This post is a little bit of a brain dump. Some thoughts and learning that may be found interesting and useful, and hopefully gets your cogs moving.
It’s hard to settle on which dystopia we’re moving quickly towards, but Huxley may be closer to our current world than Orwell.
Personally, I have an inkling that the “attention economy” is a bubble. When it will burst is a question I don’t have an answer to. Whether it will burst at all is another consideration. It is clear, however, that our current trajectory to the lowest and most extreme attention-seeking behaviour is causing harm and distress. Eventually, people will need to start switching off.
As somebody interested in marketing and behavioural science, I thought it would be a great thing to explore this and publish it (if it’s worth reading).
What is the attention economy, and why does it exist?
We humans are flawed. Our brain power hasn’t changed much in the past 1000 years.
Technology has already surpassed us, and our primitive cave-people brains (as amazing as they are) cannot compete with sophisticated algorithms and space-age supercomputers. Unlike computers, our human mind has limited resources to intake, process, and remember so much information at once [source]. To cope with the cognitive overload, the brain will the most critical information and reject the rest. Attention is, therefore, a valuable commodity.
We can all say for sure: our attention is being stretched thinner and there is increasing demand our time, focus and attention. This is a problem for marketers.
Why is the attention economy a thing?
With the consideration to our limited attention: we only have so much brain space, only so much time during the day and already so many things demanding our attention, it’s started an arms race to capitalise on our attention.
The attention economy refers to a marketplace, where what is left of our daily attention is currency. Our attention = opportunity to sell or make money. It has resulted in marketing (and software) being designed to grab our attention and keep it as long as possible. If they have your attention, it means you’re not spending your limited focus on a competitor.
“An attention economy dissolves the separation between the personal and professional, between entertainment and information” – John Carary [source].
Companies go to great extremes to find us, grab and keep our attention. Entertainment companies (like Netflix) compete with YouTube, which competes with social media companies – and content creators on social media companies are competing with each other to grab our attention, and keep us watching. YouTube ensuring the first thing you see on their platform is reels is an example of their adaptation to monopolise our limited brain-space.
Marketers, influencers and software developers are getting increasingly better at hacking our psychology by producing content, and marketing that sets off our evolutionary alarm system. This is what I think will eventually cause people to turn away.
Why is it a bubble?
We’d like to think that our attention is given to those who inspired us, connected with our lives or offered us value but – much to our collective disappointment – it’s almost always given to social media platforms and marketers, who hack our biological alarm systems.
It’s effective, but only for so long (The boy that cried wolf).
Alarm-fatigue
Evolutionarily, our mind will become hyper-focused on what presents us with the most immediate danger. It is a survival mechanism that has saved millions of lives from predators in a bush, and, useful to marketers. Attention seekers have learned how to hack our darkest elements with fear, crisis, danger, threat, horror, outrage, shock, bewilderment, gore and violence – mainstream news is more dramatic and tribal than ever. Each fighting to increase their market share in the attention economy.
Marketers, influencers, content creators, and media platforms are all pushing our buttons; the chronic abuse of our alarm systems affects the quality of our lives, relationships and well-being [source 1] & [source 2]. The emotional pain slowly pushes people away from partaking in the attention economy altogether.
Not to mention that governments & institutions may look to dismantle these harmful platforms.
Turn in trust & overstimulation.
Instinctively, after being conned into being alarmed, most people get wise. It’s unpleasant to realise we’ve been manipulated and we’re not sure what to trust any more. We also see that entertainment is being fused with information – it is in its own way marketing (also known as propaganda). We can’t seem to be able to enjoy anything without a cleverly inserted ad break – or insertion of morals, or agenda. There is no escape from being sold anything – unless you turn everything off and read a (very old) book.
Naturally, begin to trust less, and focus our attention on a few limited trusted sources (it’s also a response to information overload). It goes some way to explain a rise in conspiracy and cognitive information silos [source].
Our mind can only absorb so much information, and if we are seeing thousands of adverts a day, it is easy to simply ignore them. We’ve all been there – when an ad pops into our feed it gets swiped within a millisecond.
Overstimulation is causing people’s minds to hunker down and become resistant to new ideas or messages – rather they go looking for what they trust and know.
Shorter attention spans = less attention to offer.
Our technological world is rewiring our brains to apply focus for an extremely short length of time. We’ve become very good at skipping between topics, images and videos rather than a deep, solid dive. Our attention span is collapsing [source] and we’re less willing to more than 2 seconds [source] to warm up to a subject (generally, of course).
We’re also spending our lives more, and more, distracted by new stimuli. It’s hard to sit down and focus on anything without being distracted by our phone notifications, being emailed or harrassed at all times of the day. It is causing our professional lives to blur with our personal, and world events with local. Our brain becomes saturated with information that draws our attention away at rapid intervals.
It’s harder to keep attention, and even once it is obtained, there is more than enough temptation for it to be lost again.
The coming burst.
The result is that marketing effectiveness is dramatically decreasing [source], there is a growing awareness of the harms of social media and a large percentage of people are slowly thinking about turning their backs on the internet and living in the real world. There is a collapse in trust in mainstream news media, corporations, government, products and services. It’s tangibly harder to convince somebody to trust what you do.
There is only so much chronic cortisol, overstimulation and distractions we can emotionally take before we just want to turn off the bombardment of attention-seeking content and advertising.
How to survive the burst?
Attention is a resource that is increasingly being monopolised, and collapsing.
Yet, you still have bills to pay. The only way to compete is to join in and attempt to be increasingly attention-seeking. It’s why so many digital marketing agencies focus on the attention economy. They work with creators and content managers to find new and creative ways to capture attention.
What does the future look like? This is maybe a question worth its own post.
What I know for sure is that marketing agencies are finding that quality is increasingly more effective than quantity [source]. People are more likely to retain and be satisfied by information from long-form content than they do from short 15-seconds reels.
What we (the team and I) suspect is that people will change their behaviour to search out topics. They will heavily research before investing, they will return to word-of-mouth recommendations and require more trust signals to make a commitment. It will require companies and brands to spend more time thinking about the content they create, the message they wish to communicate and clever ways to allow consumers to consume all the information they need before reaching their door.
Here are some things to potentially focus on:
- Marketing strategies that is not directly attention seeking. Focus on quality, and usefulness, and catering to a specific interest. Be better, not bolder. (SEO, search marketing, question answering within an industry).
- Marketing that allows consumers to do their own research (long-form content, educational content)
- Answer questions on forums (Like Reddit, Mum’s net, Quora.)
- Personal brand (speaking, communicating and being human!)
- Trust signals (or as we tend to call them, spark points)
- Building real-world relationships.
- Being a helpful human…
Last little bit of thoughtfulness…
Despite our world relying more on technology, it may force is to be a little more human. The way to win in the coming world is by being a rock that parts the ocean, rather than a ship that sails out to catch the largest waves.
A nice but of imagery to finish with.
This post intends to express an opinion, backed up with some research. They are largely ideas developed over years of working in marketing, and watching how our modern world is changing. The topic is more important than the points, so if you’d like to add, disagree, or express joy and agreement, you can do so in the comments.
Written by Ian McLaren
