“Everyone knows what attention is,” William James said in 1890. We know what it is, but it’s not so easy to understand how it works.

We know that your attentional capacity is finite. But it’s not as simple as that. It never is with attention.

Take, for instance, the Cocktail Party Effect. Many people are talking in small groups in a densely packed room. There are conversations on every side of you while you engage in your own discussion.

Were we to test your memory later, there would be no trace of those peripheral conversations in your brain. For $1 million, you could do no more than guess what was said.

Yet we also know that if your name were to come up in conversation – along with the flow, not as an interjection – you would be quite likely to orient to the sound, reflexively disengage from your current conversation, and attempt to decipher why you’re being mentioned.

This relatively simple fact tells us a lot about the architecture of human attention.

Selective attention

The only reasonable model to account for this duality (i.e., no background memory despite great name detection) is a relatively low-level perceptual filter that screens out background noise for important stimuli.

This can only happen in the brain, as there are no circuits sophisticated enough in the ear.

This means that a lot of the background information is making it into the brain.

And the background information is far more interesting than the easy stuff.

Ads are everywhere

In advertising, we call this clutter, and it’s a pariah.

We have turned to guerilla marketing, buzz marketing, word-of-mouth, product placement, and branded entertainment to get around the clutter.

Avoid the clutter … at all costs.

Yet when the Super Bowl rolls around in 18 days, millions will tune in simply to be entertained by Budweiser’s Clydesdales.

That doesn’t make any sense.

We recoil from the clutter on our transit ads, aerial flyovers, and even on the doors of the bathroom stall, but sometimes we put off the rest of the world simply to watch the ads.

When clutter isn’t clutter

The difference is that there’s a good chance that the Super Bowl ads will be quite good.

And we’re suckers for a good story.

Ogilvy understood this more than four decades ago when he wrote:

The manufacturer who dedicates his advertising to building the most sharply defined personality for his brand will get the largest share of the market at the highest profit.

Burnett understood it when he said:

I am one who believes that one of the greatest dangers of advertising is not that of misleading people, but that of boring them to death.

And Lovemarks author Kevin Roberts understands this today, writing:

What people hate are boring 30-second commercials. Great 30-second commercials, they love. That’s why there are whole TV shows that play nothing but commercials. And why do people love them? Because they tell stories. And people love being told a story.

When you care enough …

And I’m not just telling you a story about telling stories.

I get paid to teach advertising. Furthermore, I am a cognitive scientist. If anyone should be immune to advertising, it should be me.

Instead I’m among the most brand loyal people you’ll ever meet.

We all know better. The price of everything we buy would be cheaper if companies simply didn’t invest in advertising.

And some don’t. Their generic and store brand packages are right there on the shelves. And yet we reach right over them for the higher-priced nationally advertised competitors.

On the way to work the other day, I heard radio ad promoting that you can buy greeting cards for 49 cents at Wal-Mart. FORTY-NINE CENTS!

Yet I’d never consider buying one. You know why?

Because I do care enough to send the very best. Hallmark’s story and Sam Bradley’s story are intertwined. Occasionally I’m pressed for time and have to buy an American Greetings card. And I kid you not when I say that it feels as if I’m cheating on my wife.

Consistency, reach, and frequency

It’s difficult enough to get a corporation to commit to a long-term strategy with the average CMO tenure under 24 months.

Once you get the company on board, you have to always be “on message.”

I’m a huge fan of public relations, and I see its growing role. But it’s just too unpredictable to be the only voice. I used to be a reporter. I know that I didn’t always write the story I was given.

Paid advertising is the only way that you get to tell the story your way. You get to decide how often you tell the story, and you get to decide who hears the story.

Consistency. Repetition. Consider paid advertising to be the gyroscope that keeps us heading in the right direction. It centers us.

In the near future, advertising might lose its status as the entrée of the persuasion meal. But I argue that it should never lose its status as the author of the theme.

The problem isn’t the stories. It’s with bad stories.

