>> Stefan Weitz: Welcome to the MS, or is screwed it up. It's the MS Research Visiting Speaker
Series. My name is Stefan Weitz. I previously worked at Bing. I now work over in education
trying to figure out how we can get Microsoft into the education a more effectively. But today
it's not about me as much as I would like to think that it's always about me. Today, Ben Parr is
here, a buddy of mine for years to talk about his new book Captivology. I met Ben probably
four or five years ago. At the time he was a blogger sitting in a beanbag in a conference and he
was working on some crappy old machine that, if I recall correctly, was running Windows XP. I
happen to have a copy of Windows 7 in my bag, as you should always as well if you travel
around the world. Always have free software. It was a Dell? I thought it was a Dell, that's
right. And I said upgrade right now. And he said he would if he only had a DVD of Windows 7
which I then produced for him and said here you go. Upgrade now. We got bent up on
Windows 7 back in the day at a conference upgrade. Today is about his book which is
fascinating because we all know in this room that the average human being is exposed to about
seven DVDs worth of information every single day, staggering amounts of information and
content. The challenge we all have is to figure out how we sift through all of that to make
sense and find the signal to the noise. It's not about our ability to sift through it. It's about the
content producers' abilities to articulate a message in a particular way, in a way that will, in
essence, captivate us. Something is vibrating up here. I apologize. All, it's Ben's phone.
Content producers and production houses to speak in a way that makes us want to pay
attention. The book you are going to hear about today is a fascinating book that actually shows
seven steps or seven different ways that we can all in this room from getting your kids to go to
bed at night to pitching a sauté on the next big idea you may have, how you can both capture,
retain and maximize the attention of others as you go about your daily lives. With that I'll
introduce Ben Parr. Come on down, Ben. [applause].
>> Ben Parr: That's such a lovely introduction. I forgot about you introducing me. I think that
was the first time. I need those new surfaces. Hello everybody. I've been told so much about it
by some of you. Hi everybody. My name is Ben Parr and after that lovely introduction I feel like
I don't have to say a damn thing about me, so I'm just going to get started. At the end of this
I'm going to open it up for some Q&A and I want you all to think about what kinds of questions
you want to ask and the kinds of things you want to learn especially when it comes to capturing
attention for your products or your ideas for your companies or just the science of attention
and how it works and how it works in the human mind. As he said, I spent over two years doing
this research for Captivology culminating in this. Let me start off with a video.
>>: Hi there. My name is Doug. My master made me this collar so that I may talk. Squirrel. Hi
there.
>> Ben Parr: I feel like Doug the dog from Up, screaming squirrel every 15 to 20 seconds and
I'm sure a lot of you feel the same way. What's happening is we have entered a completely
new era of attention. There was one study founded in 1986 that we are exposed to
approximately 46 newspapers worth of information. In 2006 that number increased to 176.
Now we're getting to DVDs and DVD's worth of information and nearly 90 percent of the
world's information has been created in the last three years. When you have so much
information being created and so much information been exposed, it can be hard to have your
ideas, to have your products to have anything else rise to the surface. This is my actual Tweet
deck. I took a screenshot. I'm pretty sure that my attention is screwed for life with something
like that. A lot of you probably have something similar. Even worse is the multitasking which
I'm sure like Linda Stone, who used to work here will tell you that multitasking is actually
hurting us in terms of our productivity. One study found that those who identify as heavy
multimedia multitaskers are the least effective when it comes to completing and switching
between tasks. When you switch between tasks, when you get interrupted, it can take up to 14
minutes to get back on track. These habits which we have taken on as a necessity in the world
of technological social media attention has had this down effect. Given all of that, how do you
capture attention for your ideas for your products for your passions, whatever they maybe?
And how do you stand out? Just as important, how do you defend your attention? How do you
keep your attention focused when you need it to be? Those are the kinds of subjects that I
discuss in Captivology and I'm going to give you a little bit of a rundown of some of the things
that I talk about. More specifically, the three stages of attention in my new model of attention,
and the seven captivation triggers, and these are seven psychological triggers that I have found
that capture attention across these three stages regardless of culture, regardless of industry,
regardless of what you do. They are fundamental to human nature. Combined, when they do
that they create what I call the bonfire of attention. In my model I kind of say the spark, and I
should have brought matches or something, but I think I would have burned something down
here, but like the spark is immediate attention, which is the first stage of attention. Immediate
attention is our immediate reaction to things. It's when someone takes a gun in there and goes
bang. Usually, I have a confetti cannon for this. I am out of confetti cannons, I am sorry. It's
immediate attention, immediate automatic reaction to certain sights, sounds and colors. It's a
defense mechanism that we have. Imagine if we had to think about whether or not we needed
to react when a car was going right at us. We would be a dead human species. In the second
stage, short attention, what is called the kindling of attention, it's our conscious short-term
focus on a certain thing, whether it's a song, TV show, a movie, a speaker, whatever that may
be. It's when we consciously focus on something. In my model the most important form of
attention is the third stage which is long attention, which is our long-term interest in
something. It is how we, it is our long-term fascination with something. Let me tell you
something a little bit about each of the stages. The first stage, like I already told you is that
immediate reaction. It's that visceral reaction. It is controlled by something called sensory
memory, which is something that lasts for fractions of a second that helps us remember
immediate sights, sounds and colors. Short attention is all about the focus, whether that school
test, that book or whatever it might be. Or that God damned dress. I'm surprised I haven't run
into anyone wearing the dress yet. Maybe that's what I need to do. That's a terrible idea.
