In shorter supply than either fossil fuel or ozone,
attention -- our cognitive ability to focus on information -- is being
squandered, even stolen, everyday by desperate marketers, their bad advertising,
unrelenting spam, and old imposition models.
The most recent
report by leading IT media, research, and exposition company IDG shows
that the Internet has now passed TV and print media in hours of attention
consumed. Users polled exceeded 32 hours online per week compared to 16
for television and 4 for print. This is good news for the
world of online media, but we are approaching a critical "jump point" in the
power balance between producer and consumer.
As marketers and advertisers hungrily explore ways to monetize
online attention, they face mounting challenges. Consumers have migrated online
precisely because they want more control over the media they consume. The
old bargain -- content for attention -- is broken. Empowered viewers now
reject TV’s standard promise of 22 minutes of content in exchange for eight
minutes of brain-dead ads. With place- and time-shifting technology at
their disposal, viewers, listeners, and readers do not want, nor need they endure,
advertisements. As a result, online ads, be they behavioral, contextual,
or declarative data-based, are all falling short. Give consumers the
choice, and they would rather get information from a trusted friend or
expert. This is giving the old Hollywood/Madison
Avenue nexus fits. The ROI on a dollar of integrated
advertising today, even when measurable, is dismal.
Worse yet, the information-overwhelmed prey are getting
restless, even hostile. And for good reason. In many ways, unwanted
interruption-based advertising is nothing short of a misdemeanor. Run an
absurdly out-of-place banner ad over my page views, or punctuate my ballgame
with, say, a feminine hygiene product spot, and I feel violated. You have wasted
my attention, pilfering precious time and focus I could have reserved for dearer
claims on my bandwidth, such as my family and friends. Simply put:
Attention theft is a crime.
People like Michael Goldhaber have been writing about the Attention
Economy for ten years. The very idea of an economy implies an
exchange of value for value. It is not clear at this point what
advertisers need to do to sweeten the attention bargain, but the current jig is
up.
The global resistance movement is gaining steam, and, since
the publication last week of my new book, Jump
Point: How Network Culture is Revolutionizing Business, I have become an
inconvenient truth-teller shedding light on the mounting consumer
backlash. There are many efforts feeding the energy.
Over at my alma mater, Boston University,
Professor
Marshall Van Alstyne has advocated “attention bonds,” whereby emailers
would post bonds on the promise not to waste a recipient’s time and attention with
unwanted spam. At AttentionTrust.org, they are
proposing an attention management utility that gives the user control over the
deluge. Globally, we should pay heed to efforts in São Paolo, where all
outdoor advertising has been banned as a blight on the landscape; or in Germany, where
the "Informationelle Selbstbestimmung" (literally, Information
Self-Determination) campaign has already resulted in national consumer-rights
legislation. And, I suspect that SEO (search engine optimization) is next up in the cross-hairs, with
practices like link farms, keyword stuffing, cloaking, and automated content
generators and duplicators getting more consumer fraud scrutiny.
I am sure you'll want to debate me on this: Get in
line. But first consider the following manifesto I am offering for the
movement. Hard to disagree with these simple dignities:
I am the sole owner of my attention.
I have a right to compensation for my attention, value for value.
Demands on my attention shall be transparent.
I have a right to decide what information I want. And don’t want.
I own my click stream and all other representations of my attention.
My email box is an extension of my person. No one has an intrinsic right
to send me mail.
Attention theft is a crime.
— Tom Hayes advises companies and executives on marketing in
the networked economy and is the author of the new book, Jump Point: How
Network Culture is Revolutionizing Business (McGraw-Hill).
Interesting that you bring up the seesaw-like relationship of power between producer and consumer; that model is only one way of looking at a capitalist market economy (and perhaps a rather dull way at that, it assumes competition rather than collaboration as well as simplifying a rather complex system into something more measurable than it may actually be). Supply and demand economic theory has trouble talking about 'value', because it is something so qualitative and dynamic and fluid. To what extent is attention taken wrongfully from the consumer? To what extent do ads online negatively affect the consumer? To what extent do they enhance a consumer's life? 'Attention' itself is difficult to define. I find ads online less of a disturbance than commercials on TV and easier to ignore. 'Attention' as a commodity is even harder to define the boundaries of than intellectual property. I agree that attention as a commodity and as property is very interesting, as it can not simply be measured in terms of time. It is a property of human beings not measured by time, but then again how else in what other units are we to measure attention?
How awake we are varies and so does the value of our attention. When we are very inattentive, dreaming, musing does that lessen the value of our attention, the degree to which interfering with it is a crime? Or is it that wrenching return to reality from a dreamlike state that is the greatest invasion and theft? Brings in many interesting questions about consciousness and to what extent we have a responsibility to be "awake" all the time. Do we have an alertness obligation? Do we have a passion obligation as per the Dead Poet's Society quote below?
"We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for."
- Dead Poet's Society
Probably such obligations are only to ourselves, and quite variable from person to person and day to day.
The notion of Zombies enters in here, see the graphic below. The idea of beings that appear to be sentient but really aren't seems much more possible in the world of today! Not sure we need to protect and defend the attention of Zombies!
