Attention, What Is It Good For?
A Bunch of Stuff About Sports Media and How We Watch
Attention. The advertising industry seems increasingly obsessed with it. But does it really matter, and if so, what’s it worth? And what if lack-of-attention can be more valuable?
These are the questions I was asking myself a few weeks ago while half watching the New York Mets play a meaningless (for them) second game of a double-header against the Braves.
Given its pastoral roots, watching baseball has always been a leisurely experience, especially compared to football, which usurped it as America’s past-time and is born out of the industrial age.
In fact, I think one of life’s great joys is escaping August heat by staying inside in the AC while simultaneously watching a Mets game and reading a book. Or at least it used to be. In recent years, Major League Baseball has taken steps to make the games more TV-friendly, such as the addition of a “pitch clock” to speed up the pace of the game and bigger bases to encourage more stealing.
These changes undeniably make the game more watchable, but should the game be more watchable? If the reason they sped up the game was to appeal to wider audiences, is asking for more attention the way to win more viewers? In a media universe dominated by mobile consumption, could MLB have optimized itself to be the second screen?
A few years ago Justine Bateman gave an interview where she lamented getting feedback from TV streamers that shows weren’t “second screen enough,” meaning that they were too hard to follow if people were also on their phone while watching. My friend Chris likes to say that “watching TV without your phone is the new reading.” Justine and Chris are making the same point: multi-screen, distracted viewing is the standard.
Not long after the Mets began their miraculous (and ultimately heartbreaking) run to the NLCS, Netflix dropped a new season of their dating reality hit Love is Blind and, as an avid fan of about half of each season, I started thinking about the show’s similarity to baseball.
Love is Blind is a weird show. Unlike dating shows on linear TV that rely on constant teasers and recaps to heighten the drama and keep people tuned in through commercials and week-after-week, its Netflix distribution allows it to burn slower. Most episodes include awkward, sometimes stuttering conversations between two people that can run almost ten minutes. Just two (sometimes very uninteresting) people slowly talking about their feelings.
While The Bachelor is dramatically edited to make every scene seem critical, LiB sometimes doesn’t even show critical moments (like when one of this year’s cast members was caught sexting with randos), just the fallout conversations.
And because most of the action takes place entirely between the two people who opt-in to blind engagements (with a handful of moments each season where multiple couples come together), viewers can completely opt out of paying attention to couples you don’t find interesting (like this year’s Taylor and Garrett, scientists that made me long for the misery of my highschool chemistry class).
Amazing, Love is Blind is both tailor-made for the second screen era because you never really have to be paying all that much attention and it’s great for people who want to obsessively immerse themselves in the intricacies of other people’s fake relationships (count me as the former; I generally fast forward through the wedding episodes).
It’s choose-your-own-adventure TV based on how invested (or not) you want to be.
I know what you’re thinking: “I wish I wasn’t paying attention to whatever nonsense he’s written this week.” Actually, if you’ve made it this far, you are probably morbidly curious about this topic. And that’s kind of the point: Lost in all the discourse about the shift to streaming consumption is the fact that so much of our media is so easy to partially opt-out of, that even the absolutely most popular things are not fully engaging the majority of their audience. As a consequence, more content is being created pre-optimized to make it even second-screening easier. Inevitably, the TV becomes the second screen.
What’s an advertiser to do? Pay super premiums to seek out the highest-attention environments? Or accept the fact that everyone’s barely paying attention, seek out passive viewing environments, and jack up the frequency behind ear-worm heavy creative?
This Week’s Whimsies (Mostly Sports Media Edition)
Shame on MLB for continuously relegating the Detroit-Cleveland playoff games to weekday day games while the Yankees kept getting prime time games. Aside from being especially insulting given how blue-collar those towns are, I also think it’s a failing strategy. Are there really more people nationally who are both able to watch day games during the week AND are interested in every game compared to the people in Detroit and Cleveland who love their local teams but can’t watch during the day?
I have no idea how it will perform, but I love the idea of last night’s NHL Frozen Frenzy, in which every team in the league played and a game started every 15 minutes starting at 6.15pm ET. This kind of stunt scheduling is getting more common as a means to grab some outsize attention and build extra fan buzz.
At the same time, figuring out where and how to watch sports is getting more complicated as sports media rights continue to fragment. So the NFL, ESPN, and others are starting to publish guides for how to watch. But this is just the first step towards one or two sports super apps or hubs that not only connect across streaming services, but also help you manages the subscriptions.
Another problem is the difficulty in “changing channels” in streaming environments, which Joe Fried articulates perfectly in this LinkedIn post.
I tried to use Midjourney make an image of a Yankee and a Dodger as Love is Blind cast members, but for some reason it kept putting only Yankee hats on both players. If there was any doubt that AI will eventually turn evil and destroy the world, I think we know for sure now.
Much like the playoffs/championship game are often all that matters in American sports, reunion shows are like the postseason of reality TV, so even though I skip the weddings, I’ll definitely be watching the Love is Blind reunion. I might even pay attention to whatever Taylor and Garrett have to say about each other, but probably not.
Remember listicles? This piece argues that they are sort of back, as a premiumized, more sophisticated version of clickbait. Make sure to open next week’s email on the 23 Best Ways to Pretend You Know What You’re Talking About in a Meeting.