Just as your name breaks through the clutter of the cocktail party, good advertisements break through the clutter.

You might think that you’re immune to the clutter. And memory tests might support you, just as they miss the cocktail party chatter. But a lot more makes it in than your name.

When advertising tells a consistent story over time, that image is slowly stored. You may not be able to recite the story, but you’re learning it ever so subtly from Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and MasterCard.

Even today. Even with social media. It still costs money to tell your story.

What’s your story on the future of advertising? Please share a comment.

Photo credits: iStockPhoto.com

The first rule of getting noticed online appears to be “go comment on a lot of blogs.”

I’ve been trying to increase my online presence this December, so I have been reading all the suggestions that I can find.

Each blogger has a slightly different take on the grand enterprise, but they all agree: comment on related blogs as if you were voting in Chicago: early and often.

Blog comments serve two purposes.

First, for those blogs that allow the links to be followed by search engines, you get credit for links back to your site. This is actually a complicated topic, and I encourage you to learn more over at Jim’s Marketing Blog.

The second benefit is for actual human beings to read your comment and follow that comment back to your (presumably) blog.

That makes sense. Web 2.0 is about the conversation, after all. So I’ve read a lot of blog posts in the past month. And I’ve left a whopping five or six comments. Not a day, total. If you’re to believe all of the advice, then I should have been posting that many before lunch.

But I just haven’t had that much to say. And it just seemed dumb to go spouting “I agree. You’re brilliant” on a bunch of blogs. It seemed like comment spam.

Then this morning, Twitter pointed me to a post titled, “Are You Commenting for Traffic or Relationships?” by Kimberlee Ferrell on Remarkablogger.com.

Ferrell did write an excellent post (no false comment praise here), and it coalesced my thoughts far better than my own mind had accomplished.

So what is the point of commenting? To engage other members of the blogging community. You are building relationships: with the owner of the blog, with the other commenters, and with the other readers of the blog. You are working on the social side of social media. You are establishing yourself as part of the online community.

Web 2.0 must be foremost about conversations. If we’re not interacting — with multiple iterations — then Web 2.0 is merely an illusion. Without genuine conversation, even powerful bloggers are nothing more than traditional media outlets with small audiences.

And my way hasn’t been especially fruitful in driving traffic to this blog (yet?), but I have made one really solid connection that will be intellectually fruitful, and I have arranged two interviews for my 5 Questions feature.

So my ROI exceeds my expectations. I’ve forged new relationships.

But, you see, the thing is, this should not have been news. We got so busy being social that we, perhaps, forgot to be human.

When is it not the case that you should only say meaningful things? Why speak for no reason?

A friend and former co-worker of mine once quipped, “advertising ethics means never telling a lie you don’t have to.”

It’s funny because we’re all familiar with puffery, bait-and-switch, and other less-than-noble practices in this industry.

But more than the George Washington-like notion of not lying, we should reaffirm our commitment to not speaking just to hear ourselves talk.

Practitioners in advertising and public relations work to craft a brand. If you’re online in any professional sense, then you represent your brand.

And whether it’s McDonald’s, Apple, or you, you need to understand your brand. Who are you? What is your personality? Even if you know, take a moment to refresh you memory. It never hurts to be reminded.

And once you know, then make sure that everything you say is on message. Reinforce rather than dilute your brand.

Now, let me backtrack a bit and say that’s not nearly as boardroom MBA jargon-speak as it sounds.

I’m just saying: Be true to yourself. Even if you’re invading social media only to make a quick buck, you’ll do so more quickly with sincere relationships more quickly than fleeting ones.

But hopefully you do value relationships more than receipts!

And although initial hits might not skyrocket the way that you’d hope, those who follow links from diligent, relevant comments are precisely those visitors likely to return.

And long-term success demands repeat visitors.

And this is about relationships. A basic human tendency.

This is simply basic communication science for any brand: even if it’s Brand You.

Photo credit: iStockPhoto.com, Nikolay Kropachev.