Of course, some will rise to defend caffeine’s impact on health. It can make athletes more alert, especially if they are not regular users; and many a drowsy driver has probably stayed alive thanks to coffee. Caffeine has been linked to lower Alzheimer’s rates, less diabetes, fewer gallstones, lower rates of Parkinson’s, and less colon cancer. It is also said to support the delivery of other vitamins or healing agents (which is why there are surprisingly high quantities of caffeine in over-the-counter pain relievers). One study says caffeine grows brain cells, potentially improving memory and the ability to learn. Another study says it cures male baldness (although you need something like sixty cups a day to make it work, so scientists are working on creams that let you just smear it right onto your scalp).

  Americans are becoming big drinkers overall. Our poor little kidneys don’t know what to make of all the increased hydration and dehydration. (Since 1980, the average American’s beverage consumption has grown by an astounding 30 gallons per year—putting pressure on not just our personal plumbing systems, but on the nation’s in general.) But Americans are not consuming more alcohol; that consumption has dropped since 1980. They are looking for a very different sort of buzz—drinks that pick them up, not drinks that bring them down. In today’s 24/7 world, it should not be a surprise that more and more of them are reaching for caffeine. How else will they be able to stay awake longer hours, or multitask all the time? So hold the martini and pass the Monster; it’s time to set up caffeine bars where stimulus-hungry Americans can mix and mingle around their common interest—staying awake.

  PART IX

  Lifestyle

  Long Attention Spanners

  It is conventional wisdom that America’s attention span is shrinking. A couple of decades ago, we cut our sixty-second TV ads down to thirty, and now apparently the “right” length of an Internet ad is fifteen seconds. We reduce presidential platforms to bumper stickers. We speed-date. When we insta-message our friends, we can’t even bother to spell out whole words.

  How much more ADD could America be?

  But—slow down a minute. (Yes, a whole minute.) For every Tuesdays with Morrie, there is a Tom Wolfe novel. For every frenetically animated, two-second pop-up ad on your computer screen, there is a carefully scripted thirty-minute infomercial on your TV—an industry that rakes in over $90 billion per year.

  Some people operate on a totally different wavelength. From books to movies to products to news, they want more depth, more information, real answers to more of life’s questions. They want substance, not style and flash. So while many marketers and politicians have been perfecting communications aimed at “ADD America”—packing wallops of a message into the nanoseconds they think their audience will give them—they would be wise to pay some attention to America’s “LAS,” or Long Attention Span folks, too.

  How do we know the LAS are out there?

  Let’s look at sports. Fully half a million Americans run marathons, races of 26 miles or more. Almost 200,000 try triathlons, the toughest of which are ironman triathlons—marathons plus a 2.4 mile swim plus a 112-mile bike ride. It’s not like they could just as easily win a 50-meter sprint. These are people who wrap their heads (and bodies) around something and stick with it for far, far longer than one could reasonably expect. They are in it for the long haul.

  Golf, which takes easily four hours per round and is as much a game of the head as it is of the body, has grown in the last twenty years into a $62 billion industry, well outpacing the shorter-term-gratification “amusement, gambling, and recreation” industry. The much faster moving game of tennis has been declining in interest, as more people want to slow down, take their time, and immerse themselves for long periods of time, lost in thought or sport.

  Or look at reading. Even as the average Internet page gets about sixty seconds per hit, magazines with 13,000-word, reflective articles like Atlantic Monthly have increased their readership to nearly half a million, or almost by half since 1980. Between 2002 and 2005 alone, the circulation of Foreign Affairs—truly a publication of all words and no pictures—grew 13 percent.

  The real kicker is puzzles. Apparently, 50 million Americans do crossword puzzles, which can mean anything from ten minutes to three hours of wrestling with arcane synonyms, bad puns, and your own limited spelling. Puzzle-lovers are especially found on the West and East Coasts, where we think of time as being the most hurried.

  And of course there’s Sudoku, the insanely addictive game where you have to fill in the blank squares of a grid so that each nine-cell row, column, and mini-grid contains all the numbers from 1 to 9. In 2003, practically no one had heard of Sudoku; now Sudoku books fill several shelves in most mainstream bookstores, and generate over $250 million in global sales.

  Whether it’s half a million marathoners or Atlantic Monthly readers, or 50 million crossword-puzzlers, LAS Americans are not just the Fringe Attentive. In fact, despite what you learned in marketing school, tuning in for the long haul is really quite mainstream.

  The biggest-grossing movie ever in America was Titanic, which ran for more than three hours.

  24, the TV show that took five Emmys in 2006, makes you watch a whole season just to know what happens in one day.

  Harry Potter, the most popular book series on earth, proved that not only do we love long stories, we’ll wait in lines as long as Lord Voldemort’s snake to get the next installment. Long novels, from Thomas Pynchon to James Michener, are huge sellers. Series fiction, from John Updike to Patricia Cornwell, sustains our attention for literally decades at a time.

