Forget everything you thought you knew about reaching people in the digital age. While global smartphone penetration skyrockets, nearing 7 billion devices worldwide, and digital advertising spends soar past the US$ 700 billion mark, a hidden problem lurks beneath the surface. Despite the massive budgets and focus on personalization, the effectiveness of digital advertising has declined significantly.
In 1994, the first digital banner ad boasted an impressive 44% click-through rate (CTR). Imagine, nearly half the people who saw it clicked! Fast forward to 2023, and the average CTR for display ads is a dismal 0.35%. effectiveness
That's a shocking plummet in, over 100-fold. This isn't just bad news for advertisers; it's the "Achilles' Heel" of digital advertising, raising questions about its future and highlighting a critical gap in how we use smartphones for communication.
This growing inefficiency could undermine the very future of digital advertising and exacerbate the problem of subprime attention paid to it.
It serves as a call to action for rectifying this gap in smartphone advertising.
The smartphone revolution: The always-on, always-with-you medium
Since its launch in 2007, the smartphone has been the driving force behind a new digital revolution. With approximately 6.84 billion devices worldwide in 2023 and a global penetration rate of 67% in 2021, it is an undisputed medium that is always-on and always-with-you.
The smartphone is the final mile of most digital interactions, acting as the vital bridge between the information generated in the digital world and the desired behavior. This makes it crucial, now more than ever before, to understand the interaction between humans and smartphones. Given its omnipresence, the smartphone can be utilized as an effective agent of behavior change.
Fractal launched pioneering research to investigate why this new medium requires an understanding vastly different from that of past media, such as television.
Unpacking smartphone usage: Key research findings
Fractal conducted non-intrusive, app-based research analyzing high-fidelity data from over 443,520 minutes and 1.8 million touches from 44 participants in the 20-30 age group. The objective was to understand the nature of user interactions on their smartphones throughout the day.
The research confirmed:
Smartphones are the ultimate always-on, always-with-you medium. Excluding sleeping hours, smartphone activity is persistent across the day. This creates an opportunity not only to reach but also to engage with users continuously.
Unlike television's prime time for youth (8:30 pm to 9:30 pm), the smartphone's Digital Prime Time lies between 10:00 pm and 11:00 pm, marked by the highest active usage during this hour.
Smartphone usage is on the rise. In 2023, users spend an average of 3 hours and 36 minutes per day, a nearly 50% increase compared to the 2 hours and 25 minutes found in a 2016 study.
Interaction frequency has surged. The number of daily screen touches increased by an astonishing 72% since 2016, from 2,617 to 4,513 times per day. On smartphones, context shifting is achieved with every touch of the screen.
While streaming apps like Netflix and YouTube see daily usage around 20 minutes, messaging and social media apps like WhatsApp and Instagram command significantly more time, at 51 minutes and 72 minutes daily, respectively.
This daily usage is spread across numerous shorter sessions throughout the day, creating "Revolving Door Sessions" on apps. WhatsApp is opened an average of 35 times a day, and Instagram 22 times.
The blink-and-you'll miss it moment: Context duration
Context duration is defined as the time a viewer spends engaging with a particular piece of content. On television, the context duration is typically 5-21 minutes, allowing ample time for a 30-second commercial.
The research revealed a fundamental difference on smartphones: the context duration is the time between two consecutive touches. The stunning finding is that the duration between two touches on smartphones is less than 5 seconds for 90% of all interactions, and less than 10 seconds for 95% of all interactions. Long, uninterrupted viewing isn't the norm on smartphones.
This presents a significant challenge for traditional digital advertising and communication, which are often built on longer formats. Persuasion stimuli developed for smartphones must be a subset of this extremely short context duration.
Digital habits: Your smartphone as a behavioral mirror
Our daily taps, swipes, and scrolls, seemingly trivial, leave behind a trail of "behavioral breadcrumbs". Increasingly, researchers and AI systems analyze those trails to understand not just how we spend our time, but who we are. Smartphones are, in essence, "behavioral mirrors".
Our screen time and interaction patterns reveal more about our personality and mental health than we might think.
High screen time on social media may indicate extroversion or a desire for connection.
Frequent, short bursts of activity might signal anxiety or attention challenges.
People using health and productivity apps may score higher on conscientiousness.
