The Auction of your Attention

If I had a dollar for every time that I’ve heard this quote “If you’re not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product” – then I would have enough money to buy premium ad-free subscriptions to most services that I use. (though I love watching ads and make a living off creating such interruptions).

The attention economy rests on slicing and auctioning access to people’s attention – and ultimately their minds. Like a mall sells access to quality footfalls, these attention auctioneers (TV channels, social media companies, newspapers etc.) aggregate and sell eyeballs.

Harvesting and selling of our attention is arguably more than a century old. One can see examples of 1890s newspapers (check: the New York Sun) or early radio programming to validate this. The commoditization of human attention has evolved to present day – where our hours spent on social media platforms contribute to billions of dollars of ad revenue to tech majors like Facebook & Google.

The Attention Economy’s Race to the Bottom

If your revenue model sits on the acquisition of attention, then you’ll have to create increasingly novel ways of getting more of it. Modern life makes this difficult – with shortened attention spans, more competition for fewer slivers of attention, increased ability to “tune-out” the sensory overload.

The mad scramble for more attention results in an appeal to your basal senses (fear, sex, survival etc.) in what ultimately becomes a race to the bottom. Our mainstream Hindi news channels are a case in point. Nobody has escaped their specials on casting couch exposes, occult babas, doomsday predictions etc. (though I was disappointed when inter-galactical intelligent life failed to abduct Himesh Reshammiya as reported)?

Echo Chambers and Fake News

This rush for sensory titillation has created modern propaganda weapons like fake news (more on this in upcoming posts). It has also created the manufactured need of constant dopamine spikes which lead to online echo chambers, where you see more of what you like and less of what’s scientific or even plain factual.

The Cambridge Analytica (read) scandal shows us one of the many ways in which these attention economy echo chambers can disturb and break down the very fabric of our society. Half-hearted congressional testimonies by tech billionaires (watch) have done little to arrest the problem.

Who’s messing with my mind?

Let us assume for a second that Company X’s business model is to get inside your head, alter and impact your memory structures, perceptions, attitudes and measurably change your behavior – resulting in outcomes like increased desire, aversion, loyalty, addiction etc. Quite dystopian, unethical and outrage-worthy right?

Ok, reality check. This is not one company, but millions of them that make up the marketing/advertising industry and its allies. From toy brands creating shiny, provocative ads for kids and triggering extreme desire in their impressionable heads – to NGOs that use graphic imagery and your guilt buttons to trigger the behavioral outcome of you loosening your purse strings and making a donation to feel slightly better (or partially absolve yourself from the guilt generated by their stimuli).

Demand engineering needs to happen within some ethical and moral imperatives        

Marketing is fundamentally about creating, communicating and delivering customer value – and it should not come through mass willful manipulation of the sanctity of the human mind.

So, what do we do?

I think there needs to be a new unwritten deal between advertisers and consumers – to keep some time, places and occasions off limits. I have always tried to see brands as people you meet at a party, you decide within seconds on who you want to have a conversation with and who you want to brush off instantly. Imagine you’re the brand at the party which is popping up again & again at the wrong time trying to interrupt a conversation and sell your own shit.

While that decency quotient (DQ) will take time to trickle down to all advertisers and media companies, till then it all comes down to the old-fashioned “Buyer Beware!” because we’re all just what we pay attention to, right?

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