  In fact, in 2005, the best-selling books in America were, on average, more than 100 pages longer than they had been ten years before. And even back in 1995, the average top ten seller was a hefty 385 pages!

  My favorite is political speeches. Every public speaking expert on earth will tell you that short and sweet means powerful. The Gettysburg Address, they recall (with a wistfulness that makes you think they think they were there), was under 300 words and took President Lincoln less than three minutes to deliver. But in 1995, President Clinton gave a 9,000-word State of the Union address that took seventy-six minutes to deliver—and it was both the longest and one of the most successful in history. Nearly every year, more than twice as many Americans watch the State of the Union address as watch the final game of the World Series.

  So while many politicians try endlessly to cram big thoughts into a few small words known as a sound bite, President Clinton mastered the art of issues-based campaigning. He took the issues and the voters seriously, and rather than give them just “red-meat speeches” (that, say, John Kerry was famous for), he explained issues in a thoughtful and detailed manner. Senator Hillary Clinton is this kind of politician, as was, for all his other troubles, Richard Nixon. No doubt some voters regard their speeches as boring or wonky. But candidates like that do it out of a distinct respect for people, and a belief that, as I mentioned in the Introduction, V. O. Key said fifty years ago, “the voters are not fools.”

  As I mentioned in the Introduction, Key had a profound influence on how I approach polling and the voters. He systematically studied presidential races in America and determined that each one has been decided on the basis of real, rational, and thoughtful reasons, not on the basis of who wore the better tie. His thinking is the basis for a lot of the work I do—that the rational side of people is far more powerful in many areas of life than the purely gut or emotional side. For every person who decides in a Blink, there is someone who decides only after a serious, intellectual mud-wrestle. And it is the latter type of voter who generally decides elections—the swing voters who go through a process of making real judgments, not snap ones.

  The importance of the Long Attention Span in politics should not be underestimated—America itself is a country founded on long intellectual documents embodying powerful ideas that were debated long into the night. And in most other countries, when my colleagues and I bring in American-style political advertising on issues, it handily defeats old-style song-and-rally spots.

  Finally, in the commercial world, look at some of the “upset” brand advertising like Dyson vacuums. Here a CEO painstakingly details the physics of the vacuum he invented, and sweeps market share away from the leader.

  So be careful before you accept the conventional wisdom that Americans can’t concentrate, that we are too distractable for sustained narrative, and that political office always goes to the candidate with the cleverest tag line. In fact, a sizable number of us—often the most interested key decision-makers—will listen for as long as you can talk, read for as long as you can write, and follow for as long as you are willing to explain something. Sometimes people say less not because they are such clever marketers, but because they have less to say.

  Neglected Dads

  It took fast food marketers a couple of years—and the development of $200 billion in children’s direct and indirect purchasing power—to realize that marketing to kids was a really smart way to boost sales. Ronald McDonald, you may recall, with his enormous red shoes and goofy clown face, wasn’t meant to attract the people driving the family to McDonald’s for dinner.

  That strategy worked well until the mid-1990s, when Moms started paying more attention to what their children ate. Then, despite the pleas for Happy Meals, Moms started overruling their kids on fast food. (In Britain, they call these Moms the “female handbrake”—Moms who won’t let sports-dominated satellite TV into their households.)

  The fast food industry stumbled, gauged the trend, and refocused its energy, this time on Moms—adding foods like salad that they could feel comfortable eating along with their kids. If it sounded like a lot that children influence $200 billion a year in spending, women control something like $7 trillion.

  The Mom focus reached its height at McDonald’s in 2004, with a new “McMom” initiative offering everything from an online newsletter with tips on parenting, women’s health, and nutrition, to individual McDonald’s locations featuring “Mom Corners” and “Mom parking.” In 2005, one company executive summed up the industry giant’s strategy simply as “It’s All About the Moms.”

  Indeed, the only group still hanging on to anything like that level of attention from fast food marketers is what industry analysts call the “young and hungry men”—males aged 18–34, who eat more than anybody else and are known to eat anything put in front of them. (“Supersizing” was for them, not for the Moms.)

  But before getting too comfortable with the two-pronged strategy of hurried-and-worried Moms and young-and-hungry men, the fast food industry might want to watch the emerging trends again.

  In fact, at a recent company retreat to discuss Moms, McDonald’s executives asked me what the next trend is that they should be thinking about. And I looked around at their McMom strategy paraphernalia, and said, “Dads.”

  Since the 1970s, Dads have been spending more and more time with their children. According to a 1999 University of Michigan study, in the late 1970s, the average father in a two-parent home spent about one-third as much time with his kids as the average mother. By the early 1990s, this percentage had jumped to 43 percent. By 1997, Dads living at home spent 65 percent as much time with their kids as the mothers did on weekdays, and 87 percent as much time on weekends.

  Two key trends have contributed to the rise in Dad time. First, as more women have gone out to work, they are tired when they get home and ask Dad to put the kids to bed. On Saturday, many simply say, “It’s your turn.” The second trend is the rise in divorce, which means that, more and more, kids have regular and exclusive time under Dad’s roof.

