Dopamine hunters: Why 30 per cent of agency, media set are likely neurodivergent, how mobiles really hurt deep thinking and hot consumer segments overlooked

What happens when you get a neurodivergent, a dopamine dissident and a socio demographic myth buster riding the boundaries of the media and marketing business on the mics together? We’ve done just that after The Media Federation’s (MFA) recent annual conference produced an eclectic mix of keynotes and speakers - the conversation and data should challenge long-held assumptions about what makes us tick as marketers, people and consumers.

Firstly, some busted myths: Gen Z can’t get on the property ladder? Actually 40 per cent of under 30s in Australia own their own house, per Slingshot Media’s Flo Gleeson-Cook’s data deep dive, which means banks may be doing their media targeting all wrong. Luxury brands should target those with money in Sydney’s Eastern suburbs? Wrong. Sydney’s “westies” have more ready cash to spend and less debt. Meanwhile, personal care brands targeting women are missing 40 per cent of their market - blokes. Sephora and Mecca take note. But there were some myths Gleeson-Cook couldn’t bust – MAFS’ audience skew being one.

OMD strategy chief Rob Frost didn’t get diagnosed with ADHD and autism until he was 33. Before then he’d been exhausted trying to keep up with social norms – preparing for social conversations in the shower, writing down jokes on his phone, telling himself in major pitches to focus on what people were saying so hard that he hadn’t taken in a word being said. Now he’s harnessing divergence – and bringing it to work. “There’s a Harvard Business Review study that shows that teams are 30 per cent more productive when they're neurodiverse,” per Frost.

But it’s also critical for bosses to create environments for neurodiverse people to thrive – creative, breakthrough thinking can surge but they are way more likely to die early. “If you have ADHD, you are significantly more likely to die of suicide, to end up in prison,” says Frost. “Your life expectancy is lower than someone who smokes 20 cigarettes a day for their whole life … because your brain is constantly searching and striving and trying to find that element that gets you that little dopamine hit and that little reward.”

Hearts & Science’s Peita Pacey reckons the media industry with its need for creative and lateral thinking is close to 30 per cent neurodiverse, which is why “trying to fit everyone into one box” in terms of working patterns is “a really terrible idea”.

But she got a muffled, collective groan from MFA’s heaving younger contingent when she suggested as little as 30 minutes a day of scrolling short form video on social media has the same negative physical impacts as three glasses of alcohol. The average Australian under 40 is now using their phone 7 hours a day, she said, creating massive cortisol and dopamine spikes, increasing heart rates and creating “basically a hot mess that is aging us significantly”.

But Pacey says phone addiction is a problem for business leaders as it is for the rank and file, because our brains are trained to be constantly reactive to the latest ping, rather than fresh thinking.

“If your brain is being trained to be reactive, that means that all you're using is your experience and what you've done before. You're not actually generating new ideas. You're not being expansive in your thinking,” says Pacey.

“And of course, these people are the ones who are most connected to their phones, because the expectation is that you're available at all times.”

But she says there is a solution to “stopping the brain rot”: Just don’t look at your phone for the first hour of every day. “That hour period regulates your dopamine system for the next 24 hours.”

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