Using a unique mix of neuroscience, cultural history and advertising research, the study shows how an increase in abstract, left-brain thinking has spread across business and popular culture and how this is undermining creativity and making advertising less effective. Crucially, it also provides practical advice to reverse this decline. According to the 130-page publication, the reasons underlying the crisis relate to the way the brain attends to the world: the same instincts that lie behind short-termism and narrow focus are resulting in work that is flat, abstract, dislocated and devitalised - advertising that doesn't move people. An attentional shift has occurred in business and society; a change in thinking style that has left its mark not just on advertising, but also on popular culture

Lemon. How the advertising brain turned sour.

Orlando Wood

Institute of Practitioners in Advertising

Look out An advertising guide for a world that’s turning inwards. 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 – as Wood puts it – in culture turning inwards. This is the context in which advertising is being made today, and Wood 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. When companies move online they lose their physical availability, and so too their mental availability. Brand building advertising therefore becomes more important because it maintains the mental availability that is otherwise lost. To create the effective and memorable advertising that’s needed, Look out urges advertisers to capture the ‘broad-beam’ attention of audiences. The book 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, Wood argues – it must look out.

Look out

Paperback. Pages are clean &amp; crisp. Spine is tight. Please see all pics.

System1 - Unlocking Profitable Growth

John Kearon

Tom Ewing

System1 group

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Orlando Wood. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Orlando Wood

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Orlando Wood. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Lemon. How the advertising brain turned sour.

Look out

System1 - Unlocking Profitable Growth