Once upon a time, a group of brave young scientists decided to compare the attention spans of humans and goldfish. In 2000, humans had a several-second advantage over the goldfish regarding attention, but since 2010, the goldfish has surpassed humankind. In the digital age, the average human’s attention span is only 8 seconds, while a goldfish can concentrate on something for a whopping 9.

What does this mean for businesses in the digital age?

As a brand, it’s become even harder to compete for your target customer’s attention. Although, there are several proven metrics for gauging how well your audience is paying attention to your brand and your content.

How can you measure audience attention?

You can accurately measure audience attention by considering how often your content is liked, loved, shared, or commented on.

People assess a brands credibility and gauge its trustworthiness within 50 milliseconds of first viewing a website or landing page. If you want to know whether your audience is paying attention to your content and finds it credible or trustworthy, you need to pay attention to how often they interact with it, and what type of interaction is taking place.

A comment or share is a much more robust indication of trust, credibility, and attention than only a ‘like’ or a ‘love.’ A ‘like’ or a ‘love’ doesn’t entail much investment on the consumer’s end, although a ‘like’ or a ‘love’ will still shed a favorable light upon you. People want to associate with that which is popular, and likes and loves do indicate popularity.

But with a comment, they viewer is making a time investment in your content by responding to it and possibly hoping for a response back. A ‘share’ indicates an investment of their own credibility by associating with your content.

So, how can you get people to pay more attention to your brand?

The first thing you need to consider is your content. Is it engaging, well-written, valuable, and informative? Research says that if your content is riddled with poor grammar and spelling mistakes, you’re actively sabotaging your brand’s credibility. Also, if your content is uninspiring, people may not necessarily find you untrustworthy, but they won’t pay any attention to it. Give your viewers interactive, informative content while still being fun and they’ll more likely pay attention to what you have to say. Furthermore, you want to add a call-to-action to your content.

This way, you’re inviting the reader to respond by either liking, sharing, or commenting. Better yet, specifically ask for a comment or share since it adds more weight and credibility to what you’re saying, not to mention on social media, the algorithms will look upon you more favorably with the more interaction your brand receives.

In this way, attention is an economy. The more people you get to interact with your brand, the more the algorithm will show your content to more consumers. Attention compounds upon itself. If you want to gain consumer trust and build your brand’s credibility, don’t ignore the attention economy.

Have a listen to this latest TED Podcast: Attention Please. It should offer some additional insights.

Thanks again for paying attention

In keeping with their new direction, last week Google unveiled an updated logo, a much more simplified and modern-looking incarnation than its predecessors. After hearing what graphic designers had to say about it, we asked our CEO, Marc Sampogna, about his thoughts on the redesign.

By no means am I a graphic designer, but one thing I do know is branding. The latest redesign of Google’s brand identity seems to be a small step for a company that’s introduced innovation after innovation to the world. Its simplicity and approachability elicits memories of how Pepsi transitioned from their bold, bubble lettered logo into their current, more contemporary “brand stamp”. I also think this falls coincidentally on the heels of Apples recent software update — OS X Yosemite, where they moved from a beveled, dimensional treatment to flat. If anything, this new logo actually feels more playful and childlike, but no matter what they’ve done, it surely won’t impact how people interact or use the search engine powerhouse. It’s Google, for s*#ts sake. They change their logo daily to reflect a relevant theme that’s taking place in our culture. So…I have one word to say about the new logo, and that is “whatever”.

Burger King released a video proposal on Wednesday as an open letter to its No. 1 competitor McDonald’s, calling for the two burger powerhouses to bury the hatchet in honor of World Peace Day on September 21st.

The fast-food chain proposed a pop-up shop at the halfway between its headquarters in Miami and McDonalds’ headquarters in Chicago, in Atlanta as the middle ground. The shop would exclusively serve “The McWhopper,” half-Big Mac and half-Whopper, designed to “settle the beef” between the two companies for a day. In addition, to the video, the company also created a website illustrating the logistics of the proposal, even featuring an endorsement from nonprofit Peace One Day founder Jeremy Gilley and the recipe for the proposed hybrid burger.

