thing.
And the reason, again, why is because we do not
like that uncertainty.
We have to fill it in.
It's the same reason also why, for example, I
don't know if anyone remembers a year ago, Justine Sacco.
She was an exec at IAC.
And she before she gets on the plane she
decides to tweet something along the lines of "I'm
going to Africa.
Hope I don't get AIDS.
Oh and wait.
I'm white."
She does this.
She gets on a plane.
And then she's off Wi-Fi.
By the time she gets off the plane,
she's the number one trending topic in the world
and she's the most reviled person on Twitter.
And the reason why is because she couldn't
close the uncertainty gap.
She couldn't close the mystery loop.
Everyone started filling speculation
of how is she going to react?
Who is this person?
Why would she say such a thing?
In fact, Steve Martin tweeted something offensive
as well in the same time period but nothing
happened to him because he was able to delete
his Tweet within two minutes and post an apology.
Mystery done.
Justine Sacco could not and that's
why she became the number one trending topic.
And so there are a couple things when you think about mysteries
to capture attention.
The mystery trigger.
One is to create suspense.
And I don't think the sound is working,
but we're going to try a video anyway.
This was one of the Budweiser ads
from this year's Super Bowl.
And I love any reason to add puppies to a conversation.
And in this case, this was one of the most popular ads.
And part of the reason is because of suspense.
And so you know that Budweiser's not going to kill the puppy.
They're not Nationwide.
But there is this moment to moment suspense of what's
going to happen to the puppy, how
is it going to escape the wolves,
how is it going to get back home.
And there was a study that actually
found that the more moment to moment suspense
we feel in an advertisement, the more memory we're
going to have it, the more we'll pay attention,
and the more positive reaction we'll have to that ad.
And that's part of the reason why
I believe this one was one of the most popular ones
of this year's Super Bowl.
And so another tool for capturing attention.
Can't do another one even tough I love the puppies.
So another key tool is using cliffhangers.
And so creating the cliffhangers, whether it's
in advertising, or in your storytelling,
or maybe just a cliffhanger to get people to come back
to the next meeting.
Captures attention again because of that uncertainty gap.
You should use cliffhangers when you can unless you're
going through a press crisis.
Like that guy.
So everyone knows that guy or most of you
know that guy, maybe.
And this is Brian Williams.
And what happened with him was he basically
lied about what happened when he was in the war zone.
And he put out what amounted to a half-assed apology.
It was kind of like, "I sort of mis-remembered, blah, blah,
blah."
What it didn't do was complete the mystery gap
and complete the mystery.
And so people filled in with speculation until suddenly,
more reports came out to a point where he had to step down.
On the other hand, regardless of what you think of this guy,
there was no mystery gap.
When his allegations came out, he
came out hard and being like, here's exactly fact ABC.
Go look.
That's it.
Done.
And guess what?
He still has a job.
Again, regardless of what you think of him,
he's still in his chair and Brian Williams is not.
But there's actually a couple good tech examples
of this as well.
So a couple years ago, Airbnb-- I
don't know if anyone remembers this-- but they had a renter.
They had a gal named EJ and she rented out her place
and she came back and it was completely
ransacked-- destroyed, burned, everything stolen.
And Airbnb was kind of slow to helping her our
in fixing the problem.
So she wrote a blog post about it.
It went viral.
Everyone wrote about it.
And when it started going viral, Airbnb
felt like it had to respond.
So Brian Chesky wrote that on Hacker News, which
basically says, "hi, everyone.
We were shocked when we heard about this unsettling event.
We have been working closely with the authorities, blah,
blah, blah, blah.
It is written by a lawyer.
It sounds like a lawyer.
There is no apology.
It doesn't resolve jack shit.
Guess what?
The mystery continued.
EJ put out another post.
The thing went more viral.
Airbnb looked even worse until finally, they
put out the right statement.
They put out this blog post.
This one, which said, like, with EJ, we got this wrong.
We let her down.
And we are sorry.
And we fucked up.
And here's how we're going to fix it.
When they did that, the story was over
because they completed the mystery loop,
the gap of uncertainty was filled and the story died.
And so when it comes to a press crisis like that,
your number one goal is to end the mystery.
Exactly here is we fucked up and here's
how we're going to fix it.
Final trigger.
And then questions, if you have any questions.
Think about your questions now.
Acknowledgement.
The most powerful of my captivation triggers.