Actually, that's a great idea. I'm going to do that. You just saw the idea. It's going to be scary.
The short attention is a fascinating mechanism. It's controlled by something called working
memory. I don't have too much time to go through working memory, but essentially, it is the
temporary storage, the short-term memory system that controls information especially
auditory and visual and kind of takes long-term memory and find context within it. It is a very
complicated system, but suffice to say it is the way in which we pay attention in the short term.
Long attention, on the other hand, is really about that long-term interest and long-term
attention is the difference between listening to a Beyoncé song and becoming a lifelong fan of
Beyoncé. It's the reason why someone like Beyoncé could just drop an album and suddenly
everyone would buy it and she will go platinum. I found out that Lady Gaga's last two albums,
which did really well, didn't even come close to Beyoncé's which had no marketing at all. It's
because of that relationship built over years and that community that she has built and I will
describe that a little bit later in the book, in the presentation. Those are your three stages that
create the bonfire of attention. Let's get into the fun meat of it all, the captivation triggers.
These are the seven psychological triggers that capture attention across all stages. Trigger 1,
automaticity. If you are a hitchhiker on the side of the road and you want to have the best
chance of being picked up, what color shirt do you think you should wear? Someone guess,
guess. I've heard every color so far.
>>: Nothing?
>> Ben Parr: Nothing? [laughter]. If you want to streak go ahead. I was thinking wearing blue
and black or white gold, you know, that might be good. The answer is actually it's a little bit
gender specific. If you are a man most bright colors will work, yellows, greens, I mean yellows
and reds and oranges because of the gray background and the gray roads, black roads, green
grass, that kind of thing. If you are a woman there is actually a study done over in France and
this researcher had women wear different color shirts to see which one would be picked up
most of the time. Most of the time the average was around 13 percent. Darker colors
performed worse except for the color red. 21 percent of the time they got picked up and the
reason is actually because of the subconscious romantic associations we have with the color
red. In fact, if you put a thick red border around a person's face, the opposite gender will rate
that person as more attractive. That's why, I just like this picture. I like excuses for putting this
picture in. But there is all this crazy subconscious association. In fact, part of the reason why
my book has the blue and teal border is because blue has the highest correlation with
competence. Immediate attention is an automatic response. That's the big thing to remember.
With sights, sounds and colors we have two reactions to every sensory input. We call them
contrast and association. Contrast is the contrast of which a sound or sensory stimuli is with
the environment. It's the reason why yellows and oranges work very well on buying websites
because they have a high contrast with whites and gray backgrounds of websites. The other
thing was the association. Association on the other hand is about the subconscious
associations that we have with colors or symbols or sounds or things like that. As I said before,
yellow and orange are great for capturing attention for clicking buttons, but they are actually
terrible if you want people to take you seriously. What you think when you see this person in
an orange suit? What do you think? Any words? Pick words, say words, word association
game.
>>: Clowns.
>> Ben Parr: Clown, that's a good one. Actually, usually hear Dutch is the first thing.
[laughter]. It is. I've done this once or twice and I'm like, okay. Orange actually has the lowest
correlation with competence, orange and yellow. Think about it. A guy in an orange suit or a
girl in an orange suit walked into your office for a job interview, you would laugh your ass off,
but there is a reason for that, a reason why some of these colors actually matter. I go through a
lot of these fascinating color correlations and symbol correlations and sound correlations. In
fact, the cultural correlation because while, for example, green may mean more nature in the
U.S., green is terrible packaging in China because green has more association with death. Even
smells matter. This is a Camellia flower. Revlon today perfume out of this flower and it did
pretty well in the U.S. So let's go international. Let's put it in South America. The problem with
that is that this flower is associated with funerals. Literally, we want you to spell like a funeral.
That did not turn out well. This is why you have to really think about color associations and
associations and automaticity and the sort of automatic reactions people have to whichever
stimuli you put in front of them. Trigger number two, framing, to tell about framing I have to
tell you a story about deodorant. I made a mess. In the 1910's there was no deodorant or
antiperspirant. In fact, this is the stuff that people literally used to smell better, dress shields
and cotton pads. There were two reasons why they didn't use deodorants and antiperspirants.