Aggressively scrolling late at night might hint at emotional regulation struggles.
Bingeing on videos while ignoring messages could be an escape from overstimulation.
Behavioral frameworks even classify digital behavior types:
The Seeker: Curious, constantly consuming content, possibly anxious.
The Escaper: Gets lost in games/videos, often a sign of stress relief or avoidance.
The Explorer: Tries new apps, switches platforms, creates more, typically open and creative.
You may be a mix of these types. Your phone habits reflect your coping strategies, priorities, and personality traits. Your digital habits reveal a story about how you manage stress, joy, boredom, and connection.
AI: Analyzing the behavioral story
AI algorithms trained on app usage, typing patterns, and even the duration of pauses before clicks can draw surprisingly accurate inferences about personality, mood, and even early signs of depression. Startups and researchers are using AI to detect burnout, identify loneliness, and track attention spans.
While this may sound invasive, much of this data can be anonymized and aggregated to provide early insights and even real-time interventions. For example, some wellness apps alert you when your phone behavior mimics patterns associated with stress, offering prompts for breathing exercises.
This analysis aligns with the core belief of teams like the Cerebral team at Fractal: the more we understand the "inscrutable algorithms" within our brains, the better technology we can develop for our machines.
Enter microstimuli: Tapping into nature's power and behavioral insights
The answer to effective communication in the age of rapid-fire smartphone interaction lies in MicroStimuli. Since the context duration is a mere 5–10 seconds, persuasion stimuli must be a subset of this extremely short window – ideally working in milliseconds.
The inspiration comes from nature itself. Nobel laureate Nikolaas Tinbergen's work revealed "Supernormal Stimuli" in biology, simple, exaggerated stimuli that can trigger powerful, fixed action patterns in milliseconds. If nature can achieve such swift and potent reactions, the thinking goes, so too can stimuli designed for smartphones. By delving into neuroscience and the complexities of natural communication, teams like Cerebral at Fractal found a path to creating MicroStimuli.
Applying MicroStimuli to business problems
Fractal has identified key business problems where MicroStimuli can make a significant impact, including improving Click-Through Rates (CTRs) on e-commerce platforms, reducing cart abandonment rates, and bridging the information-behavior gap.
E-purchase framework: For routinely purchased items, an e-purchase decision can occur in as little as 920 milliseconds. MicroStimuli can target the three cognitive stages:
Evoking an Approach based on the Core Category Need.
Generating Liking by invoking Past Experienced Utility.
Creating "Wanting" by playing up the emotional benefit and perceived price reward.
Cart conversion framework: With average cart abandonment rates near 80%, MicroStimuli can mitigate this by combining elements that create:
An Endowment Effect (shifting the item to 'personal space').
Temporal Discounting (giving short-term rewards and creating urgency).
Highlighting the Emotional Benefit of Consumption.
E-action framework: Smartphones can be used to encourage positive behaviors, such as increasing medical adherence, physical exercise, and product usage. Various behavioral barriers create tension between short-term interests and long-term goals. MicroStimuli generated by tapping into evolutionary triggers and emotional benefits can help resolve this internal tension and drive action.
The fine line between insight and intrusion
While analyzing digital habits provides an opportunity for better self-awareness and mindful tech use, it also raises concerns about how these insights are applied. When platforms leverage behavioral data to encourage healthy habits, it can be beneficial. However, when they exploit these patterns for profit, it becomes manipulation. Tech organizations are already refining feeds based on micro-behaviors. The same insights that could help manage screen addiction can also be used to keep you engaged longer.
A quick tip for self-awareness: try a digital audit for a day, tracking not just time but your mood when using each app. The patterns might surprise you.
Conclusion: It's not just screen time—It's story time
The digital communication landscape is changing. The dominance of smartphones and our unique interaction patterns with them, coupled with the revealing nature of our digital habits, demand a new approach. The age of long, drawn-out digital messages may be waning, making way for a revolution powered by MicroStimuli – tiny triggers designed to engage us in the milliseconds that matter most. Our digital habits tell a story, and as AI improves at interpreting them, there are twofold opportunities for enhanced self-awareness and more mindful tech use. So, the next time you pick up your phone, ask yourself: Am I scrolling for a reason—or just out of reflex?
Read through the insight research on, Microstimuli new digital communication
