The Cost of Eyeballs
Spectacle vs. substance. Designing event spaces for recall, not just applause.
Spectacle buys attention, but guests judge an event by what they remember. It draws on Herbert Simon, Guy Debord and the peak-end rule to show why one peak, a planned ending and one idea beat sheer volume. It ends with a recall test to run seven days after any event.
Spectacle buys attention, and attention is not memory. Herbert Simon warned in 1971 that "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." The peak-end rule explains what guests keep afterward. Together they give event design a better target than applause. That target is what a guest can still say about the host a week later.
Two costs
Simon made the point in "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World" (text). What information consumes, he wrote, is "the attention of its recipients." So a wealth of it leaves attention scarce. And most of its cost, he noted, falls on the person receiving it.
The title of this essay means two costs. The first is what the host pays to buy eyeballs, such as the installation, the screens and the build. The second is what the guest pays in attention. It is spent before the host's message arrives. Picture a guest who has walked through a tunnel of screens, two photo moments and a DJ set. They reach the product demo with less attention than they had at the door.
The spectacle
Guy Debord put the deeper version in 1967, in The Society of the Spectacle. Thesis 4 reads, "The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images." Events have their own versions. The photo room designed for the phone fits it. So do the LED tunnel, the giant installation and the guest performing for a feed.
None of this needs a sermon. Spectacle is a tool. The question that matters is what it buys.
When the queue is the experience
Two well-known cases show the pattern. Random International's Rain Room opened at the Barbican in London in October 2012. It came to MoMA in 2013, where visitors queued for hours for a short time inside. The Museum of Ice Cream opened in New York in 2016 as a series of photo backdrops. It sold out and spawned imitators (Artnet).
The point is not to sneer, because Rain Room is serious art. The point is the brand question. When a host borrows this kind of experience, the test is what guests remembered about the host, not about the rain.
Applause versus recall
The two are different results, measured at different times.
- When. Applause: During the event. Recall: Days after.
- What it counts. Applause: Footfall, dwell time, photos, posts, queue length. Recall: Unaided mention of the host, the idea and the intended action.
- Who it describes. Applause: What guests did in the room. Recall: What guests kept.
Applause numbers are easy to collect and flattering to report. That is why they fill post-event decks. Spectacle can leave a vivid memory of the spectacle and none of the sponsor. Treat that as a risk each team should test on its own events, not as a statistic.
What the peak-end rule rewards
The research is clear on one point. In 1993 Daniel Kahneman, Barbara Fredrickson, Charles Schreiber and Donald Redelmeier reported a study in Psychological Science. People preferred to repeat a longer unpleasant episode that ended better.
Each person held a hand in painfully cold water twice. One spell was shorter. The other was longer, but its last stretch was slightly less cold. Most chose to repeat the longer one, because memory weights the peak and the end, not the sum.
Hedwig von Restorff showed in 1933 that an item which stands out in a series is remembered better than the items around it. Both findings point away from volume and toward design.
That gives a room four levers. The first is one designed peak, tied to the message and not to the budget line. The second is a designed ending, not the cloakroom queue. The third is one idea, expressed in space and repeated until it sticks. The fourth is quieter places to talk, because people remember what they said and heard.
Designing a room for recall
Work in this order.
- Write the one sentence a guest should repeat a week later.
- Map the guest's sequence from arrival to exit.
- Put the peak where the message lands.
- Design the last five minutes.
- Cut stimulus that competes with the message.
- Move budget from size to story.
An ending can be simple. Think of a quiet exit route past the one product the room was built for, with a person there to talk about it.
The same logic governs why trade show booths fail when they entertain.
The recall test
Run it seven days after any event, and record the results yourself. There are no published benchmarks to compare against.
- Ask a sample of guests one unaided question, "What do you remember from the event?"
- Follow with aided prompts about the space, the host and the message.
- Then ask, "What will you do differently?"
- Code each answer with the scheme below.
- Report the share of answers that name the host and the idea, and compare events over time.
- Spectacle: The installation, the effect, the photo
- Host: The company or brand by name
- Idea: The message the room was built to carry
- Action: Something the guest will do because of it
Count both costs
Count the cost of eyeballs on both sides of the ledger. One side is the budget spent, and the other is the attention guests gave. Then judge the room by what they can still say a week later.
Simon's scarce attention gets spent in a real room. Monet shows a planner's layout in 3D renders and walkthrough videos of the real room, so a team can place the peak and the ending, and walk the route between them, before the budget is spent.