The first reason was people thought it was unhealthy or could kill you to wear antiperspirants,
which it does not kill you. The second thing and the more important factor was this frame of
reference where people would not discuss anything related to body odors. It was Victorian era
kind of thing. It was uncouth to talk about bodily fluids of any kind. It was not lady like. In the
1910's there was this gal, a teenager named Edna Murphy. Her father, a surgeon, invented
antiperspirant for his hands so that he didn't sweat while doing surgeries. This entrepreneur
was thoughtful. She said you know what? I could put that in my armpits. So she did and it
turned into this product, ODO-RO-NO. I love the name. Exactly. She got a $500 investment
from her grandfather and started this business and started doing well. She started pushing it,
but she kept on hitting this barrier of getting more people to use it because of the things I just
told you about, health concerns and the people not willing to talk about body odor. She
teamed up with a copywriter, James Webb Young, who eventually became the first chairman of
the Ad Council to go and address these issues. They decided we've got to address these frames
of reference. First frame of reference, how do we get people to realize that you won't die by
using ODO-RO-NO? A surgeon invented it, so they advertised that fact hard. Sales doubled the
next year after they did that. But the more important thing was how do you get people to
actually talk about deodorant? They tackle that one had on. This is the actual ad from 1919 in
the most popular magazine of the time, Ladies Home Journal, talking about how we are going
to have a frank discussion about a subject that is too often avoided. This ad was the most
controversial thing of the year. Hundreds of women canceled their Ladies Home Journal
subscription because of that, but it worked. It worked. Sales doubled from 400,000 to well
over a million the next year. A couple of years later Edna Murphy sold her company and made
millions because suddenly it was okay to start talking about deodorants and antiperspirants and
suddenly other people started advertising that fact. The industry grew until, you know, now it's
an $81 billion industry, ODO-RO-NO, by the way. So you must adapt to your audience frame of
reference like Edna Murphy did, figuring out what is the frame of reference, what is their
worldview? Frame of reference is how we view something. It's the reason why you have, you
talk about global warming and two people have two completely different reactions to it. It's
how we grow up. It's also our biology. ODO-RO-NO in this case was able to adapt to the frame
of reference by talking about how it was made by a doctor and they reframed the conversation
by making it okay to talk about. I'm going to talk about another kind of frame of reference,
scarcity. Who likes Twinkies? Nobody. You are a smart group. I hate Twinkies. People actually
raise their hand and then I have to scold them. Twinkies are disgusting. They are the bane of
existence. They taste like crap, but you all remember a few years ago when Hostess went
bankrupt, right? Suddenly, everyone wanted to go by Twinkies. It wasn't because anything
changed about Twinkies. They did not get any tastier. They did not taste any less like shit and
yet people went to buy them because of this frame of reference, because they were scarce.
And the research shows that when people feel like something is scarce, especially when it's
scarce because of outside forces, its value that people place on it goes much higher. It's the
same reason why, for example, and I'm going to talk about a competitor's product. Gmail had
the invite system and people were willing to pay, like someone offered me $100 to buy a Gmail
invite. How does that make sense? Here is your Gmail invite by the way. That kind of scarcity
effect really does work because it really changes the frame of reference in which people view
something. Trigger number three, disruption. We pay attention to the things that violate our
expectations. There was a study that was done a few years ago and what they did is they gave
subjects different kinds of lines to see which ones would be more memorable. They would
have sentences like the maids cooked a meal versus the made licked the ammonia off the floor.
Which one do you think people remembered better? There is actually a term for this, the
bizarreness effect. Part of the reason we have this greater memory and pay more attention to
things that violate our expectations is because it's a defense mechanism. He's sleeping. Let's
pretend we're on a date. Let's pretend we are sitting on a date and suddenly a parade of
clowns comes and sits down right next to us. We're going to pay attention to them, right? But
the reason why is because we are automatically making a threat assessment. It's called
expectancy violations theory. We're trying to immediately figure out is this thing a threat or is
this thing a positive moment? Maybe these are our good friends who are about to visit a
hospital or maybe this is a group of clown muggers who are about to take all of our money. We
don't know, but we make the automatic assessment. It's what we did when we were hunter
gatherers. We were like is that rustling in the bushes food or trying to eat us? There are
effective ways to use this disruption trigger as I call it, to capture attention. This is a couple of
years ago the Patagonia campaign. Don't buy this jacket. This is a clothing brand telling you not
to buy their clothes. It makes no sense at all, right, but when you go into the thing deeper you
find out that what they are trying to do is say we don't want you to buy our stuff unnecessarily.
If we can repair it we will repair it for you. If you want us to help you, we want to help the
environment because it takes a lot of water to make one of these jackets, but we will sell you
one if you want one. This message of don't buy your stuff made people buy more of their stuff.
Sales doubled within the first three months and kept on going up and have been much higher
ever since. Old Spice, another great example of the disruption trigger. Every 3 to 5 seconds
something crazy is happening, but it's always a very kind of positive element, something fun.
