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Buzz Building: Podcasts and Vodcasts (NMK, MusicTank, CIDA)

When: June 19th, 2007
Location: CC Club, 13 Coventry Street, Piccadilly, London
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The Future is Female: Women In Media Conference

When: March 8th, 2007
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Beers and Innovation 8: The Attention Seekers (NMK)

When: March 6th, 2007
Location: The CC Club - Unit 33, The Trocadero, London, W1D 7DH
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Writing for the Web Training

When: December 5th, 2006
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The Pud (Think & A Drink Party)

When: December 14th, 2005
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The Attention Seekers

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The latest in our Beers and Innovation series concerned the topic of attention. Is there less of it than ever? Is it a commodity? Do brands need to completely change their approach to consumers? Ian Delaney reports.

The latest in our Beers and Innovation series concerned the topic of attention. Is there less of it than ever? Is it a commodity? Do brands need to completely change their approach to consumers? Ian Delaney reports.

Chairing the panel, George Nimeh (blog), MD of digital at advertising agency iris, explained the urgency of the topic. Consumers are continually bombarded with marketing messages, perhaps particularly those of us who spend a considerable portion of their life online. How can brands and marketers expect traditional tactics to work when we're seeing the same tactics employed by all of their competitors and everyone else who is attempting to grab a slice of mindshare?

Since attention is now more of a rarity than information, surely that is the site of value in the marketing equation?

Panellist Sam Sethi of Vecosys admitted to 'information constipation': he can't pass a piece of information without reading it. With a bulging email inbox, an even-more bulging RSS reader, and banners around every corner of the web, it's becoming continually harder to process even that information that we want to consume.

Sethi believes, though, that the time is at hand for something of a consumer revolution, and a significant volte-face in the way brands deal with us. The things that we do pay attention to: the websites we visit, the blogs we subscribe to, the buttons we click can be recorded and analysed. Before long, it will be possible to build up a very accurate profile of what individuals are interested in and what they'll therefore pay attention to. The technology for packaging this data is called APML - attention profile meta language, information about the information we consume.

What if, Sethi continued, there were a mechanism for exchanging that information for money and other rewards? Wouldn't brands be very keen to have some sort of marketplace for identifying the people most interested in their industries - the people who take the trouble to post blogs, write reviews for Amazon or publish photos of these products on flickr?

Chris Seth, who after a lengthy career in advertising has now become MD of the popular teen social network Piczo, is in a position to see both sides of the fence. He feels that the attention economy - the idea that atttention is worth more than information - isn't a new thing - it's existed since we had more than one TV channel or the option to fast-forward past the adverts on a video recording. For a long time, the challenge for advertisers has been to create models that engage individuals and therefore work for brands.

Piczo is an extremely attractive property for youth brands such as music companies, sports goods manufacturers and so forth. However, he felt strongly that there were clever and not-so-clever ways of addressing this audience. Sophisticated advertisers are aware that the main thing teens go onto the site to do is to create things: to work on their profile, upload and arrange media and enhance their site with widgets. So what they do is work with their audience, following a collaborative model rather than the interruptive one which reasonably describes most advertising we see. A branded yet customisable movie-player widget, for example, that users can place on their profile page is useful and respectful to users, and thus commands their attention.

Seth also revealed that Piczo is aware of the most active members of its network. Those teens who communicate the most, are most linked to and upload most new material. These individuals are rewarded by being given the status of Piczo Insiders. This group are potentially given special access to new features and special offers before the general population of the network, and since they're so active and popular, might fit nicely into a brand's plans for word-of-mouth campaigns.

The empire is fighting back in some ways, Seth suggested. Companies like last.fm and Google are very clearly tracking their users' attention data. Four years' worth of an individual's web searches, for example, would reveal so much about that person, that advertising has the capacity to become laser targeted.

Our final panellist, Alan Moore, the MD of SMLXL and co-author of 'Communities Dominate Brands', is one of the pioneers in engagement marketing. Going back to the problem, he quoted political scientist Herbert Simon, who stated:

...in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

Against this context, his belief is that advertising has to become more valuable than it is at present. Image advertising, he asserted, is the junk mail of the twenty-first century. If advertising isn't valuable, then it becomes very forgettable. Once upon a time, you could buy three thirty-second television advertising spots to communicate to the vast majority of US consumers. Nowadays, it's calculated that you would need to buy 119 to reach the same numbers. Advertising is very necessary, of course: commerce needs to grow. But it's becoming increasingly inefficient. And not only are the number of television channels growing, but media is fragmenting. People are spending more time with different media, so that cross-platform solutions are required.

At the same time, our trust in word of mouth is increasing. Ninety-five percent of us will trust friends and family to a greater extent than any other source. And there are people who are real advocates for particular brands. The way forward, surely, would be to try to engage with those people who will do most to influence others. If brands invite their fans to participate and collaborate in product development, feedback and discussion, then they are on the way to creating communities that will do the attention-grabbing for them. A friend telling you how wonderful their new phone is, for example, is likely to have exponentially more power than other means.

Moore cited the Nokia Forum for mobile phone software developers, the scientists' social network siphs.com and the Mini car-owners network mini.com as excellent examples of how brands (and organisations) have fostered communities that add value to their instigators in a combination of Metcalfe's Law and Reed's Law (the number of contributors to a network add value to that network exponentially).

Questions and arguments from the participants included:

'What do unsexy brands do, then?' A fair point, Coke probably has plenty of brand ambassadors, but if you're Anusol, for example, then what do you do? Answer: The Internet is big. There are still ways you can build a community.

'Attention and rewards for attention isn't just about monetary exchange; it's also about control over those communities that we choose to contribute to'. Answer: agreed - control over the content people give to a community remains a thorny issue, however. Community owners want to keep it, while users might well want to migrate it somewhere else.

'So what about new brands? How do you engage with people who don't even know you exist?' Answer: a thorny problem, but new brands swiftly get champions if they're good. Everyone likes to pass on a secret new solution to a problem.

George Nimeh concluded the formal part of the evening by referring to Lord Saatchi's pronouncement in the FT last year that people are in a state of 'continual partial attention', and that if you can't get your message across in six seconds or less, then you've lost. Citing the recent Dove 'natural beauty' campaign and the success of it's three-and-a-half minute long viral video, his own conclusion was that advertisers can continue to gain attention, but only if they raise their game sufficiently to deserve it.