Attention Archives
It's a bit intimidating/humbling to be going for this walk in Young Noah's shoes - but as he checks in on his ancestors I'll see if I can't move the ball the least bit forward. I was mulling over what to discuss in the past few days and the one thing that has been driving me absolute batshit crazy is the David Blaine NBA ads which point out a series of problems with how corporate marketers deliver messages, and then the Paris Hilton nonsense (I live in LA so it is necessary for me to dabble in the booming craft of celebutantistm). And in the end they both speak to the same thing - which are opposite sides of the same coin - where marketers are and where consumers are and how on Earth we, as digital pros need to take heed of that if we are to bridge that gap.
But first my bit of vitriol for the genius behind the David Blaine playoff ads.
First there's the astonishing bit of me-tooism that is so obvious as to be painful. You can see the marketing meeting that took place after those brilliant Don Cheadle NFL Playoff ads aired, which began in 2002.
MARKETING DIRECTOR OF THE NFL: Did you see those ads? Did you? We need something like that.
MARKETING MANAGER OF THE NFL: On it.
Cut to some FIVE YEARS LATER (even Cheadle's later efforts of doing the NFL Ads failed to live up to his earlier brilliance) and we get David F'ing Blaine, delivering some crap message about Magic in the most tired, lame-ass monotone voice it calls to mind Tex Avery's wondrous creation Droopy. And this is important for a few reasons, the NBA ads have featured stars that that were no longer in the playoffs which when you're trying to entice viewers isn't necessarily the best strategy. The guy they select to do his best Don Cheadle, the guy they decide to give mass dollars to is David Blaine, who is so over as to not even really merit the blog inches I'm giving him. And third it shows the NBA's inability to capitalize on what was fresh in the Playoffs which was Baron Davis of the Golden State Warriors and for the moment - King James.
So point the first - the corporate marketer can be SLOW, LATE and OUT OF TOUCH.
Now Paris. Believe me I don't really deal with the Hilton bit too much. I once was in a bar with her and her sister Nikki at about the time her 15 minutes began and I literally felt my brain being sucked out of my head. But it doesn't matter what I think, it doesn't matter what you think- Paris coverage is off-the-hook. The madness outside of her home when she was under house-arrest for the day was a media orgy totally out-of-sync with the actual course of events. (A young woman got a DUI and then violated her probation). A panel was convened to discuss the whole matter on Larry King Live, and the news of her court date and re-incarceration were trumpeted on news crawls. And what does this say about our culture - that Paris is where it's at. The nexis of Celebrity, Money, Fame with not simply very little but actually ZERO substance behind it.
So here we have the very nearly opposite of the corporate marketer. The consumer is hyper-aware mercurial, and wholly interested in flash for flash' sake.
It's not quite as tidy an equation as I'd like but this is blogging so forgive if it is not perfectly thought out. We as professionals interested in delivering messages that resonate sit squarely in the middle - it is our challenge to get the marketer up to speed and not creating me-too campaigns 5 years too late and to interest the consumer in more than the pretty pictures and the viral vid du jour but something with a little teeth behind it.
The first bit - dealing with the client is the easier of the two, but ignoring where their head is at while we blog, twitter, and flickr ourselves to death would be unwise.
And the second bit, the Paris thing, is more a state-of-the union in that her incarceration really is what the peeps seem to be fixated on. How do you deliver a message of any heft when the person you're talking to has shown themselves either constitutionally incapable or philosophically disinclined?
-Todd
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New tools turn your attention into media.
I've been trying to write intelligently about the idea of 'data-blogging' for a while, but haven't been able to articulate it all that well up to this point. In "Blog Everything", I wrote "as a result of digital technology and the metadata it creates, we are able to share parts of our lives in much more fluid ways." I then proceeded to go into the example of exposing your Netflix queue to your friends and the social implications of the whole thing.
Disregarding the social stuff for the moment, the bigger point is that we now have tools to broadcast our attention. As a result, attention is now media.
If you visit my homepage, you'll see the Sidenotes in the right-hand column. That is an ever-changing list of links I find interesting. In my mind, the Sidenotes are an equal member of this site with my original entries. As I wrote a while back, "I decided to add the links as content because I believe that's just what they are: Content. What I tend to do here is annotate/comment on other media. I read things and link to them with my own thoughts and opinions. While that's not the entirety of the site, it is probably the majority. So with that in mind, why should the links themselves not be given equal real estate?"
Essentially the Sidenotes are a running log of what websites I'm paying attention to. They are a peak into my mind and can spur conversation. In a similar way, I am broadcasting my movies to friends through Netflix, my music through last.fm and my clickstream through Root.
