Toy Story 5 carries a warning for marketers about their own screen time, says Tim Wickham

Pixar’s Toy Story 5 is ostensibly a children’s film, but its real lesson is for the adults watching, and particularly for those working in marketing, argues Tim Wickham of Pinpoint Media, which is part of PrettyGreen.

The film centres on Bonnie, the girl who owns Woody and his friends, who is given a tablet called Lilypad. Her toys spend the story competing for her attention. It is marketed as a family film about toys against technology, but Wickham says it is aimed at an audience of adults who will be scrolling again almost as soon as the credits roll.

Children mostly learn their screen habits from adults, he argues, and left alone most would still choose mud, sticks and make-believe. It is grown-ups who cannot get through a coffee without checking a device.

The average adult now spends about four hours a day on screens, Wickham says, which adds up to sixty full days a year. “Two months, gone, mostly to other people’s holiday pics and arguments between strangers.”

Attention dealers

For marketers, he writes, that figure should be especially uncomfortable. Attention is the industry’s currency, the thing it is paid to earn, keep and convert for brands, and campaigns are planned and measured around fractions of a second of it. Yet marketers are among the worst at guarding their own. “We are, professionally speaking, attention dealers who can’t stop using our own supply.”

When Woody and Buzz try to win back a distracted child, Wickham says he sees adults rather than children. “We are Bonnie.” Hobbies, books and friends across the dinner table, everything that needs patience and presence, has been losing out ever since, standing around like abandoned toys.

He praises Pixar for not making Lilypad a villain. She simply has to be effortless, as phones are. Toys need a child’s imagination, a walk requires you to raise your eyes and a conversation needs both people present, but the phone asks for nothing, which is why it always wins.

The value of boredom

Wickham recalls checking his own screen time after a long gap and having to look away. What those hours had removed, he says, was boredom. Screens are unmatched at eliminating it, which seems like progress until you remember its purpose: it is where children build worlds out of a cardboard box and adults have their best ideas.

People say their best ideas come in the shower, on a dog walk or on the drive home, he notes, and almost nobody says forty minutes into doomscrolling. “Remove the boredom gap and you lose everything that used to happen inside it.”

Agency staff create content all day and consume it all evening, Wickham says, with screens at the desk, on the commute, on the sofa and in bed, so nothing ever switches off. Scrolling feels restful because the body is still, while the mind is constantly stimulated. Then the Monday brainstorm feels like wading through wet sand. The industry tends to blame burnout on workload, but he argues it is partly because people have removed recovery from their lives and replaced it with more input.

Treating attention like a budget

Marketers sell attention while giving their own away free, he says. Every campaign is built on the premise that attention is precious, limited and worth competing for, but the industry does not apply that logic to itself. If people treated their own attention like a client’s media budget, they would never spend it the way most currently do.

In the film, the toys never attempt to outdo the tablet at its own game; they simply remind Bonnie of what she loved before it came along. Wickham suggests the same lesson applies to marketing. Capturing attention has never been the industry’s problem, he says, and the tools keep improving. What he doubts is whether marketers can keep enough of their own to produce ideas worth anyone else’s.

“That’s the real message of Toy Story 5, and it’s not aimed at the kids watching in the cinema. It’s for whoever brought them.”

Wickham is the author of Offline Adventures.