The ad has nothing to do with the text below. It is just a good ad by Saatchi&Saatchi Stockholm for Gainomax.

If you are in digital, chances are you are acutely aware of the 3-second rule. If not, this is the gist of it: if your page or content takes more than three seconds to load, more than half of your visitors will have already gone ahead and bounced right out of there. Basically, the general public has the attention span of a poorly disciplined circus monkey.

The interesting thing about this phenomenon is that a few years ago, those three seconds were five, and in the 60s, a TVC was basically as interesting as the tv-show it interrupted. This was obviously due to the lack of choices, a luxury we no longer have. But I imagine that with an ever-diminishing tolerance to wait even the briefest moment before moving on to the next shiny object, at some point, we are going to have to come full circle. Remember when a small cellphone was the coolest thing you could have? Remember that tiny Motorola flip phone that everyone flipped out about?

One thing I really can't wrap my head around: gross branded edibles. If you are going to brand something that people are meant to enjoy, why would you choose something utterly unenjoyable?

I was having a perfectly uneventful day when around the 4 pm mark I found myself feeling a bit peckish. I considered the rice cakes in my drawer but I wanted something better, so I made a little foray around the office, checking the fridge, making eyes at a large jar of Nutella (a jar I had already had my proverbial fingers in earlier the same day), and finally came upon a small selection of strange sweets on a shelf. This is normally where one will put some kind of "authentic" snack brought home from a vacation to share with colleagues, or leftovers from a meeting with clients, or other things that are free to grab. Among them were these small, fancy candy-like pastries with a brand on top. I casually took way to many then it would be considered polite to and went back to my desk.
As I bit into the first one, I immediately realized that something was wrong. I had forgotten to remove the wrapper. I checked. In fact, I had not forgotten to remove the wrapper. It was simply a really, really vile pastry-like candy. As I swallowed the dry piece still in my mouth and threw the other pieces in the trash, I got to thinking.

Why would a brand choose to have something like this produced? Mind you, I assume there are several people involved in this simple project of choosing and purchasing sweets - target lists (I mean, someone sent this to our office), budget decisions, research, contact with suppliers, getting an estimate, presenting to a client (unless it is done internally, in which case the "client" is probably like the office manager's boss), making a decision and finally providing the supplier with the logo and... well, there should have been many moments in the process where someone could have raised their hand and said "hey, guys, how about if we went with something that doesn't have the taste and texture of paper?..."

I remember being part of this specific type of process several years ago. Someone put a dozen little bonbons in a selection of different flavors in front of me and asked me which ones matched these three separate brand-in-brands. The flavors varied from lemon (tasted like a cough drop) to mint (ditto) to spearmint (you get my point here). Exactly none of them had what I would be looking for in a branding product - you know, appeal. I mentioned this and two weeks later there was a large bowl of different cough drops wrapped in cheap-looking branded wrappers in the office.

Plenty years later I had a client in the automotive industry with whom I had regular meetings in a large conference room in their carpeted offices. As time dragged out and peoples voices were distorted into that low alien slo-mo effect I would absent-mindedly stretch out my hand and pick up one of the caramels in the bowl on the table, popping it in my mouth and, five seconds later, pretending to scratch my leg so I could pick up the cheap, branded wrapper I'd discreetly thrown on the floor under the table and spit the lemony little devil out in it. Not half an hour later this exact thing would happen again. I also saw colleagues do the same thing. The worst part of it is that the client must have thought they made a good decision when buying the damn sweets, as the bowl would be half empty every time we left.

The little boxes of sweets, anything with a crinkly wrapper, anything that pays more attention to the clarity of the logo than the actual edibleness of the product, anything that has no flavor, no visual appeal, no sense of opulence or sumptiousness... if your brand is not premium, or aiming for a premium feel, you don't need branded edibles. If you are going to a fair, just offer people brownies (not special ones, unless it is that kind of fair) or something store bought. A nice bite is more memorable than a logo on shiny wrapper - you should be doing the talking anyways. Unless you want your brand message to be "eat shit", consider your choices when acquiring branded candy. If you cannot provide an enjoyable moment, maybe go another way this time.