One of the things I feel like I'm always quoting here is Kottke's 2005 entry on "The fundamental unit of the web". In it he writes that the web is shrinking: From sites, to pages, posts/permalinks and finally to links. To me, single bits of attention data is the obvious next step (is attentron the appropriate term Seth?).
All it took to turn millions of people into bloggers was a simple interface for posting to the web. Who is to say that Netflix and last.fm aren't the same thing? Both allow you to broadcast yourself to the world. But even more than that, all these tools cut down the levels of mediation between people. Blogs are so revolutionary because it's a fairly unfiltered look at people. Linklogs are even less filtered because they contain the ideas behind the ideas. Now imagine if I exposed every click to you, now you know the path behind the ideas that make the ideas (sorry for that).
I guess the question is do you want all that? It's fun to spy on your friends movie-watching habits, but how deep to you really need to go? (I really don't know the answer to this, need to give it more though.)
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What are the ethical and social ramifications of blogging?
The other day Michael asked a question that relates closely to something I've been noodling on for a while: "Is it ethical to blog about something that you find through a link from a contact inside your network?"
Personally I believe the answer is yes, mainly because I see posting your links to del.icio.us as another form of blogging. But putting aside the ethical issues, for a moment, it seems we are at an interesting time in the development of self expression. Mainly, it is now possible to express yourself via your implicit gestures instead of just your explicit ones.
I know that sounds strange, and I have to admit, I don't have this idea fully baked. But basically as a result of digital technology and the metadata it creates, we are able to share parts of our lives in much more fluid ways and that brings up a whole lot of unknowns when it comes to social interaction.
How about a concrete example? Netflix allows you to add friends, when you do so you expose your queue and watched movies list to them. For the first time (maybe ever) I can keep up with what my friends are up to without any conversations. While they had to approve our 'friendship,' after that there's no additional work or reminders that all your actions on the site are being recorded and exposed to your friends. In a way it allows us to 'converse' without the conversation.
In the not-too-distant future, we will be able to 'blog' much of our world: Our phones will be able to record our locations and upload them and our televisions will record all our shows and make recommendations.
I'm kind of out of it and having trouble formulating a conclusion. So how about I leave that up to you.
[CONCLUSION GOES HERE]
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For me the pros of exposure outweigh the cons.
So privacy's dead. What now?
Control. It's time for us to take it back.
Everyone is spying on us, so why shouldn't we start spying on ourselves? At least that way we can use that data to our own ends.
last.fm gives you recommendations based on your musical tastes. Google is recording your searches with the eventual goal of giving you your own search engine. By making your bookmarks public, del.icio.us makes them a lot more powerful. These are all attention based systems that give us value through exposure.
But you want to know the most powerful attention system out there?
Let me give you a hint: You're looking at it. Nothing paints a better picture of my identity and the things I pay attention to than my blog.
While there are dangers in exposing myself to the world, I've made the decision that the benefits are even bigger:
- I control my identity. Search for Noah Brier on Google and I'm number one. That means when someone's looking for me they find the me that I want them to see. That's big.
- I connect with likeminds. I wouldn't have met all the great people I've met in the last 6 months had it not been for my willingness to expose myself and my thoughts to the world. The possibilities of these relationships are endless.
- I create searchable thoughts. I know for a fact that I use the search box on this site more than the rest of you combined. Since I wrote everything, I'm able to go back and dig up something I was thinking about 6 months ago. Sure, Google's search might be powerful for the masses, but it can't shake a stick at my own search for me.
Bottom line is this: Instead of false privacy I've chosen controlled exposure. And you know what? I'm having a damn good time with it.
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Because so many fewer people are listening to lesser-known bands, you can gain a whole lot more insight into their tastes from the knowledge.
Yesterday morning I realized something that had been floating around in my mind for a while: Niche choices provide a whole lot more insight than mass ones.
I was playing with last.fm's similar artist radio. The basic premise is you put in an artist name and it plays you comparable music based on the data they've collected from users. Thing is, the similar artist player spits back terrible results if you put in an artist like Coldplay. That's because for a band that popular, similarities in people's other tastes don't necessarily mean similar sound. The pool is too diluted.
That makes perfect sense logically, but for whatever reason yesterday morning it struck me as incredibly important. When I put in the Guther, the system returned some very accurate similarities as well as some interesting, but good, deviations. That's because for an artist like Guther, who very few people listen to, the other artists people listen to are more meaningful.
None of this is to take anything away from popular bands like Coldplay, I actually like them quite a bit. Instead, it's just to make the point that when a person makes a conscious decision to consume something niche it says much more about their taste than a mass artist/movie/etc.
