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Much has been said of late about the attention economy. It is certainly a topic close to my own heart as it’s a trend we have been tracking in the agency for over five years. However, the suggestion that we live in an attention economy goes much further back than that.
Nobel Prize laureate, Herbert A. Simon is often credited as the first person to articulate this concept back in 1971 when he said, "in an information rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes.
“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."
If you take Simon’s point, that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” and overlay it with the sheer amount of media, information and conversation vying for people’s attention today in 2016, then it would be fair to say that we have become even more wealthy (totally stinking rich to be frank) when it comes to accessing masses of content, but the impact of this is leaving us and all the audiences we are trying to reach are living well below the poverty line when it comes to attention.
And it is brands that are left most feeling the pinch. Not only are audiences harder to reach, particularly en masse, but when you reach them they certainly don’t give you their undivided attention. You have to work a lot harder for that.
Share of voice in a category is no longer the proxy for success it once was because category lines are now blurred and your competitive set is pretty much anyone putting together anything remotely engaging for the group of people you want to have a relationship with. In short, anything stealing their attention away from you.
Far from being all doom and gloom, living in an attention economy should simply compel us to be much better at what we do. People know they sit on a powerful commodity with their attention and they will absolutely trade it with you, but you just have to make it worth it.
So, as we are catapulted faster and faster into a world where attention is our most scarce resource and a very precious one at that, it begs the question how many brands and businesses are really prepared for the impact this lack of attention will have on their brand health measures and how many are ensuring it is not just the sales they can deliver today but the brand attention they can deliver tomorrow?
After all, choices are infinite, attention is not.
By Katie Rigg-Smith is CEO at Mindshare Australasia