LATEST ENTRY

ATTENTION | Noah Brier

What's the Big Deal about Attention?

Attention is a hot topic on the net these days. But after giving it a fair amont of thought, I'm not quite sure what the big deal is.

November 20, 2005 | RSS | EMAIL | PRINT | 5 COMMENTS

In response to my "Unbundled Opoportunities" post, Joshua Porter asked, "what does attention have to do with it?" When Joshua says "attention," he's referring to it in terms of AttentionTrust, who's mission is to give people back their attention data. Basically the idea is that whenever you visit a site your giving your attention in the form of metadata. When you're on Amazon they know what you click on, what you've bought, and so on. They use that information to make recommendations for you. Google has different kinds of information and so does Netflix. Those who believe in AttentionTrust believe that you should have all that metadata and that in the future it will have value to marketers who want to understand you better. (For those in the know, please critique that description, it's how I understand. Here's Joshua's description to compare it to.)

Anyway, when Joshua made the comment, he was asking specifically what the role of attention is in terms of unbundled media. After spending a lot of time thinking about it, I think I have more questions than answers, but I want to at least try to get my thoughts down on paper (or blog as the case may be).

Question #1: What about the aggregators?

As I understand it, there's currently an implicit agreement between aggregators (including your average television station) and consumers saying, "you give me content or services I want in exchange for my attention." A media company pays to make that 30-minute show because they know that they can sell portions of your attention to advertisers. An RSS aggregator like Bloglines offers you the service of bringing together your multiple feeds in one place in exchange for the fact that they know everything you read (disregard the fact that they don't sell ads at the moment). I'm pretty sure this is understood by AttentionTrust, being that one of the three points in their mission is to, "Educate people about the value of their attention and the existence of "attention data". However, it's important to point out that the idea of "attention" is not entirely new.

Question #2: So where's the value?

So now that we've established that attention data exists already, the real difference between AttentionTrust (from now on to be referred to as AT) and the status quo is that AT wants to return that data to it's rightful owners: US! But my big issue here is that once attention data's been removed from a context, doesn't it lose a great deal of value? I mean, yeah it's great that I know that you visit XYZ.com, XZZ.com and ZZZ.com, but if you're trying to convince me to buy that data, then you better tell me how I can make money off it and right now, just knowing that doesn't really help. Yes, it is great if I want to spend the money to talk to you one-to-one (and I will discuss these possibilities a bit later), but other than that where's the value? I still don't know when to put the message in front of you. Unless I put it together en-masse, where's the value to marketers? And if I do combine it with the attention data of others, what makes it any different than market research? (Not to say market research isn't incredibly valuable, but if AT is pushing glorified market research, then there's a whole lot of hubbub over nothing.)

With all that said, there are possibilities . . .

Idea #1: One-to-One

This seems like the biggest opportunity, you sell me your attention data and I know just what to give you to sample. Whether it's a new website, or product, I can understand you well enough to put something in front of you that you'll actually appreciate.

Other than that, at the moment I'm having trouble envisioning how AT could really change the world. Yeah I would like to own my attention metadata and know everywhere I go and everything I do on the net. And yes, I could sell that data to a company in exchange for some services, but I don't completely see how this is flipping the model we currently have on its head. I mean, they'd be able to build one hell of an application and I'd spend a lot of time there and they'd know a lot about me, but so does Bloglines . . . Of course, I could just be missing something obvious, but what's so revolutionary about this?

Update (11/19/05): Right after writing this, I read this entry by a brand planner about inverting the marketing funnel. In it he suggests that the funnel may have moved from "awareness - familiarity - attitude - action" to "intrigue (among a small group) - co-option - investigation - consideration/opinion - publicity". Thinking about attention in that context, attention makes a lot of sense to marketers as a way to identify opinion makers (the "small group") and hit them with free product. Just an idea.

Update (11/20/05): Alright, so I did some more AttentionTrust homework and am starting to get my head around it I think. I started with Seth Goldstein's entry, "Media Futures: From Theory to Practice", which explains how AttentionTrust and ROOT Markets came to be and followed that up with "Following the Lead to a More Transparent Future" over at ClickZ. One clarification I've gotten is that AttentionTrust is about lead generation. It's about delivering qualified customers to companies. As I understand it, in some way it makes advertising a bit irrelevant by connecting customers directly with companies (of course those companies still need to close the sale). What's more, from Peter Caputa's comments on a Jason Calcanis entry on Attention, I began to better understand some of the benefits that can be offered to publishers:

If it squeezes "traditional publishers" or "blog publishers that have adopted traditional business models", so be it. But, what Seth points out, is that this is a huge opportunity for publishers too. If the ad serving technology on engadget could be customized based on the visitor's wish list or what products they've browsed on amazon.com, and the ad would be more likely to result in a sale or a lead that makes engadget $20. Now, if that happens 5 times per thousand impression, you've made a bit more than you are making now.