  This is serious father-child interaction time, say the researchers—which means meals. But where is the McDad initiative? Who’s targeting the volunteer coaches, who need a place to take the kids after Saturday’s practice? Who’s got the game on in the restaurant, so no one has to miss a beat while spending quality time with the kids and relieving Mom, who’s exhausted from her own full-time workweek?

  Unlike Mr. Cleaver of Leave It to Beaver, who got great respect, today’s Dad gets none. It is almost as though marketers see today’s society as an Amazon tribe, where women make all the decisions and men just go along for the ride.

  If you are a Dad actively raising your kids, and perhaps taking them to their games on the weekend or after school, you are simply ignored by today’s marketers, policymakers, and politicians. In 1996, when I helped identify Soccer Moms, it was because women with young children were playing a unique role in politics, serving as the critical swing vote. In the 2006 midterm elections, it was actually married men who did the swinging. As manufacturing jobs have disappeared, a new breed of “Office Park Dads” has become the norm—better educated, working in new kinds of jobs, and much more involved in family life. In fact, 4 million Dads today have substantial child care duties while their spouses are the chief wage-earners.

  The changing role of Dads in families has many untapped marketing implications. Billy Joel’s book on being a Dad is a runaway best-seller because it’s the one-in-a-hundred children’s book that features a Dad. Where are the Daddy-and-me books? Equally ignored are the Dads buying back-to-school clothes, or holiday presents for the kids. (Do an Internet search for “Dads buying gifts for kids,” and all you will find is sites that help kids buy gifts for Dads.)

  And, dare I say it, what about marketing household cleaners? A 2003 study from the University of California at Riverside showed that school-age children who do chores around the house with their fathers are more likely to get along with peers and have friends, and less likely to make trouble at school or become depressed. Not only that, but according to research from the “love labs” of Dr. John Gottman at the University of Washington, when men contribute more to household chores, their wives find them more attractive. (Gottman says wives interpret husbands’ domestic contributions as a sign of love and caring, and are therefore more sexually attracted to them.)

  But of the hundreds of commercials made annually for household cleaners, has any of them even targeted a man—let alone a Dad? A man’s world is a-changin’. A typical man changes more diapers than ever before, and gets less credit than ever before. And in some parts of the world, fathers are staging violent protests to get guaranteed visitation with their kids. Men are spending more time with the kids, but neither Madison Avenue nor the media has picked up on it, and the potential of Daddy-and-me relationships remains untapped.

  In the past fifty years, we have had a sea change in the power of women at work and at home, as the majority of women now work and play an increasingly important role in everything from voting to car-buying. At the same time, over the last decade or two, we have finally begun to see men adapting to the new realities of life—becoming more involved in the family, sharing responsibilities, and becoming closer to their kids either from within the nuclear family or through divorce.

  And so Dads need some marketing attention, too. I am Papa, hear me roar.

  Native Language Speakers

  One of the great, abiding myths of America is that we are a melting pot—a big, warm stew of all the ethnic and cultural differences that formerly separated us, now blended together into a smooth, supremely palatable American.

  Language, of course, was the prime example—within a generation or two, immigrants to America were expected to shed their Gaelic, Chinese, Tagalog, or Italian mother tongues for accented—and ultimately flawless—English.

  But ironically, in an era when the world’s lingua franca is overwhelmingly English, there are a skyrocketing number of people in America who not only have limited proficiency in English, but who live in households where no one speaks English very well. The U.S. Census calls these households “linguistically isolated,” and the number of people living in them has shot up in recent years—by more than 50 percent, to nearly 12 million people.

  Source: U.S. Census, 2000

  That’s about 1 in 25 households. It’s nearly the population of Guatemala.

  The total number of people in America today who speak English either “not at all” or with limited proficiency is nearly 25 million. That’s more people than live in Taiwan.

  Qué pasa?

  Of course, one reason for the surge in Non-English-Speakers in America is the surge in immigration. Since 1970, the number of immigrants living in the United States has more than tripled, from about 9 million to over 28 million. These are the highest immigration levels since the turn of the twentieth century. So it is not surprising that we would be having—as we did then—a burst of linguistic isolation, even if the new immigrants were learning English as fast as possible. (And by many accounts, they are. In 2006, 1.4 million adults were taking government-subsidized English for Speakers of Other Languages classes, and there were waiting lists in at least fourteen states.)

  But other factors suggest that the linguistic isolation numbers may not come down so fast. First, because the jobs that draw immigrants to America today, unlike in past decades, are primarily the low-skilled jobs that native-born Americans pass up, today’s immigrants come to America with less foreign language training, and less education generally, than used to be the case. Before 1970, fewer than one-third of foreign-born immigrants to America spoke English “less than very well.” In the 1990s, that proportion was over 60 percent.

  Second, the myth of dramatic improvement generation by generation doesn’t seem to be holding up. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, in over two-thirds of the households classified as linguistically isolated, the head of the household wasn’t even born in a foreign country; they were born right here in America.