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Attention Availability Disorder

The future of media will be dominated by attention availability disorder, the condition people suffer from when they can't begin to watch anything without feeling compelled to watch something else, says Michael Nutley...

The future of media will be dominated by attention availability disorder, the condition people suffer from when they can't begin to watch anything without feeling compelled to watch something else...

By Michael Nutley of

[Register and post your own comments on this report below...]

That’s the view put forward by VC, Dragons' Den panellist and NMA columnist Doug Richard in the 6 July issue. It’s not a new idea, of course; it’s a 21st century version of the old “cash-rich/time-poor” problem. But Richard’s argument is that the boom in user-generated content and social networking is taking that problem to an entirely new level as the number of content producers and the resulting amount of content proliferates massively.

The same argument cropped up at the Blue Sky forum I hosted at NMA’s Online Marketing Show in June in relation to advertising. Rights Marketing Company founder Michael Bayler argued that the fundamental problem facing advertisers is to persuade consumers to accept advertising messages in the face of this deluge of content.

“Continuous partial attention” hurting advertisers

This would certainly explain the bizarre current phenomenon of ads being hyped in other media, for example Lynx’s recent online campaign to promote its Billions Of Babes TV ad. And the same argument fuelled Lord Saatchi's speech at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival a few weeks back, when he talked about the problems facing advertisers, and advertising, in a world where the best they can hope for is the partial attention of their target market.

Not surprisingly, there are a number of solutions proposed for the attention problem. Lord Saatchi went on to suggest that the only brands that would survive would be those that could distil their essence down to one word, which would then achieve the cut-through marketers are increasingly desperately seeking.

Solution in brands offering value up-front?

Michael Bayler, in a July column in NMA, takes a different approach. He believes that the only way for brands to persuade consumers to listen to their messages is to offer them value up-front, to persuade them the messages will be worth hearing.

This view is not so different from the “advertising as service” theory propounded a few years ago by Modem Media founder GM O’Connell. The result is the same as that desired by Lord Saatchi, but Bayler¹s view of building relationships through information and value seems more plausible than the near-mystic qualities Lord Saatchi attributes to his one-word branding approach.

Lion’s Den panelist backs filtering technologies

Doug Richard sees another solution; technology. He sees VC money starting to move to those companies that can develop filtering technologies that help us to find what we want, whether that be a new band or a new product. He gives the examples of music discovery systems Last.fm and Pandora, which use the preferences of other listeners and mathematical analysis of musical characteristics respectively as the basis for recommendations.

What Richard, Bayler and Lord Saatchi all acknowledge is that the game has changed. The power now rests in the hands of the consumer whose attention advertisers and content providers are trying to attract. Interactive technologies have already provided many of the tools by which that power is exerted, and will continue to do so.

Back to the mid-90s, pundits were predicting that intelligent agents would scour the Internet on our behalf, searching for the things we wanted. Like so many ideas from those early days, it vanished in the crash. But, again like so many early ideas, it’s re-emerging. Because, as Richard points out, what we need is not a way of finding more stuff, but a way of just finding the stuff we want.

About Michael Nutley:
Michael Nutley has been a business journalist for twenty years, covering a number of areas including software, telecommunications, construction and leisure. He took over as editor of New Media Age in July 2000. As editor he maintains a strategic overview of the entire new media sector, from both a client and a service provider perspective. He’s also particularly interested in online advertising, interactive TV and the transformative effect of interactive media on organisations. Before joining NMA he worked for a year as associate publisher of Centaur Business Intelligence's portfolio of marketing titles.