PREVIOUS ENTRY | NEXT ENTRY

LEAVE A COMMENT

First name, first and last, whatever you feel like.

Required, but not displayed (so don't worry about spam).

If you've got one, flaunt it.

You can use some HTML (a's, br's, p's, oh my!) if you'd like, if you don't know what that means, don't worry about it.
REMEMBER ME?

COMMENTS

1Kyle Bunch

Noah--

Have you read this article by Seth Goldstein? (http://majestic.typepad.com/seth/2005/11/media_futures_t.html)

Or read about his new venture, Root.net ?

That article especially has a lot more food for thought on Attention and its potential values/applications in the future of digital media. You should definitely give it read if you're trying to wrap your head around all of this--I know it helped make sense of it for me.

November 20, 2005

2Noah Brier

I haven't read the article, but have checked out Root.net. I'll look into the links and see if it answers any of these questions for me. Thanks a lot Kyle.

November 21, 2005

3Joshua Porter

Noah, thanks for pushing further on this. I'm trying to wrap my head around it too...

Your questions are great. I think the answer to the first one is that there is only one authority about what we pay attention to: US. Aggregators of all sorts, websites, individual companies, all these things will try to gather a store of our attention metadata, but really the only authority is us. This includes our online behavior, our shopping behavior, our conversations, our contacts, etc...etc...etc... Nobody else will ever be able to provide a richer detail of our attention than we will.

The second question is the most difficult, I think. This is the big question! And I think your idea is certainly one possible route. I would definitely give my attention metadata to one of a couple of companies that I actually want to succeed, or rather a company that makes it worth my while.

One big issue I see is false metadata. Imagine how people could create false attention metadata and sell it as real...lots of real issues with this.

Also, just as I got you thinking you got me thinking. I wrote a post after reading yours: goes live tomorrow morning on bokardo.com: Attention, Buying a Car, and Control

Cheers, josh

November 21, 2005

4peter caputa

Noah. Great questions and comments.

One point of clarification before I hit the hay: AttentionTrust is about championing the rights of consumers to own and control the data they create as they use the web. Right now, they have created the Attention Extension which records what sites you visit, which they call a clickstream.

/Root Markets has launched tools to let you analyze your clickstream. Right now, they have some tools that allow you to view your clickstream, analyze which sites you visit most frequently, and categorize the sites you visit into topics/categories. (They use dmoz categories.) They will be expanding the functionality of that based on use and feedback. So, if you have ideas, blog them. I've already shared some ideas with them through email. And are quite excited about what's coming.

/Root Markets also plans to enter the lead generation business in a big way. They have a multi pronged approach on that front. A noteable and public piece is that they bought leadfilter, which is an exchange for publishers that generate and sell leads and advertisers that buy leads.

Down the road, /Root Markets will create ways for us to use our attention data to better match offers to us. I am not sure exactly what they plan to build. But, that's the idea.

But, it is very important to note that /Root Markets is a company that is using the AttentionTrust data, assuming you opt in to share it with them. And that Attentiontrust data is available for any company or individual that wants to use it. I have a bunch of ideas for what clickstream data could be used for. And the kind of applications that could be built on top of that data. Clickstream data could be used to personalize search results. Could be used to personalize the home page of my newspaper. It could be used to improve my shopping experience at amazon.com or to suggest other articles that I'd probably like to read. It could be used to tell me other music that I'd like to listen to. It really could be used for a lot of things. And that is really up to the creativity and ingenuity of the developer community. And the rest of us to share ideas and adopt applications and services that leverage our data.

The important part now is that we get a critical mass of people to download the Attention Extension. And if they want, share the data with /Root Vaults. With a critical mass of people sharing their attention data, development activity will begin to happen in other organizations. And /Root Markets will have larger motivation to build applications that leverage our attention data.

November 21, 2005

5Greg Linden

Hi, Noah. If you're wondering how attention data might be able to help people, I think Eric Horvitz at MS Research has a pretty nice vision. The NYT had a pretty good writeup on his work; here's my post talking about it:

http://glinden.blogspot.com/2005/10/attention-and-life-hacking.html

However, I'm also unclear on whether Attention XML is necessary to make this future happen. Some thoughts on that at

http://glinden.blogspot.com/2005/04/attention-xml-and-finding-relevance.html

November 21, 2005