Diamonds or people swimming in pools or unicorns or horses, all things you want to do. At
least I like diamonds and horses and unicorns, so the disruption trigger is a really powerful
effect. But a lot of people use the disruption trigger incorrectly because the disruption trigger
must match your brand's value, so I call this significant. The issue sometimes that people use
the disruption trigger to shock advertising to get people to pay attention by sheer shock, and
that doesn't always work. In fact, there is a difference between positive attention and negative
attention. That's a very key point to really remember. A couple of years ago there was this ad
by Quiznos. They had these weird fucking looking rodent things talking about eating
sandwiches. Who would want to you to sandwich that had these things next to it? These
things look like mutated mice. No fucking sense. And, of course, you know, Quiznos went
bankrupt last year. There is such a thing as good attention versus bad attention. It must match
your values. Trigger number four, reward. There was another study and I'm going to talk about
mice again. There was a study done by Doctor Kent Berridge of the University of Michigan,
whom I interviewed for the book, and what he did was he took the dopamine out of laboratory
mice. Everybody has this association with dopamine as pleasure, but that's actually not true.
What he found is that the mice still felt pleasure when the dopamine was out of their systems.
If you gave it sugar water it would find it tasty. But what he found was that when the dopamine
was out of these mice they lost motivation. They were demotivated from achieving any
rewards, and in fact, most of them died because they were so demotivated that they would
rather starve to death than to try to eat. What dopamine does is actually creates motivation to
achieve a reward to achieve pleasure. It creates wanting. And there are opiates that actually
create liking and your job to capture attention is actually activate the wanting response. That's
what's really important with the rewards trigger. There are two types of rewards. There are
intrinsic rewards and extrinsic rewards. Extrinsic rewards are the very kinds of physical things,
food, money, sex that do capture attention. In fact, there's a study that found that if you
associate an object with money, even just a few cents, people's eyes will attract towards that
object more often even after that object is no longer associated with money. Attention
automatically shifts towards extrinsic rewards. But that doesn't capture attention of the longterm. Extrinsic rewards are great for capturing short attention. Long attention, on the other
hand, is better with intrinsic awards, rewards like purpose and mastery and self-satisfaction. Is
that combination that captures attention across all three stages. You must create motivation in
order to capture attention. But there are a couple of ways to help boost that up. A couple of
years ago there was a company called Scopley and they wanted to hire more engineers. How
do we create awards to get more engineers to come? Everyone offers money for bounties for
people coming in, so what they did is they parodied the most interesting man in the world
campaign and they were like if you sign up for us, not only are we going to give you $11,000,
but we're going to wrap it in bacon. Literally, they wrapped it in bacon, in cash. And not just
that, but you got an oil painting of yourself, Macallan 15 and a harpoon gun. I personally want
a harpoon gun. I want to feel what that feels like. Figure over 1000 applications just by doing
this. Surprising awards capture attention more than any other types of awards. They had
another study. They would spray user water or citrus into a person's mouth and they found
that when people couldn't predict when it would be water or citrus, when they didn't know the
pattern, people felt much more pleasure and surprise and had a greater memory of the task.
Creating surprising rewards is a really powerful impact whether it's the reward itself that's
surprising or you surprise people with the reward. This actually brings me to the next point and
I apologize that I have iPhones appear instead of Microsoft phones, instead of Windows
Phones. I couldn't find Windows Phone versions of this, but this is keep and it is a platform for
delivering rewards and what they do is when you have an achievement in a game or an
achievement in and out, like a Nike app, you suddenly get this message saying you have earned
the reward and you didn't know it was coming. It might be something like a Gatorade are extra
points or something like that and what they found, and this is called post-action rewards, and
these types of rewards capture a lot more attention and make people feel happier and create
longer retention them your standard type incentives. Incentives are the worst type, the least
effective type of rewards. Rather than you be a you do this and all give you this, it's much
better to surprise somebody with a reward after the fact for taking an action that you want
them to take, post-action rewards. Again, the surprise really matters. Trigger number five,
you've been good. There are three more. Trigger number five. Now I'm ready. Reputation.
And you may be wondering why I put on a laboratory coat. I'm about to answer that. There
was a study done at Emory University were there we looking at FMRIs of students while they
made economic decisions. They were making decisions about how to spend their money.
When you have those decision-making centers of the brain start lighting up, as you can imagine,
and that's what they found. But in half the case studies they had an expert come in to give the
students advice on what to do with the money. It was an economics professor saying take the
conservative route with this money that you have been giving. What they found was that, and
these are the real scans, is they found that the ones that listening to the experts, the decisionmaking centers of their brains pretty much shut down. It was as if they offloaded the
processing power of their brains to the experts. This is a phenomenon known as directed
deference from Robert Cialdini's book. What essentially is the point is that we pay huge
amounts of attention to reputable sources and we pay extra attention to experts and there are
a couple of reasons. One is because of the associations we have with them. Actually, if you put
a doctor's coat on someone and you tell them it's a doctor's coat, their attention will on
average be sharper and they will have fewer mistakes and they will complete tasks that are
purely by the association that a doctor's coat has with it. If you have the same code and you
tell them it is a painter's coat, people's attention actually goes down. There's another effect to
this as well is that we trust experts more than anybody else. This is the Edelman trust survey.
