Optimising For Attention
Traditional marketing teaches us to optimize for correctness rather than attention. Most marketing and advertising thinking is designed to optimize the message that the brand wants to convey. But in a world where consumers are facing a cacophony of messages, where everything from news to memes are vying for their attention, it’s more critical that we first get our audience’s attention and then worry about our message. To use an analogy, the focus is on the payload not the rocket. What if the rocket is not able to get to its orbit, what use is it for the payload? What good is a correct message if it doesn’t even get read?
The world is speeding up. In the always-connected world of social media and smartphones it can feel that much harder to stay focused. As consumers are constantly inundated with information, content, and products, they have therefore become more selective with what they choose to focus on. This has subsequently sparked a clash for control amongst brands and marketers for the most valuable commodity: the fight for consumers attention.
Unfortunately, a lot of the rules of marketing that we follow today are from the era of appointment television. However, today as the consumers attention is not only limited but is fractured across multiple platforms, the effectiveness of traditional mass media is falling short. Every day, there are more companies, with more brands and more products to advertise, which means there’s more demand for consumer attention than ever. Add to that the democratization of content where anyone can create the next viral video or a meme or trend which will take over social media marketers have their task cut out for them.
The brand thinking framework for the attention economy needs to focus on the rocket as much as the payload. Marketers need a new thinking framework which is driven by content. In today’s world a brand’s success is highly dependent on the way it delivers its message or the content and the experiences customers will have with it. The delivery and experience is what will command consumer’s attention. Selling propositions and USP’s alone won’t define the success metric.
To breakthrough in this new world, modern marketing framework must address the issue of attention. Is your brand igniting a debate that people want to be a part of, is it activating a collective memory that everyone would like to share, is it more entertaining than all the news content on TV?
Currently, a brand gets built at multiple touchpoints across platforms. The only way to win customers in the attention economy is to make something worth paying attention to. People don’t wake up in the morning wanting to compare one toothpaste brand to another. They aren’t interested in brands, brands need to be interested in them. Marketers need to invest time and energy in creating content that matters. If you are asking for someone’s time, you owe them a reward – a nice warm story, some entertainment, some new discovery. Rather than worry about what do we have to say, brands need to worry about why should someone listen?
When we created the idea - there’s a playlist for that – we did something like this. We looked at the everyday issues that bothered people and offered matching playlists as solutions for that. We put up these messages at places where these issues were most top-of-mind. So at busy metro stations, where people get pushed out by the crowd, we put up a billboard saying – got here not by choice but by chance – there’s a playlist for that. At a busy signal near ISRO, we put up a billboard saying – shooting for the moon but stuck at a signal – there’s a playlist for that. This led to chatter about these billboards on digital, because we put message breadcrumbs that were interesting to people. The entry point for success for campaigns in today’s times is - whether you are able to get my attention. The previous decades were about - the medium is the message. Today is about - attention is the medium.
The author is Dheeraj Sinha, CEO & Chief Strategy Officer, South Asia at Leo Burnett
