‘Microstimuli’ Could Be the Next Big Thing for Advertising

When television began as an advertising medium, the standard commercial length was 60 seconds. Then as the cost of advertising space increased, brands moved to 30-second duration ads. This length of persuasion stimuli was justified on the argument that it was sufficient to tell the complete brand story. There is one more reason which has helped the longer duration ads. The returns to advertising agencies and media houses were directly proportional to the length of the advertisements. The longer the duration of the advertisements, the higher the income for the advertising agencies and media houses. Therefore, there was no incentive to question the 30 second persuasion stimuli.

With the global smartphone penetration rate rising to 68% in 2022, smartphones are now clearly the dominant mode of communication. This always-on always-with-you has led to new strategic initiatives such as hyper-personalization and search engine optimization. But one thing remained the same: the length of the persuasion stimuli. The belief is that 30 seconds is the ideal duration for persuasion stimuli even in the smartphone medium.

Recently, my team conducted a research to understand the interactions between smartphone and its users. It was conducted across India among students and working professionals in the age group of 20-30 years. Research revealed that the average user spends 3 hours 36 minutes a day with their smartphone. The time spent by the user on different apps was also measured. But what is unique about this research is that the number of times a person touched the smartphone’s screen (excluding keyboard typing) was also captured. It was found that the screen is touched an average of 4,513 times every day. For heavy users, the number of touches in a day is as high as 15,040.

Touch is an important metric for evaluating the interaction between a smartphone and its user. It is much like touching the remote control button of a television. With each touch, the editorial context of the channel and television changes. Similarly, on smartphones, with every touch, the editorial context changes, especially on social media apps. For example, with each touch, an article about politics is followed by a makeup tutorial and then an ad for a laptop bag. So the time between two consecutive touches is an important parameter to evaluate the reference period, the time for which a particular editorial content is in front of a smartphone user. Studies show that the reference duration in case of television medium is 5 to 21 minutes (90-95% of viewing session). In contrast, the reference period, the time between two touches on a smartphone, was found to be less than 5 seconds for 90% of interactions and less than 10 seconds for 95% of interactions.

Does this mean that smartphone users do not spend time on long-form content on smartphones? They watch longer content. On average, viewers spend more than 40 minutes 31 seconds per day watching longer content. But this is only the last percentile of long-term smartphone activities. So is the fact that most conversations on a smartphone happen in a matter of seconds.

Ideally, the ratio of the duration of the persuasive stimuli to the duration of the editorial context should be kept to a minimum, so that the persuasive stimuli are perceived as less intrusive. Given the television medium’s reference duration of 5–21 minutes, a 30-second advertisement fits well within it. But given the reference span of a mere 5–10 seconds on a smartphone, there is certainly an urgent need to redesign the persuasive stimuli to fit well within its very short reference span. This calls for the concept of microstimuli: persuasive stimuli with a duration of only a few milliseconds.

The concept of MicroStimuli is actually nature’s ideal. Nico Tinbergen, the Nobel Prize-winning Dutch biologist, was one of the first to observe exaggerated forms of natural stimuli that elicit definite action patterns of responses in mere milliseconds in many animal species. He called this phenomenon the supernormal stimulus. Neuroscientists are studying decision-making processes in sports such as tennis, baseball, cricket or soccer. They have found that whether it is a cricket batsman about to play a shot or a football goalkeeper about to save a penalty kick, the time available to make an appropriate decision is less than 0.5 seconds.

In nature and in most human activities such as sports, decisions are made in milliseconds. Deep knowledge of the brain’s millisecond decision-making processes has been used to devise efficient playing strategies (eg with the slower ball, in cricket). But why is it then that marketers and communications professionals continue to rely on 30 second long persuasion prompts to influence routine human decisions?

It is high time persuasion professionals start diving deeper into brain processes to develop microstimuli: persuasive stimuli that are milliseconds in duration.

Updated: May 31, 2023, 11:22 PM IST