They do a survey every year of what type of spokespeople that people trust and every year
consistently at the top academics or experts. This is much higher than people like you or
analysts or CEOs and government regulators are somewhere in the basement. This
combination is why they capture so much attention. There are three types of what I call
refutable sources, experts being the most powerful, the authority figures because of the
authority they have over us and the crowd because the crowd itself is actually an expert,
especially when it comes to things like collective decision-making. Yelp is a very powerful
expert in which food you should eat because we trust the crowd's judgment in general. Your
key with capturing attention is to leverage experts and establish credibility. ODO-RO-NO did
this, for example by advertising the fact that it was created by a doctor. Smart brands like
ODO-RO-NO leverage outside experts. Trigger number six, mystery. Who knows what movie
that is from?
>>: Cloverfield.
>> Ben Parr: Thank you, somebody got it. You get bonus points. I don't know what I'm going
to give you. I wish I had brought muffins or something. That sounds delicious, doesn't it?
Cloverfield. When they did the first ad, the first trailer for Cloverfield and I didn't have enough
time to play a 3 minute trailer for you, it's all an entire mystery. There is no branding of
Cloverfield of any kind in the first trailers. It just shows kids at a party and then a giant roar and
then the head of the Statue of Liberty in their front yard. That campaign worked really well. JJ
Abrams, the director of Cloverfield, Lost, the new Star Wars movie is fantastic at the mystery
trigger, at creating mysteries both in his campaigns and in terms of getting people to come back
for television shows and for things like lost, and that's why people come back. There are two
reasons why mystery's capture attention scientifically. The first is something called the
Zeigarnik Effect. In the 1950s there was this woman, Bluma Zeigarnik. She was a researcher, a
Soviet researcher and she was sitting in a restaurant and she noticed that the waiters that were
taking her order had a perfect memory of her order until the moment they dropped it off at the
kitchen in which case they completely forgot it. She was like why is this? What is going on
here? What she did, kind of cruelly, what she had children make puzzles and finish puzzles, but
in half the case studies she took the puzzles away at the halfway point. Guess which puzzles
and tasks the kids remembered three and four months out. The ones that they didn't have the
chance to complete. We have a greater memory for incomplete tasks and incomplete stories
and incomplete thoughts, again, the Zeigarnik Effect. Another reason why mysteries capture
attention is because of something uncertainty reduction principle. We're going to do this date
example again. You seem like you would be great on a date. He is like, no, I wouldn't. I
wouldn't say that. If we were on a date interaction, what are we going to do? We're going to
start asking like small talk questions. Where are you from? That kind of thing. What do you
like? What do you not like? And the reason why is because we need to figure out whether or
not we want to be around this person and that sort of thing, whether or not they are a person
we want to hang out with or date or et cetera. The reason we do this is because we dislike
uncertainty and uncertainty reduction theory is a communications theory that states that we
have these kinds of interactions with strangers because we don't want to have uncertainty in
any kind of relationship in anything and so the more information we gain, the less uncertainty
we have about the strangers around us. This is what we do in relationships and on dates and
it's the same thing that we do with mysteries. The uncertainty of a mystery makes us, compels
us to pay more attention because we need to know how something ends. It kills us when we
are at that cliffhanger and we don't know what's going to happen next. It's part of the reason
why the Malaysian airliner disaster captured so much attention. It's not the fact that a plane
crashed. It happens all the time. It's the fact that no one knows where the plane went, and
suddenly you had massive amounts of speculation on CNN and every other news network
because in our attempt to complete that uncertainty gap we fill it in with speculation and fill it
in with our own theories because we do not like uncertainty. We do not like unsolved
mysteries. Capturing attention really comes down to creating that mystery and creating
suspense. In fact, it's not just about storytelling, but it's also things like advertising. This is my
favorite ad from this year's Super Bowl. It's different from the Nationwide ad. My only
association with them is Nationwide kills kids. I know no one works at Nationwide. Someday I
am going to do a presentation and someone is going to be from Nationwide and it's going to be
awkward. But this is the Budweiser commercial and what they did is they had the puppy and
the puppy is trying to get back home and you know Budweiser is not going to kill the puppy.
They are not Nationwide. But there is that moment to moment suspense of what is going to
happen to the puppy. How is the puppy going to escape the wolves? How is the puppy going
to get back home? There was a study that found that actually, the more moment to moment
suspense and ad has, the more positivity and the more remembering people will have of that
ad. That's one of the reasons why this ad was one of the top ones of this Super Bowl because
moment to moment suspense really creates pleasure and really creates interest and
captivation. It's also about using cliffhangers and getting people to come back to the table by
having something, a mystery that can't complete until they come back, unless, of course you're
going through a press crisis. We know that guy. He put out a half-assed statement that was
complete bull shit. I'm sorry; that's what it was, and what happened was it didn't complete the
mystery loop. There was speculation of what really happened. Are you really sorry? What's
going to happen next? When you have that, again, people fill it in with speculation. It's the
same thing that happened with Justine Socco. If you remember last year when she tweeted
that age joke and she hopped on a plane and 10 hours later she was the number one trending
topic on Twitter because she didn't have a chance to respond and close the mystery gap. In
fact at the same time Steve Martin had a really offensive tweet but nothing happened to him
because he was able to delete his tweet and apologize within about 3 minutes. She had 10
hours to let this fester. But the difference between Brian Williams with his half-assed
statement and Bill O'Reilly who we do have a different frame of reference for, but when very
much, very clear like, this did not happen. Here is how it happened and went straight for that.
