The new TV campaign from Tangerine, formerly ING Direct, has all the right pieces but ignores one important element —humans have very short attention spans. One of the first things drilled into my head decades ago was that advertisers had less than 15 seconds to let consumers know what were selling. After that, they lose interest.

Today, we don’t even have that long to grab them.

In 2000, the average attention span was 12 seconds. Thanks to the proliferation of mobile digital devices and social media in our multi-screen world, research has discovered that the average attention span has now dropped to 8 seconds. According to the research study released last year by Microsoft, goldfish at 9 seconds have a longer attention span than we do.

What that translates to for advertisers is that waiting until the end of a commercial to reveal the brand, let alone the product or service category, is definitely not a good move. Unfortunately, that is what Tangerine has done with its new campaign.

The online bank has nailed its strategy, “You work hard for your money. Does your bank?” together with its “Forward Banking” tagline. This message is conveyed via a sequence of scenes of people hard at work in occupations such as health care, daycare and factory work. It’s all set to a terrific military-style cadence. The music is memorable and the visuals are well done but, to me, the spot suggested social programs, health care or labour unions. I tuned it out after a few seconds. It wasn’t until I read about the campaign launch in trade media that I took a second look and watched until the very end to find out that the ad was for a bank.

The agency behind the campaign may balk at the idea of superimposing the Tangerine logo on a corner of the screen or at least having one of the workers in the montage slip a cheque into their pocket at the end of a long day, but at least the viewer wouldn’t have to work so hard to get the message.