The Attention Economy
At no point in time has your attention been in such high demand as today. Throughout human history, the commodification of one’s attention has always been a reality in some regard, such as the nature of advertising. But the rise of the information age leaves us with entirely new possibilities, and over the last decade, it’s become the norm in business. As data become companies’ main source of revenue, the primary mechanism in this whole ordeal is the little personal media center you carry in your pocket.
Pioneered largely by our modern tech giants, in theory, it’s incredibly difficult to compete with advertising through a device billions of people carry around with them on a daily basis. When we first picked them up, none of us ever realized the extent to which smartphones would permeate our lives, but we’ve now become accustomed to the constant stream of white noise fed through them. But that’s the catch: Digital Marketing experts estimate that most Americans are exposed to around 4,000 to 10,000 advertisements each day. If you’re like most people, you won’t remember even a fraction of those, let alone register you’re being exposed to an advertisement in the first place. Collectively, we’ve developed an ability to filter out the noise coming our way. In reality, it’s in our own best interest. If we were actually to register the sheer amount of information coming our way at any given time, our own ability to function on a daily basis would be severely impacted.
The secret, then, isn’t much of a secret. What’s lacking in the grand scheme of advertising are the genuine experiences we seem to have lost in the numbers game. The good news is that there isn’t any complex formula or practice for breaking out of that. Getting through to someone is as simple as playing by a different set of rules and taking a more thoughtful approach. Brand experience takes a once passive viewer and an unremarkable ad and turns that into an interactive way of communicating a company’s core message. The future is thoughtful.
Contributors: Written by Alex LaBossiere-Barrera, Illustration by Amanda Song