And so there was this one study that-- yeah,
it was pretty cruel, actually.
And what they did was they strapped electrodes
to the ankles of married women.
Yeah, pretty much.
And there were three conditions.
Condition one.
Married woman sitting alone.
Condition two.
Married woman could hold the hand of a stranger.
Condition three.
Married woman could hold the hand of her husband.
And so what they found was that when
the married women who had no one to hold the hand of
felt the most pain because they had nowhere
to direct their attention.
And the married women who could hold the husband's hands
felt the least pain because they had
someone they love to direct their attention towards.
But what I found fascinating about this study
was that there was a direct correlation
between the strength of the marriage and the amount of pain
that these women felt.
The more connected they felt to their spouse, the less pain
they felt.
And it kind of shows how powerful this acknowledgement
and this connection is.
This connection is so powerful that it can
reduce an even eliminate pain.
And so the key to the acknowledgement trigger
is that we pay attention to the people and things that
pay attention to us and provide us with validation,
empathy, and understanding.
And one example of this is actually
in our celebrity culture.
And so this is Adrian Grenier from the show "Entourage"
and this is Dr. Thomas de Zengotita.
And I interviewed them for "Captivology."
And you wouldn't think that they would be experts in anything
like this, but actually, they did a documentary together
called "Teenage Paparazzo" on a 15-year-old teenage paparazzi
and following him around and exploring
why we pay attention to celebrities and celebrity
culture.
And we had this long conversation about why.
And we kind of came to the conclusion,
one of the major reasons we pay attention to celebrities
is because they're, in a way, a reflection of ourselves.
They are a piece of our identity.
It says something about you, whether you're
a fan of Justin Bieber or Rachel Ray
or Sheryl Sandberg or an Apple or a Google
or a whichever company.
It says something about you and your identity.
And we are looking for things that validate
our identity in some way.
In fact, actually, Buzzfeed, for example--
I interviewed Jonah Peretti the CEO Buzzfeed--
and what I learned from them is that they
do a lot of this kind of validation aspect.
One article that I read about is that they
did was "54 Things That Minnesotans Are
Too Humble To Brag About."
Now, this article went viral, especially in Minnesota,
as you could imagine.
But the reason why is because it's
a validation, a positive affirmation of a key identity,
for a key demographic.
And it's saying it's great to be from Minnesota.
And Buzzfeed puts these articles and these quizzes
out all the time.
'90s Kids or from Chicago or works in X industry.
They do this all the time.
And it's always very positive.
They affirm.
They go for EQ over IQ.
And it works really well for capturing attention for them.
So there's actually a term for all this,
and especially for our relationship with celebrities.
It's called the parasocial relationship.
And so it is our capability to feel a two-way relationship
with a one-way figure.
And I'll give an example.
There is-- my old boss at "Mashable,"
she works for Rachel Ray now.
And what happened was Rachael Ray
came out for Obamacare, right?
And what suddenly happened was there
was a whole bunch of women who came out and they're like,
how could you do this?
You've betrayed me.
I thought I knew you.
The fuck?
How does this make any sense?
It makes sense because people can
feel as deep of a connection with a figure
like that as they can with their best friend or their families.
Parasocial relationship.
It's why we can fall in love with a brand
or a musician or an artist.
And the case, for example, of Taylor Swift.
She's a master at parasocial relationships.
So last year, she was doing YouTube videos.
And it was YouTube videos of her wrapping gifts
and sending it to a few of her fans.
And this created a frenzy in her entire community.
She didn't have to give a gift to every single member
of her community, to all over fans-- just a few
to show that she cared about them as a collective.
And as a result, they paid attention back
and made her album the number one album of last year.
She did a fantastic job of building that community
and building that relationship.
And she scaled her relationship with her community.
Now there are a couple other ways
to build that kind of identity and that validation
and that acknowledgement.
And it is this way.
It is through the power of participation.
So some of you may know this story.
In the 1950s, Betty Crocker and all the big cake mixing
and food mixing companies at the time like Duncan Hines
and Pillsbury, they were trying to get cake mix off the ground.
But cake mix wasn't taking off with the female demographic,
not like Bisquik did.
And they were stumped.
Betty Crocker's like, why is this not
being getting bought by everybody.
So they brought in two researchers
to come in and give them advice on what's going on.
And they figured it out, actually.
The reason why it wasn't taking off was eggs.
Now back then, eggs actually came in powdered form.
