Harvesting Attention in 2023

Historically, attention was gathered into neat pockets by advertisements that were run in papers. Once televisions reached most homes, the attention industry really got fired up in a much bigger way. This was a way in which to grab attention from people’s living rooms. Attention then became something to propagate and collect by the trailer load.??

The attention industry started off as a limited model (newspaper ads) but is now embedded in every aspect of our lives through the internet, social media, etc. Human voluntary control as a whole is weak; we are consistently drawn into clicking, reading, viewing, scrolling, and buying.??

Tim Wu defines an attention merchant as “an industrial-scale harvester of human attention”, something all brands ideally want to be doing. The entire world of business is built on standing out against competitors, being the brand consumers trust and ultimately the one they spend their hard-earned cash with.?

Whilst attention metrics have played a role in the marketing and advertising world for quite some time; these are points of measurables that are used to make decisions and change the design but not many of them travel past surface level. In the 1920s, for example, companies had products that no one purchased and so they began to engineer demand. This correlated with the emergence of behavioral science and studies of conditioning. The corporate world integrated this with their tactics and began to build demand out of nothing. This demand for attention was all about the bottom line but as the idea of attention transformed, we started finding ways to forecast it.??

We all know that attention as a science is still a bit of a non-starter when it comes to eye tracking. There are countless eye-tracking companies, and new ones popping up daily, that promise immediate results that provide data surrounding attention. The truth of the matter is that these automated tests are based on stale data that isn’t updated. So yes, you get a result and it is fast but it doesn’t give you the data you need to actively harvest attention.??

So where does this leave us in 2023? We know that attention is a commodity that can be created and harvested. We also know that eye tracking offers only so much information and we are firmly aware of the consistent need for attention on brands.?

Enter AI stage left.?

What we have now is more than a simple measurement tool but a strategic bank of data to leverage for efficiency, ROI, engagement, and impactful campaigns. The future is biological, human-based data at the click of a button. An algorithm that doesn’t train off data but actually mimics the brain’s response to visual stimuli.?

Predicting attention in 2023 needs to be based on science to be relevant and effective. The traditional ways of doing things just don’t compete with the density of competition in an informational world. A biological AI algorithm empowers teams to not only measure attention but understand it on a level that makes establishing creative quality a standard.??

Attention has evolved, and we need to keep up.?