And completing the mystery loop and making it so that the mystery died down. I also think
about Airbnb. I don't know if you remember a few years ago, but Airbnb had a crisis. They had
a gal named E.J. and she rented out her place and she came to it completely ransacked and
destroyed by the renters. Airbnb didn't do a good job of managing it. They let it fester. She
made a blog post about it and that went viral and then here was the CEO's response on Hacker
News. Basically lawyer shit, lawyer speak. It was like no apology being like we hold our
community at the highest standard. This does not complete the mystery gap. This does not
complete the gap of uncertainty. It just kept on filling the speculation of how is she going to
respond. What is going to happen next? Eventually, they got the picture after the controversy
blew up even more and they put out this apology in a blog post and being like we f'd up. We
are very sorry. Here is how we are going to fix it. And some new store was done because they
completed the mystery gap loop, because they ended the mystery. And when you are trying to
end a press crisis you end the mystery by giving all the information and not giving any more
chance for speculation. Final trigger, and then think about your questions, whatever you want
to ask and you are all a lovely audience, except one or two of you I see you sleeping. But I
forgive you. Acknowledgment. I found one fascinating study during my research. What they
did, kind of cruelly, as well. Researchers are cruel sometimes. Some of you are very cruel.
They strapped electrodes to the ankles of married women and, nothing that is going to kill
them, I hope, but they had three different conditions. First condition was strapped with
electrodes with nobody next to them, second condition was that they got a stranger to hold
their hand and the third condition was they got their husband to hold their hand. The ones
who felt the most pain were the ones who had no one to hold the hand of, and the ones who
felt the least pain, as you would imagine, are the ones who were able to hold their husband's
hand. They were able to transfer their attention away from pain and towards their husband,
but even more interesting, there was a direct correlation between the strength of their
marriages and the amount of pain they felt. The stronger their marriage, the less pain they felt.
That symbolizes the power of acknowledgment and it is that we pay attention to those that pay
attention to us and provide us with validation, empathy, acknowledgment and understanding.
In this quest to understand this a little bit more, and this is from the actual interview with
Adrian Grenier from the show, and Doctor Thomas de Zengotita. People may not know this but
a couple of years ago they teamed up for a documentary called Teenage Paparazzo. They
followed a teenage paparazzi and his work and how celebrity culture and why we are obsessed
with celebrities. They had this interesting fascination with it. The three of us concluded in this
interview that a lot of the reasons we pay attention to celebrities is not just because their
figures that we know, but it's because they are reflections of ourselves in a way. They provide
us with an identity. Think about it. Saying that you are a fan of One Direction for Justin Bieber
or Sheryl Sandberg or Microsoft says something about you, who you are and the community
you belong to. There are kids who know their favorite celebrities or favorite YouTube stars
more than their own parents. I had a friend, one of my old colleagues tell me, she works for
Rachel Ray and she was telling me that when Rachel Ray came out in support of Obama care
her audience was crushed. They were like I thought I knew you. You betrayed me. It's insane.
They don't know this person. But it actually makes sense. It's something called the parasocial
relationship. The parasocial relationship is our capability to have a two-way relationship with a
person even though it's only a one-way relationship in the sense that we feel like we know
Jennifer Lawrence, but she is never actually going to know us. She is never going to actually
meet us, but we feel a direct connection. And that is what the greatest brands and the greatest
celebrities do. It's the reason why a company like Microsoft is around for 40 years instead of
three. It's the reason why Beyoncé can drop an album and make it a best seller and millions of
others can't. Taylor Swift, for example, builds a parasocial relationship with her audience by,
this is what she did last Christmas. She wrapped gifts on YouTube and she sent them to
random fans that she was following online. This was a sensation. She didn't have to actually
give a gift to every one of her fans and acknowledge them. Just the mere action of giving a gift
to one of her fans made it feel as though she had given a gift to all of her fans. She was able to
build this parasocial relationship with her entire audience. I call this scaling the unscalable
because she is able to scale personal relationships in a way that wouldn't normally be possible.