You could just have the powdered eggs, you just put it in.
You didn't have to have the fresh eggs with you.
And in fact, if you actually try these recipes,
there really isn't much a difference
between a powdered egg and a fresh egg.
But what they found was that women
didn't feel like they were making
any contribution to the recipe in the cake mix version.
And so what Betty Crocker did was literally make
their product harder to use.
And the result was that their sales went through the roof
and they won the cake mixing wars
by making it so that you had to break eggs into the recipe.
And it worked really, really well
because they enabled their audience
to participate and provide some kind of validation,
to provide their input.
It's the same kind of reason, for example,
why Kickstarter is so powerful.
Yes, Exploding Kittens.
I can't wait to get my deck.
And it's because not just are you buying something--
it's pretty much a buying website--
but you feel like that you're providing some kind of input.
You are helping a company get off the ground.
You are providing something extra.
You are part of that community.
A couple years ago, I remember, Vitamin Water-- they actually
asked their community to help name
the next flavor of Vitamin Water and actually create
the next flavor.
And it was a campaign and it went really viral.
And they allowed their audience to put their input.
And they eventually came up with one called
"Connect," based off Facebook.
And it did really well and their sales went up as a result,
again because they allowed their community to participate
and that alone created that acknowledgement
with their audience.
And so I've talked about the seven key triggers.
Automaticity, framing, disruption, reward, reputation,
mystery, and acknowledgement.
And you'll kind of notice that these
triggers go across all three stages of attention.
Automaticity is very powerful in immediate attention,
while disruption is a very powerful trigger for capturing
short attention, while mysteries and acknowledgement are
powerful tools for long attention,
get people to have long term interest.
Because it's not enough to just get
people to pay attention to your ad or to your idea
or to your campaign.
But you need people to become customers and users and fans.
And the last thing I will say that I learned
from this process is from all the interviews
I did with all these masters of attention
is that the masters of attention don't try to capture attention
for themselves.
They're trying to get attention for their products,
their projects, and their ideas.
They're not trying to be me, me, me.
They're trying to get a cause and to promote something
that is bigger and beyond them.
And that is a much more powerful version and much more powerful
form of attention.
And I guess that is a sign that it's done.
So you know what?
Thank you, very much.
[APPLAUSE]
AUDIENCE: I am Darcy.
I am a hardware reliability engineer,
and I'm curious about this colors and competency study
thing.
Is that dependent on culture?
BEN PARR: It is dependent on culture.
And so I didn't mention in this part of the presentation
but the cultural associations really do impact color.
I was talking specifically about US and Western.
Couple different examples.
Green is terrible packaging in China
because green is associated with funerals and death in China.
And in fact, it is a very poor performing packaging color
in that country.
Red has significantly different associations
across different cultures.
There are a few things that are the same.
Like for example, blue.
If you, for example, there was a study that actually found
that if you put schizophrenics under blue light, regardless
of which culture, they will be calmer
and they will be more relaxed.
And if you put them in a red light,
they will be more energetic and they'll be more jumpy
and they'll be more agitated.
So there are some that are universal.
But there's a lot that are different culture by culture.
And I actually provide some resources in the book
and some links and examples of different colors
in different cultures.
And there's actually an amazing color wheel
that shows the associations different cultures have
with different cultures.
The reason why I focus so much on color
is because color provides the majority of initial assessment
when people are looking at a brand.
If people look at a symbol for the first time,
the majority of their assessment will be purely from the color
as well.
AUDIENCE: I'm actually a video game designer.
And I just wanted to let you know
that I had seen something very similar
that somebody had described in trying
to figure out how to get people to play early arcade video
games.
A woman ran a company and she talked
about the first quarter, the second quarter,
and the thousandth quarter.
And the idea that it's first getting their attention
and then having them have that reaction of OK,
I played it once.
Now I want to try it again.
And then having something in there
that keeps them going 1,000 quarter drops later.
And just the games industry looks
at trying to keep people's attention particularly
on social media games, as you mentioned, like the stuff
on Facebook.
So it seems like there are a lot of commonalities in what you're
talking about there.
BEN PARR: Exactly.
One of the people I interviewed and one
of my favorite interviews for the book,
is Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Super Mario.
And I got to interview him at E3 a few years ago.
And he talked me through why Mario
captures so much attention across all three stages.
So I don't know if you all know this,
but the original Super Mario, when they first
created the character, they only had 16 by 16 pixels.
