Why are modern ads so fast-paced and flashy compared to older ones?

Question

I once took a class in television production at my local cable studio, and one of our assignments was to go and watch TV with the sound off and pay attention to the ads. The lesson was to look at how fast-paced ads were compared to those from an earlier time period (such as 20 years ago).

I have noticed this phenomenon of quick pace not just in television but also print ads (I'm drawing my comparison to vintage ads) and also how films and movies are shot from 20 years ago to those of today. They feel more slow and drawn-out whereas today's are very quick to change scene and avoid stagnation.

What are reasons why there has been a shift in how those media are directed? Are there psychological and or cultural factors that have heavily influenced the visual and aural aspects of them?

Answer 1

I hate that we all automatically spring into nostalgia and some sort of "kids these days" mentality when it comes to these sorts of questions. I think the main reasons for this change are generally positive not a side-effect of us all getting thicker.

One factor to consider is that we've simply had more time to get better at making ads that serve their intended purposes. Advertisers perform a lot of cognitive science and psychological research to develop strategies and techniques for cutting through to consumers, and so you'd expect techniques for communicating to their audiences to change over time.

Regarding print ads: colour printing of newspapers is a relatively new thing. That allows brands to apply very consistently their marketing across multiple media which wasn't always possible before. If you're really extending your question back 20 years, you should also think about how much desktop publishing and design tools have improved in that time. In 1992 it wasn't feasible to produce many of the complex layering, texturing and compositing effects we now see. A bunch of newspaper compositing was still being done by hand (literally cut-and-paste) as recently as the late 90s.

It's also apparent to me (but not something I have evidence for) that magazines especially have become much more typographically pure in the current era; that's partly due to the proliferation of digital typography and partly due to the improvement of layout and proofing tools. It's also a fairly popular design aesthetic. With the actual editorial content tending to be more stark and grid-based, it stands to reason that the advertisements would tend to avoid that aesthetic in order to draw attention to itself.

It's also almost certainly related to the increase in exposure to advertising we all have now, which makes us far more cynical than we once were. "Talking head" ads directly espousing magical effects of a certain brand of clothing aren't generally going to be well received by a more savvy audience.

Answer 2

I would assume it has to do with the fact that the attention span of users is much shorter nowadays and they look for instant gratification. There is this infographic which I found on the net which provides a number of statistics on how much instant results matter:

1. One in four people would abandon a site if it took more than four seconds to load
2. 50 % of mobile users would abandon a page if it didnt load in 10 seconds and three out of five wont even return to that site
3. If Amazon's page render speed was reduced by even one second,they could potentially lose upto 1.6 Billion dollars in a year
4. Slowing down Google search engine by 4/10ths of a second, for example, would cut 8 million searches from Google’s daily total of 3 billion

There is also an article which states that Facebook and internet 'can re-wire your brain and shorten attention span' . To quote what they say

The Oxford University expert believes constant computer and internet use may be ‘rewiring the brain’, shortening attention spans, encouraging instant gratification and causing a loss of empathy.

I'll try to update this with more information later