How long can you hold your audience’s attention with a message that starts out with ambiguity? This is a question for TV and radio advertisers, copy writers, and public speakers alike, and getting it wrong can be embarrassing – or worse…

Sometimes a mysterious opening can be powerful and have great impact upon resolution. Other times it flops. Not unlike humor in advertising, people tend to respond with either love or hate – rarely neutrality.

Here’s an exercise for you. Watch this advertisement. I guarantee you haven’t seen one like it before. Show it to a few folks around your office, and watch the varied responses that you get.

Then, see if you can piece together a pattern of reactions among the people you show it to such that you can predict who will like it and who won’t. Herein lies the litmus test for when to steer clear of ambiguous, mysterious openers in your communications.

In their book, Made to Stick – Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die…, Chip and Dan Heath offer some tremendous insights into the art of grabbing and holding people’s attention.Among the many lessons in communication that I took from their work was that we humans seek resolution to what the Heaths call “curiosity gaps.” These are gaps in our knowledge… things we don’t know… even trivial things that when presented properly hold our attention (for some period of time) until they are resolved.

Consider how those trivia questions hold your attention when they appear amidst the ads on a movie screen before the movie begins… or how you stay tuned to the news to find out what common item in your kitchen may be slowly killing you.

We have a natural tendency to want to fill in gaps… resolve mysteries… answer the unanswered question… and marketers can exploit this tendency to captivate an audience long enough to get their message across in a meaningful way.

The question is – how long is too long? And how ambiguous can the set-up be before we fail to engage our audience in the first place – or even worse, annoy them?

This ad, I would argue, pushes the limits.

This is why I think it makes an interesting study. Not everyone agrees. And teetering on the edge of taking a good tactic a little too far, I think it reveals a way for us to gauge our limitations with regard to this important communication technique.

I tried this little exercise on my own recently and arrived at the following conclusions.

First, reactions ranged from people loving it (I loved it but think it’s about 30 seconds too long) to people finding it annoying and not worth the time it took to watch. I don’t think anyone abandoned it prior to its resolution, but reactions were very mixed.

Then there were people who just didn’t get it. And for those of us who loved it, we have to appreciate the fact that not everyone is as perceptive and/or attentive as we are. On those people, the message is a total waste.

In my experiment, reactions appeared to vary based on three variables:

• the personality of the viewer;
• their frame of mind at the time; and
• oddly enough, the degree of trust present in my relationship with the viewer.

Most of my experiment was conducted in-person.

Here are my results.

• The hard-charging, task oriented people were annoyed by the time it took to get to the point.
• Creative people loved it.
• Women seemed to like it more than men.
• People who were relaxed and in no hurry liked it more than people I pulled from busier, more hectic circumstances.
• And finally, the people with whom I enjoy a higher level of personal trust tended to like it more than those who I knew less well. Why? They gave it a chance and approached it with an open mind. They were willing to give me the benefit of the doubt and patiently invest a minute or two at my request knowing that the result was likely to be interesting and worth the investment. Friends can get away with asking you to close your eyes for a surprise. Strangers usually can’t.

So what can we take away from this experiment?

First, consider the personality of your audience before you launch into this type of communication. If they are task-oriented type-As, be careful.

Second, anticipate their circumstances at the time at which they will receive your message. If they are likely to be stressed, busy, distracted, etc. keep your communication more to-the-point.

Finally, if you haven’t established trust with your audience in advance, be careful trying this - especially online. It’s too easy for people to abandon you before the punch line.

Try this for yourself, and share your observations. This is hardly scientific, but I’d love to hear what you think.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 20th, 2007 at 6:30 pm and is filed under Direct Marketing, Powerful Presentations, Sales & Business Development, Web Marketing, Marketing Principles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.