And they're like, how do we make this guy more distinctive?
How do we have him pop out on the screen?
Well, we got to make his nose big because that's the only way
to see he even has a nose.
So they made his nose big.
But you couldn't even tell he had
a nose so they put a mustache on it so you
could define the nose.
Now it was impossible to do hair in 16 by 16 pixels.
So we're going to give him a red cap.
And a shirt didn't really pop out at all, shirt and pants,
so they gave him overalls.
And that's actually why Super Mario has big nose, moustache,
a hat, and overalls.
But that's just immediate attention.
They really focused on that kind of gameplay element,
getting people to try to achieve the reward of getting
that high score, getting to the end
of that level, and that loop every single time,
within a specific game.
But the reason why we play every Mario game and love and all
that sort of thing is because we fall in love
with the characters.
We know the key elements of every single Mario game.
There's always going to be Koopas.
There's always going to be gold coins.
There's always going to be a Bowser somewhere.
And that kind of element makes us come back for each game
because we have the familiarity.
While each game is different enough in terms of game
play to make us find something new.
Whether it's going to a Mario galaxy or a new platform
or that sort of thing.
And so that's part of why Mario has
become an icon over decades.
And so many other games have fallen by the wayside.
AUDIENCE: I am wondering what suggestions
you have for getting people to pay attention to and not only
pay attention to, but take action
in regard to environmental issues,
such as water conservation and climate change.
BEN PARR: Oh.
Oh.
I mean, I went through a lot of framing research
to think about that one.
Because there's a couple things that go about it.
It's really a framing issue, right?
It's elevating the importance of that knowledge
to a level where people will be forced to pay attention, right?
Because there's a whole-- there's
a segment of the population that absolutely and thank
God believes that we have huge issues coming
with water conservation and climate change.
And yet, there's still a huge part
of the population that will not even
listen to you if you mention these things because they have
been indoctrinated with years of hearing
a different side of the story.
Now there's a couple different ways to kind of go about it.
You can find a way to adapt to the frame of reference
and not go directly and be like, you're wrong.
Because that will actually not work.
You have to find a way to get actually
them to agree on a little thing and that actually opens up
the door lot more.
You get them to agree on the smallest thing
and that will make them more receptive to an idea.
There's a couple other things.
One interesting thing I learned is
the illusion of truth effect.
And this might not necessarily help you get attention for it,
but it'll help you understand why
people believe what they do.
And it is purely that the more you repeat a phrase,
the more likely people will believe it is true.
And they did a study where they would
have people go through like 30 or 40 phrases every couple
weeks and they would rate how true they were.
And every time they went through it,
they would rate the statements that they saw over and over
again as more true, despite the fact
that repeating a statement does not
make a thing more or less true.
But it actually has that kind of profound effect
in our brains and our minds.
And so when it comes to getting attention
for that sort of thing, it's going
through those three stages.
It's how do you get people to pay attention
to it in the first place?
If they don't know anything about it, disruption trigger.
Getting people to violate their expectations
with something that'll make them turn their heads.
I think about anti smoking campaigns.
In Thailand, they had a campaign where
they had little kids with cigarettes in their mouths,
asking adults for lights that had cigarettes in their mouths.
And the adults would be like, you shouldn't be smoking.
It's causes cancer.
And the kids would be like, then why are you smoking it?
And that went viral not just in Thailand but all across
because it violated people's expectations,
and it really drove the point home.
But then, it kind of comes in long term.
It depends on the audience that you're really going for.
I suspect that you have a huge group.
There's one group that just will not believe what you say.
And it's going to require different tactics
and you have to really think about the framing trigger.
And you have this audience that thinks it's important
but maybe they're not being active enough.
And they know that there's sort of a problem,
but they don't think of it strong enough.
And I think that maybe have to violate their expectations
and jolt them out of their complacency and be like, here
is what is effing happening.
And I'm not sure what that kind of thing
is but you need to jolt them out of their expectations.
I would love to talk about that one
further because that's a hard problem that I still
haven't fully figured out how we solve that one.
All right.
I think that's good.
So if you want to ask me more questions,
feel free to email me or tweet at me or Google+ me or all that
other fun stuff.
And I hope you'll check out the book
because it has a lot more of that scientific research
and interesting stories and more tips on how
you capture attention and how attention really works.
So I want to thank you all for being an awesome audience.
[APPLAUSE]