Let's try it another way: Imagine going into a room and asking everyone who's visited Yahoo! to raise their hand. Everyone in the room would have their arm in the air I assume. Now ask who's visited NoahBrier.com. Pretend one other person raises their hand. (Come on . . . use your imagination here!) The odds that you have something to talk about with that one other person in the room is far higher than you having something to talk about with everyone in the room.
I think this explains two important pieces of this 2.0volution, specifically as it moves outwards towards the general, more diverse, public:
- The best recommendations come from niche choices.
- In order to compare niche choices effectively you must have scale.
What's scary about that statement, is that it seems like as soon as these things go mass they will no longer be useful. That may be true for something like 'similar artist radio' for Coldplay. However, what a system like last.fm can do to get over that issue is look at your entire library and compare from there. Thus their other feature, 'recommendation radio', is even better. By looking at everything you listen to and comparing it to everything everyone else listens to, you get some pretty insightful picks.
None of this is new, Amazon's been doing it for years with their 'people who bought this bought that,' but it's still a really big deal.
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There's a huge group of people out there that are creating content without even thinking about it.
All we hear is how small is the new big. Here's the truth: It's not.
Small is still the same old small. It's just more scalable than ever. Data's cheap and so is computing power. It's easier than ever to deliver customization and personalization.
The tides have shifted, we are in control.
People are dreaming "of talking directly to a business and sharing my personal data; where I am valued for this and rewarded with tailored/cutsomized services that design out assumptions and waste. And they are rewarded with my attention."
Scale used to dictate that everything must be equal, all products the same. It's not the case any longer.
The internet is redefining things. People are not content to have their world defined for them.
Not all of us feel this way. 80% are content to consume. We know what they want.
1% are content to be superusers. They create for creation's sake.
19% are stuck in the middle. They are passively active.
They are constantly passively creating content. They might not think of it that way, but the metadata footprint they leave is their blog. They have friends on Myspace and favorite videos on YouTube. They share pictures and post on forums.
Screw the 'consumer generated content' the advertising industry has declared. This one's the real deal. Millions of people are leaving their number and waiting for a call.
It's not about slapping ads on things, it's about thinking small and letting go.
Give me what I want and you'll be richly rewarded.
Update (9/8/06): Brad Feld on the other 19%.
Update (9/11/06): Organic on the 'new influencer.'
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When you pull the curtain away you start to realize that we're the ones running the show.
I'm going to expose some big things here, so be prepared.
- Journalists are just regular people who write for a magazine.
- Advertisers are just regular people who work in the advertising industry.
- Superstars are just regular people who get a lot of attention.
That's right ladies and gentlemen, it's all a sham. The media industry is filled with regular people. When you look behind the curtain, the wizard is actually us.
For a long time what these people had going for them was distribution. Not anymore.
We've all got it now.
People don't go to MySpace for MySpace, they go for MY space. We are all creators and our creation is our lives. As we become more aware of how the world functions, of how businesses operate, of how textiles are produced, our consumption choices become a kind of production of their own.
Best of all, it's happening right now.
"Teens are extremely socially aware, but favour participation through their consumption choices, because they believe corporations are more effective agents of change than governments."
"Perhaps the first lesson of the brand underground is not that savvy young people will stop buying symbols of rebellion. It is that they have figured out that they can sell those symbols, too."
We're all in the game now. We've just got to accept that we're all acting on the same stage. It's all about self-awareness. Reality television, for all its shortcomings, has shown us that we're all players. The internet has exposed the inner workings of our brain.
When you step back and look at the landscape from above, you start to realize that it's all shaped by people just like you.
Update (8/8/06): Got rid of a Shakespeare quote I took completely out of context (which Jeff corrected me on).
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If it's not money that's driving the web, what is it?
I want to talk about attention. More and more lately I've been thinking about it as the primary driver of people's actions on the web. But when you think about it in a larger context, it's really at the center of what much of the population does off the web as well. Think about it, how many people want to be famous? What's fame? A whole lot of attention.
The vast majority of the world don't get paid to contribute to culture, they do it for free. That's why artists starve and actors wait tables. The light at the end of the tunnel is never just fortune, it's always paired with fame. People want to be noticed and that's the bottom line.
As I understand much of traditional economic theory is based on the idea that people are completely rational beings, but if that's the case, why is attention so valuable? Sure, sometimes you can convert attention into profit (think infomercials), but what about all the people that just do stuff to get on TV. Come on, you know the guy, the one who stands behind the newscaster making funny faces so that maybe, by some stroke of crazy luck, one of his friends is watching.
We're not rational in any way, television did a good job breaking that. But now, with all these people on the web, it's becoming all the more apparent. There are millions of people adding content to the web with no apparent goal in sight. My writing here is not a profitable endeavor. I have to pay for my hosting and, assuming my time has some value, waste my time. The result is a site that I hope will attract interesting people. I want attention.
