January 12th, 2010 §
As attention becomes more of a scarce resource, does it become a commodity for sale?
Marketing agencies must view attention in this way at times. The signals we’re bombarded with day-to-day are endless; tv, music, books, ads, and magazines are just a start. Everyone has an opinion too and they aren’t afraid to express it, the blogosphere being a great example.
Attention spans are only going to get thinner. Multi-tasking has a limit, so do you a) choose to scale back and unitask, b) limit the scope of what you pay attention to, c) don’t do anything and let yourself swim in the sea of messages?
It’s a tough choice, but no matter which path you choose, you are paying out something of yourself. Something much more valuable than the dollar in your pocket. If attention is the next scarce resource, buy-in is gold.
November 25th, 2009 §
The hyperlink is amazing. It’s pay-it-forward in action. It reduces the six degrees of separation. It connects us to people and ideas we may never have heard of simply because we stumbled upon a site.
It also contributes to trends and groupthink. Hyperlinks sometimes remind me of the buzz and gossip of the overvalued blue chips that ultimately bubbled out at the start of the century. The value of what you’re being linked is your own judgment call, but so often we empower the person that’s linking us with that judgment. Take it to the extreme. If Al Gore – as opposed to Joe Schmo – recommended a green company, you’d check it out. Al Gore certainly has the credentials, but is he becoming outdated? Maybe his personal branding campaign has started outweighing his community service message? Your call.
Too often we allow others to make judgment calls for us. The blogosphere is ruled by professional marketers and those that already have celebrity value (think Ashton Kutcher vying for 1,000,000 followers on twitter). It’s not a collusive atmosphere, but there’s a “club” mentality emerging with friends linking to friends. I still click on hyperlinks, but just like I look for conflicts of interest and financial disclosures when reading scholarly articles, I evaluate the information trail of the link itself. It’s really easy to do with any generic rss aggregator (i.e. google reader).
Why bother? Because when you open your mouth to talk about the cool thing you read or saw on the net, you’re voicing your support of it. You become a representative. Your word-of-mouth sponsorship is as much a hyperlink as the digital url hiding behind the attractive text. The value of the link is up to you.
October 11th, 2009 §
This prize, which came as Obama contemplates a troop build-up in Afghanistan and hectors the international community on financial regulation and global warming, suggests that there is some reservoir of relief and amazement for America’s young president. The international gushing may seem absurd to us, as the schoolyard lionization of an older brother often seems funny to a sibling, but it can be used to our advantage. Leaders in allied countries no longer run against America, and now the Nobel Committee is attempting to welcome America back as the leader of the free world. And it didn’t cost us anything. Would that life told more jokes like that one.
That’s from Ezra Klein.
It’s signaling value is more important than the prize itself. Obama certainly doesn’t need another wall trophy.
July 6th, 2009 §
We’ve become immune to watching commercials and maybe that’s why advertisers are working so hard to keep our attention. Probably because I don’t watch much TV (ok, hulu selectively), whenever I watch a commercial my mind is thrown in ten different directions. It’s an experience and only when I see myself watching it can I step out, and recollect my brain.
The plethora of audio-visual stimuli in a commercial is meant to do only one thing; keep your eyes on the screen. We all know it’s to sell us stuff and I don’t think most of us buy into it. What we buy into instead is a well-staged glamorization of reality. Reality. You know, slow-moving birds, waving trees, smell of the air, feel of the pavement, all that jazz. Just isn’t as exotic and glitzy as TV. After a few hours a day (which is below the national average), we’re overstimulated to the point where regular old life seems, well, regular and we have go back for more. It’s like opening a Doritos bag.
The best way to realize the inanity of what you’re experiencing is to step out of yourself for a second and think about you sitting there watching this commercial and absorbing what it has to offer. Your transfixiation becomes immediately clear and you might find yourself shaking your head and getting some water. Or just getting up. Have you ever watched people playing video games (especially the Wii)? They’re so caught up in the screen that they don’t realize they’re pressing a few buttons really fast or waving a joystick around madly. It’s really funny to watch and makes me think about what they’re really doing; entertaining themselves. View yourself the same way watching a commercial and you’re realize what you’re really doing too.
Mainly, I want to jump out of the jaded reality of marketing and focus on what I really wanted in the first place – to watch a show and be entertained. Commercials have been a bother since day one, and thanks to TiVo and web streaming, they’re becoming less of a nuisance. If you watch TV the traditional way, try doing something else when the commercial comes on. Being sedentary is one of the major culprits in the obesity epidemic racing through America and no one wants to be part of that statistic. Getting up alone would do just to stretch the legs but my personal favorite is squeezing in a few pushups or situps. TV just became interactive.
June 15th, 2009 §
I like to call this the strip experiment, and it is extremely revealing. For a few weeks, strip away anything you don’t absolutely need to function, live, survive. I specifically mean all media; TV, movies, video games, books, magazines, newspapers, even the internet (unless, of course, you need it for work). Why would you do this? Because there are so many things influencing you right now that you may not even know what you really want.
Think about a group of friends deciding where to eat. When the question, “where should we go?”, comes up, the majority of the group is bound to say, “It doesn’t matter”, while a few people will make their preferences known. The indifferent folks actually do know what they want but there’s just too much decision-making noise for them to even realize it. This isn’t about groupthink or being introverted or extroverted, it’s about filtering a boatload of information at once. Myriad restaurant options, what the group can afford, location, service, mood, etc. Note that when the choices are narrowed down, everyone has an opinion. » Read the rest of this entry «