The key to acknowledgment, the key to attention and the most powerful type of attention is to
find ways to validate your audience. Part of the reason, for example, why Facebook and Twitter
and other social networks are so powerful in our attention is because they create, they give us
constant validation in the form of likes, comments, re-tweets and that sort of thing. I call it the
validation society. By being able, you think about, how can I post a status update and get that
little bit of high, that opioid high, that dopamine loop kicks in again because we're looking for
constant validation of our identity or sort of thing. One interesting thing I also learned. I
interviewed Jonah Peretti, CEO of Buzzfeed, is that a lot of the articles are written for
validation. One of the articles they wrote was 54 things Minnesotans are too humble to brag
about. When they put that article out, guess what? All of Minnesota lit up like a beacon
sharing. Why? Because it was a positive validation of an identity. It's good to be a Minnesotan
and I'm proud to be a Minnesotan and that spread like wildfire. If you look through Buzzfeed's
articles you have tons of that in their quizzes and everything else. Whether you are a '90s kid or
you are from Chicago or whether you come from a cold state, or whatever it might be, they find
ways to constantly and positively validate their audience. There's another way to validate your
audience and I'm going to talk about it here. Some of you may know this story. In the 1950s
Betty Crocker and Duncan Hines and all the others were trying to sell cake mix. Bisquick was
popular, but cake mix had not taken off. They were having a real struggle figuring out why was
cake mix failing. They turned to two researchers for help on this. What they found the answer
was, I'm going to do the, is eggs. In the old version of the 1950s, they had powdered eggs. You
honestly don't need fresh eggs to have the same kind of taste with cake mixes or Bisquick mixes
or any kind of mixes. But what happened was when all you had to do was add milk, nobody felt
like they had any kind of input into the recipe and to anything else. What the research said was
allow people to put the eggs in on their own and they will feel more connected to the product
and so that's what they did and they advertised that fact and after a year Betty Crocker
suddenly one the whole game because they enabled participation. Enabling participation is
another way of validation and the validation effect. It's the reason why, for example,
Kickstarter is one of the most popular platforms around, because it's not just buying a product.
It's you being and participating in the creation of something. It's you being at a deeper
involvement. Vitamin Water a few years ago ask their audience to help them create a new
flavor. They trusted them enough to have the input and that was a viral sensation for them.
Eventually, they created Connect as their drink and it really helped Vitamin Water sales,
because they were providing the validation and that participation. I talked to you about the
seven key captivation triggers, automaticity, framing, disruption, reward, reputation, mystery
and acknowledgment. You kind of tell that they go across all three stages. Automaticity is
really a powerful tool to immediately get attention, while disruption is a great tool for short
attention, but mysteries and acknowledgment are great for long attention. It's this kind of
process of walking your audience step-by-step to through the three stages of attention that
really matter when it comes to capturing attention. If you want to contact me because I ran out
of business cards because SxSW is brutal to everything in your entire body. I'm still somehow
standing. You can e-mail me or you can send a tweet or you can check out the book. There is
the book right there which is amazing. I am now here to answer your questions. Thank you
very much. [applause]. All right. Question time. I want to know your name and what you do.
>>: I am Matt Jackson. I am a senior account manager. Two things, really quick, you talked
about people having different associations with different things and often times that is based
on their country or their culture. When you are looking as an individual presenting to people
across cultural and international boundaries, what are some guiding lights or what are some
resources that we can look to try to appeal to the greatest number?
>> Ben Parr: I actually list one, I list a few in the book because I had that very thought in my
head. I can even send it to you, but it's also in the book. There was this one that made a great
color wheel showing the associations that different countries have and different cultures have
with different colors and different cultures. There are a couple of sites that are in the book and
I can send you some, but there has been a whole bunch of research in this area especially for
colors. In the end, it is just knowing your audience, just being on the ground and being able to
say, having people there and saying how will people react to this. What are the automatic
reactions that people have to that? What are the associations people have with this color, with
this sound and with this sensory input? That is the first thing. It's just doing the research. It's
going on the ground and actually having people who are from that culture and finding that
answer.
>>: And a quick follow-up, you said that orange and yellow were most associated with
incompetence. I have to ask, what do you think of the Microsoft logo?
>> Ben Parr: The Microsoft logo has multiple colors. That is not an issue for them. You've got
red. You've got blue. You got both competence and non-competence. Honestly, the strongest
thing is about the long-term associations that people make. McDonald's yellow, whether you
think they are incompetent or not, actually it probably makes sense for McDonald's. But the
symbol has become so powerful, the associations, that just merely viewing the symbol the
research shows makes people more hungry. That's exactly what they want to do. Associations
are supposed to be built over time based on culture and based on what you do and what you
represent. The Microsoft logo will have different associations for different people. I know that
nowadays you are really trying to push the productivity message, but I'm sure that some people
have a more negative message which is why, for example, it's probably a great idea to go
Spartan instead of IE, because IE associations are in the shitter. It's the same thing like when
Justin Timberlake and friends took over MySpace, it was like you guys are all idiots. Because
the associations with MySpace were already done for. Nobody is going to go back to MySpace
no matter how good you look at it. Make a whole brand new site. They would have done much
better. All right, questions, questions. Awesome. Think of your questions by the way. What is
your name?