Sure, down the road I may have a hair-brained scheme to turn that attention into profit by using this site as a springboard, but the fact is that most of us don't even do it for that. We do it because we like being a part of something. We want attention. We want to feel connected. We want to meet people of likemind. In fact, most of these things are probably worth more than money to a lot of people.
So the big question is, what happens when the non-web world catches on? If the web economy is made up of things like attention and trust, what happens when, like most trends nowadays, it exits the digital realm and enters 'real life'?
Anyone??????
Update (7/26/06): Just ran across this Anil Dash entry about the current Digg vs. Netscape feud and why people contribute content.
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Trying to answer the question: "What happens when media producers outnumber consumers?"
I got this really good question from Michael Fergusson in response to a February, 2006 entry of mine titled Capturing Attention. Michael asked, "What do you think it will mean, when/if the volume of content being produced nears, or even outpaces the volume of content being consumed?"
I guess the first question I have in return is how do you define consumed? Is a personal diary written and hidden away ever consumed? In a way isn't the production process in that case also the consumption process? If you are creating something for yourself than you are the consumer. While that answer at first seems like a cop-out, I think it gets at an important point. Mainly that in most circumstances the size of an audience is irrelevant to the producer.
Don't get me wrong, I'd write differently if I didn't think there was anyone out there reading this, but I'm not sure how much differently. A movie director creates the same movie for an audience of one as he does for an audience of one million. The size of an audience doesn't really matter all that much until economics enters the equation. When that director has to pay for his film all of a sudden the number of people that showed up at the theatre becomes a whole lot more important.
With the internet, however, those economics have changed drastically. I have taken a no advertising stance on this website. That's because I can afford the upkeep on my own. Because of that, the size of the audience of this site (which is quite small), really only matters to my ego. If no one reads an entry I write I will probably never know. That's alright with me. Occasionally I get really great comments/questions that affirm my work here and fuel my intellectual fire. More often, though, that fuel is from within: I write this site because it's good for me as a writer, as a thinker and as a marketer.
None of this is to discount the question, just to put a different spin on it. I think the real question your asking is about information overload. How do we deal with an increasing onslaught of information coming at us from every direction?
In the future, I think this is going to be helped along by the filters. Tools will develop, like some of those around AttentionTrust that will help us spend our attention more wisely. They will look at what we like and what we don't like, compare it to the likes/dislikes of those with similar interests and make recommendations.
Check out my post What's Next? where I specially address this issue as it relates to the newly created glut of consumer generated advertising. I compare it to blogging, where we're discovering the it's tougher and tougher to separate the signal from the noise. (As a side-note, it's important to remember that one man's noise is another man's signal.)
In that article I conclude that, "The branding opportunities of the future lie in the filtering and repackaging of content. Companies that figure out how to actually help people spend their attention more effectively will be richly rewarded. Think about it, less and less onus is being placed on who created the content, while more and more is placed on where you found it. Just ask YouTube: It's a destination, a repackager of content. Part of their magic is that they allow anyone to put a YouTube video on their own site. As a result their branding seed is spread far and wide."
Hopefully my answer didn't sidestep the question to much. Thanks for the interesting comment. Also, as a request, everyone out there, please comment. It's nice to hear (or read) someone else's voice here on occasion.
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Some of the most interesting 'attention services' out there are the ones no one would ever label as such.
This week Nike and Apple announced a very cool partnership. If you buy Nike+iPod Sport Kit you can make your shoes and MP3 player talk to each other. Basically what happens is you put a sensor in your Nike+ shoes and attach a special device to your iPod nano and you can track your distance, speed and all that good stuff. The really cool part comes when you get home and plug your iPod in, which downloads all your data to the Nike+ site where you can track your progress. Here's some screenshots:
After my initial 'wow' reaction, I got to thinking about this as a kind of attention data. Essentially what Nike and Apple are doing is allowing you to capture some of your data and layering services on top of it. The value is immediate: You get to examine data that would otherwise be difficult to record, which gets me to the more geeky side of attention (I say that with the utmost respect).
I really believe these kind of services have to be leveraged as models. What better companies are there to help understand what the mass consumer wants than Nike and Apple? Both are leaders and innovators in their industries who have reached their place of power by making an active effort to understand their customers. As Ed Batista wrote just today on the AttentionTrust blog: "I've heard Felix Miller, CEO of Last.fm, describe his enterprise as an 'attention service' running on 'attention data,' and I think it's important to use those terms, to make the connection between our attention and all of these new services--not just music discovery systems, of course--explicit and crystal-clear."
With that said, what are some other 'attention services' that we might not otherwise label as such?
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Hi, I'm 