Look out is a study of attention and its implications for advertising.
It describes how our attention narrows following periods of technological disruption and how this can result in increased levels of detachment, fear and aggression – in culture turning inwards.
This is the context in which advertising is being made today, and Look out reveals this narrowing of attention in the advertising sounds and images around us – the rigid ‘stare’, the loss of human vitality, the overuse of the word, the rhythmic soundtrack, its stasis and symmetry. Using attention, emotion and business effectiveness data, Look out shows how this kind of advertising, far from drawing people in, pushes audiences away.
To create the effective and memorable advertising that’s needed, Look out urges advertisers to capture the ‘broad-beam’ attention of audiences. It describes how this can be achieved through advertising with an appreciation of human uniqueness, movement and ‘betweenness’, with character, incident and place, with humour, music and warmth of colour.
But to succeed the industry must broaden its attentional plane – it must look out. Watch Orlando talk about it at its launch here.
“Superb. Orlando brings our attention to those images which we would otherwise take in unknowingly – in particular, the increasingly common all-exposing ‘stare’. These are images that show a depleted way of looking at the world, a fractured form of attending. Ultimately ineffective, they lack character, humour, three dimensionality, narrative, place, subtlety – all those things that make us human. He hones in on our current situation so eloquently and apparently, and in so doing provides real impetus for change. Brilliant.”