Look out

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.