However, the advertisement was seen by some as both a not-so-subtle challenge and a cheap marketing stunt, namely, by the face of McDonald’s himself, who released a public rejection letter of the proposal. “We commit to raise awareness worldwide, perhaps you’ll join us in a meaningful global effort?” wrote Steve Easterbrook, CEO of McDonald’s. “And every day, let’s acknowledge that between us there is simply a friendly business competition and certainly not the unequaled circumstances of the real pain and suffering of war.”

Despite what is clearly a highly-publicized branding move, Burger King seems sincere in its efforts to contribute something meaningful using its status as a popular fast-food chain. McDonald’s seems a little more reluctant to do so, at least in partnership with Burger King.

So who “won”? McDonald’s is making it clear that they refuse to play the game, and in terms of tactics, what was doled out to them as a friendly curveball was slam-dunked over Burger King’s head. But the circumstances of the offer should be taken into account as well. Was it smart or snobby for McDonald’s to reject the offer given that it was for a good cause, especially considering McDonalds’ struggle to stay relevant as of late? You decide.

But all things considered, McDonald’s had better come up with a really great campaign with all this talk of “global awareness.”

What Sparks Our Fire: Creative inter-brand collaborative marketing campaigns (and a little beef)

Google+ has been suffering from what many tech blogs and business publications are calling a “slow death”—its initial launch established the site as an attempt to be a fully-integrated social platform, with its multifaceted approach rivaling companies like Facebook, Dropbox, WordPress, and Skype.

However, after failing to gain both traction and users in the social media community, it recently announced that it will be splitting the platform into three different components: Hangouts, Photos, and Streams. Hangouts is a video chatting service that will remain independent of Google+, photos is a storage space for images that will be added to Google Drive, and streams covers the rest of the Google+ experience along with News and Blogger.

While the idea of a streamlined, all-in-one social media platform sounded like a good idea, perhaps it was the ambition of the venture that led to its demise; users considered the Google+ login to YouTube a nuisance, found the interface unaesthetic, and the whole system a cheap Facebook facsimile.

Google has finally compromised, maintaining the best aspects of Google+ like Hangouts and Photos, and has removed the Google+ sign-in on YouTube, much to users’ delight.

The moral of the story: Don’t put all of your digital marketing eggs in one basket, especially if your product is at risk of being disruptive—and not in the good way.

What Sparks Our Fire: Google+ taking the next step forward and making smart decisions in the face of a highly-publicized technological failure.

Popular media website Vice has announced the release of its 11th channel, Broadly, which caters to female readers.

Its tongue-in-cheek tagline “For Women Who Know Their Place” is a tribute to its mission to promote broader coverage of issues with a female perspective, including “politics, culture, sex, and fashion.” While its content (reproductive health and fertility, gang activity, drug culture, etc.) maintain’s Vice‘s edge and envelope-pushing tendencies, Broadly aims to add a new dimension to such topics.

A major distinction from its other sites is the noticeable lack of comments section, in order to encourage civil discussion and a safe space. However, in true Vice fashion, it will focus on subject matter that is generally underreported by the mainstream media.

This marks an important shift in focus for Vice, capitalizing on the momentum of feminism in the media and seeking to carve out its unique place in branding culture.

What Sparks Our Fire: A digital publication expanding its brand by creating a space for candid conversation among women about prevalent modern issues.

When Amazon launched 20 years ago, online retail shopping was revolutionized. Ten years later, Amazon introduced the Prime program, offering members free two-day shipping in exchange for a yearly fee. Today, as arguably the biggest player in the retail industry, Amazon celebrated it’s 20 year Anniversary by offering all-day deals for Prime members and dubbing the day ‘Prime Day’.