>>: Matt Jackson.
>> Ben Parr: Not you, behind you. You are not the center of my world anymore.
>>: I was hoping we would go on a date.
>>: [indiscernible] improve the efficiency of data center. You talked about incentives and
rewards and how surprising that rewards are more powerful than incentives. Can you
elaborate a little bit on how much of a surprise it needs to be? How do you get people to
actually do anything in the first place?
>> Ben Parr: Two things I think about. There are six types of rewards. There's collections.
There's gifting, for example. In social games you think about how you could give your friend an
extra life, but it's actually not you getting an actual gift. It's from the game. It's just in the form
of gifting, but gifting is actually a much more powerful form of giving a reward than straight
incentives. Yes, sometimes you need to use incentives to get things started, but people will go
through the behavior group. One book I also recommend, beyond by book, is Nir Eyal's book
Hooked, which talks about how you build habit-forming products and how certain rewards, you
reach the next level and what you are doing is you walk them through the steps of what you
want them to do the first time and you reinforce the behavior by the rewards after-the-fact.
There are sometimes when the incentives are necessary, but more often than not they are not
as necessary then to just have a simple way to walk through a product. One of the main issues
that people who have tons of products with how they design products is there are multiple
paths that people can take. That is not actually a good thing in typical cases. It's much easier to
walk people through one path and reward them for walking through that path and going
through the cycle that you want them to go through. Awesome. What is your name?
>>: [indiscernible] I tweeted you this morning.
>> Ben Parr: I remember your Tweet.
>>: I am a program manager working in Windows. My question has nothing to do with work,
but what does Beyoncé do that's different than Lady Gaga?
>> Ben Parr: Beyoncé and Lady Gaga both do a great job. It's just Beyoncé's branding is just a
little bit better. The thing with Lady Gaga is she relied too much on the disruption trigger. She
relied too much on meat dresses all the time. And you can actually see the branding change
with her recently and how at the Oscars she is going less away from that and doing more of the
long attention sort of thing. Lady Gaga was at her best when she was focusing on the little
monsters and talking to them about how you were born this way. That was probably her most
powerful song because it was a validation of a huge audience of hers. Beyoncé has done for
years this audience thing, longer than Lady Gaga has and really, really validating them. When
you think about things like how she would go to a Walmart, and she did right after the album
came out and she bought everyone's stuff, everyone in the store, like $70,000 worth of stuff
just because she was there. That kind of thing spreads like wildfire. She has cultivated this
very, very strong image. These are associations that you automatically have with her. She no
longer has to rely on short attention techniques like disruption to capture attention. She relies
on the audience and she has built-in long attention. She doesn't have to go to people; people
come to her. Let's do a few more questions. I know we are going to do signings and you can
always ask me any other questions you have with the book or anything else. Hello.
>>: Mike Lee, operations engineer with Xbox. You mentioned when you started that you were
going to talk about ways to keep people from capturing your attention, grabbing your
attention.
>> Ben Parr: So would defending your attention.
>>: Defending your attention.
>> Ben Parr: That's what I call it. My biggest thesis in the whole thing is that when you
understand how attention works, it helps you defend your attention. By knowing some of
these techniques and why they work and the science behind why our brains are so addicted to
experts, you are much better able to defend your attention and realize I am paying too much
attention to this because they had an expert say it was okay. Sometimes it can be a good thing
because if a doctor tells me I need to take medication, I probably should, or take a vaccine. But
on the other hand there are a lot of false experts and others that do hurt our attention and
have steered us the wrong way. Knowing just the fact that there is a science behind why we
pay attention to experts makes you more able to defend your attention. In my estimation it's
really about the knowledge of you defending your attention because you are able to see, at
least this is how it's been for me, I am able to see why lots of things capture my attention over
others and utilize that knowledge to know whether or not I want to pay attention. I think what
you will see over the next 5, 10, 15 years is us continuing to adapt to this continuing changing
world of constant information and better managing our attention as a result. Right now we are
in this kind of transition period, but I think with more knowledge and especially the scientific
knowledge we will be better at controlling our attention. One other thing I discussed in the
book is why do smart phone notifications capture our attention and it's the same reason why
hunter gatherers. Our attention hasn't really changed that much. Our attention kept on
shifting constantly as hunter gatherers because we had to detect threats and detect food. We
don't have that issue anymore, right? That loop has been replaced literally by smart phone
notifications because our short attention is attracted to novelty and so even just knowing that
knowledge helps you think. You know what? I have to turn off the notifications because they
are designed to capture attention because that's how we were built. And so if you want to
concentrate turn off the god damn notifications. Maybe one or two more? And then signing.
Do we have any other questions? You have been awesome, by the way. Thank you so much.
All right. I think that was a good time. I will be here for the book signing, chatting and maybe
dancing if other things happen, eating at some point because apparently you need to do that to
survive, but thank you so much for being a geek an amazing audience and I would love to hear
more from you. [applause].