Thanks to Nikki Olson for helping with this comment.
Hi Tom. Greetings from Bangkok where I have just arrived en route to Nepal! I find your approach novel and thought provoking, providing a fresh new vantage point for analysis which cannot be equated with privacy or other previous concepts.
But life is not as simple as you state. If no one you have not approved has the right to send you mail, how are you going to make new friends, new business contacts? You become the most uniquely disadvantaged man on all the planet, a digital hermit, if you really succeed in making that happen!
I also wonder if we should not consider how often our real state is not attention, but inattention, and maybe it is the rude jerking us back to attention, destroying our reverie, that we should resent most of all.
Sustained attention willingly given is unusual. I remember observing it once: In 1994 I flew to Australia to attend a medical meeting in Hobart on the island of Tasmania for just 36 hours and then returned home to Edmonton. It is a long story why I did that but it made sense at the time. On the overseas flight back in business class I witnessed a corporate CEO writing business plans in long hand the whole time we were in the air. I often wondered if the company later failed and his writing was like the nonsensical continuous scribbling of Victor Hugo's deranged daughter in the movie Estelle. Or did he actually save the company with all that writing he was putting so much effort into in the rarified atmosphere of the plane? Either way he was devoting wrapped attention to a single task for the whole duration of the flight, something no one else does in an aircraft.
I am reminded of this again as I write this on an aircraft, intermittently, flying from LA to Bangkok.
When broadband Internet is present in every plane, then we will truly see the effect of low cabin oxygen on intellectual productivity and creativity. I cannot recall many really insightful unique thoughts coming to me first on a plane (much of this comment way was prepared on the ground) whereas I can remember that happening many times in tropical locations on the ground where lush greenery all around me was pumping out the oxygen!
I agree against advertising for the same and other reasons - see my post in the "Under the Influence: Targeting the Engaged Consumer" thread, "Maybe look at a future without advertising?"
I am pleased to see someone claim our rights back in such a forthright way (dealing with Attention.) I have a similar point of view concerning our Personal Information.
Tom Hayes said:
I am the sole owner of my attention.
I have a right to compensation for my attention, value for value.
Demands on my attention shall be transparent.
I have a right to decide what information I want. And don’t want.
I own my click stream and all other representations of my attention.
My email box is an extension of my person. No one has an intrinsic right
to send me mail.
Attention theft is a crime.
Following Mr. Hayes, I say:
I am the sole owner of information about me, my preferences, my affiliations.
I have a right to compensation for the use of data about me, value for value. Meaning I (and everyone else) deserve to get a $check in the mail when our data points are used in mass-marketing operations.
Use of information about me shall be transparent.
I have a right to decide what information about me may and may not be used by third parties. You need my consent, yes you do.
There's only an illegitimate philosophy behind some marketing agent's telling me they can acquire my data to use for their profit without my consent. Read the same books these people derive their justifications from, and you find you're reading the philosophical support for Fascism. We've been there and done that and we don't want it or anything like it in the future, thank you very much.
I've been browsing through for resource on this post and i came across these very interesting ones. The one is based on "Attention Bonds' raised by Tom and it's sounds pretty interesting. It's basically saying that " Let senders choose what to send and stop forcing recipients to choose what to clean".
Thanks for your superb comments on this post. You are right in saying that a user by signing with these websites agrees in principle to some of these distractions and i can't see any litigations on such grounds to succeed. I also agree with you that the real issue here is one of privacy. I think most consumers would rather want their privacy protected than to get "bucks" for taking their attention.
Why has the attention rights movement only being apply to the internet? We are all experiencing some of the itches of advertising but i don't see the basis for such movement. I think there are more better ways to compensate users than to resort to such moves.
You raise a topic here that's probably going to provoke some discussion. Having grown up around the advent of the internet, I've taken external distraction for granted over the years––and it's a good idea to re-think this.
So I sympathize with your ideas, yet I'm not sure if all dignities of your manifesto necessarily hold. I guess my main question would be, if you would want to see these statements adapted by a worldwide counterculture against identity theft, or translated into laws? When focusing on the latter: Spammers have tried to hide themselves behind the first amendment, which is complete baloney. Technically speaking, all unsolicited advertisers––which pretty much covers most of your identity thieves––can be prosecuted, yet problems arise when you've (implicitly) agreed with advertising on certain sites by agreeing with terms of use and such. By signing gmail's (to name one example) terms of use, you basically agree with distraction of your attention––at least the distraction that Google built in itself.
Your 'value for value' argument I'm not so sure about. You see, advertising has never provided anyone with any absolute value, besides passing on information. So why would online advertising be any different here? And what would enable you to condemn advertising now on this standard?
Again, I very much sympathize with your cause, so I want to propose a modification that might evade some of the aforementioned issues: why not focus on privacy, rather than attention? The European Union has built on this principle for it's legal system against spam and other unsolicited online advertising, because it's a much clearer point of departure. This has proven to be quite effective. Here's an interesting paper on the matter. What do you think?
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