In preparation for Prime Day, Amazon announced some of the top deals it’d be offering, but allowed users to anticipate the rest. And starting at 12:00 AM PT (or, 3 AM on the East Coast), the deals opened up, with new ones popping up almost every 15 minutes.

Customer reaction all day has been mixed, with some calling today a failure. Twitter users– using #PrimeDay– have voiced their frustration at being locked out of deals, the lack of transparency around the flash sales, and even the completely weird things Amazon chose to put on sale in the first place (check out Mashable’s list here).

Despite all of the jokes at their expense, Amazon is aware of the long-term benefits of Prime Day. Before the deals began, Amazon promoted their 30-day trial accounts for new Prime users on their front page. Since deals were only open to Prime members, trial users were also able to take advantage of the deals. By giving trial users the opportunity to experience Prime during Prime Day (and thus offering them double the savings), Amazon has surely proven the value of the program to many new users who will convert to paying members after their trial ends.

What Sparks Our Fire: Celebrating a retail giant for it’s long-term thinking

Visual mediums have taken a larger role in consumers’ lives and has started to trickle into brand storytelling and communication. We’ve written about the latest trend of brands creating their own emoji keyboards, and now Chevrolet has gone one step further and released a press release for the 2016 Cruze, written entirely in emoji. Released this morning, Chevy will give consumers a chance to decipher the statement written in modern glyphs before releasing the translated version this afternoon.

Chevy, not traditionally known for their ground breaking marketing initiatives, is taking a big step in the right direction. No other company has released a formal press release written almost entirely in emoji, though Domino’s did write hundreds of Tweets using just a pizza emoji a few weeks back. By embracing the “emoji” trend and adding an element of social media driven gamification to the sometimes stale press release ritual, Chevy is taking great strides in effectively engaging with the target millennial audience.

Take a look at the full press release, and see if you can piece together the full story.

What Sparks Our Fire: A unique integrated campaign targeted at millennials.

What would your dog take a picture of, if he could use a camera? In an attempt to answer this question, Nikon Asia devised a clever way for Grizzler to take a photo (without even lifting a paw) in their latest video that’s gone viral. Nikon strapped a camera connected to a heart-rate monitor onto Grizzler, and designed a shutter that automatically closed when Grizzler’s heart-rate increased.

Grizzler the “phodographer” took some excellent photos of plants, sandals, eggs, a turtle, and, of course, some other dog and cat friends.

People have been strapping GoPros onto their dogs for a while now, but that mostly gives owners an idea of how their pet spends their day, with no regard to the pet’s preferences. Nikon offers a glimpse into what dogs might actually be excited by. As the centerpiece of Nikon Asia’s Heartography campaign, the video does an excellent job showing how photography comes from the heart– especially in Grizzler’s case, where this is more than metaphorical.

Watch the full video here.

What Sparks Our Fire: A viral brand video that gives us an excuse to watch a cute dog take photos

With over 169 million unique monthly visitors and the infrastructure to self-segment, some might wonder why Reddit isn’t already a go-to destination for brands looking to advertise online. From the outside, Reddit’s platform provides an ideal way to uniquely interact with consumers through sub-reddits that populate the site and segment users based on interests, location, etc. However, Reddit’s nasty reputation has prevented it’s advertising business from growing at the same rate as sites like Facebook, Twitter, or even the more risqué Tumblr. Even though 6% of the US population visits Reddit, the site has always been known more for it’s embrace of the idea that anything goes in the name of free speech, including online harassment.

As of today, Reddit executives are looking to change that reputation by implementing a new anti-harassment policy. Users will be able to email Reddit employees about harassment, which will result in the harasser’s ban on the website. While some are skeptical about about the impact of a team of Reddit employees monitoring this activity, most users see this policy change as a step in the right direction. If Reddit is able to clean up it’s harassment issue, the impact on the community will be an improved user experience, and will entice brands in the process.

What Sparks Our Fire: A policy shift that may open opportunities for your brand