A short explainer arguing that capturing human attention is the central commercial problem today. The speaker traces a historical arc (from street vendors to penny newspapers) and describes current and emerging mechanisms firms use to capture attention—richer tracking data (eye/facial/audio), algorithmic personalization, persistent screens, virtual environments, and generative/machine-assisted content—then raises implications for marketers and concerns about individual attention being overwhelmed.
Chapters
In business today, what is the billion dollar question? It is what captures your attention. Why? Because the business that revolves around answering it pulls in loads of cash every year. The fact of the matter is, as long as there have been things to buy, there has been a cutthroat market for human attention. This market wasn't always as complex as it is today, though. Back in the day, capturing human attention consisted of nothing more than street vendors shouting through swarming marketplaces. Years later, 1cent newspapers hit the stands after editors realized that selling readers attention to advertisers was much more profitable than selling papers. Today, this notion of selling human attention has been taken to an extreme. Algorithms can anticipate everything from what we search online to which emails we're likely to open up, and even where our eyes will dart around on a webpage. How exactly will companies try to evolve these ways to grab our attention? Before we can answer that, let's first take a stab at understanding exactly how attention works. Think of your attention as a spotlight on a crowd. You're mostly operating the spotlight. You can point it in a particular direction, but you can't actually control who or what appears in the crowd. The crowd represents your awareness. It includes all the info your mind has access to, from the words on your screen and the background noise in the room to every random thought that pops into your head. Your spotlight is constantly moving around without your permission. Right now, you may be casting it right on this video, but inevitably it will start to wander towards other things, like a noise or a coworker's movement. So back to the ways companies are going to try to get our attention. It's likely going to evolve in a few ways. Number one, we'll have much more data tracking our attention and awareness. Eye tracking has long been used in psychology, marketing, and consumer research because it's a good way of telling what people like best, even if they aren't aware. And stores today already use facial expression tracking interfaces to monitor customers, age, gender, mood and more. And many of us gladly invite Amazon Echo's always on microphone into our homes. So what's next? The race for attention will continue to grow, so more of everything. The competition surrounding attention is not slowing down, meaning more email, more results on your Google search page, and pretty much more of everything in all the places you spend your attention. Number three Screens will continue to be the primary magnet for human attention, and newer ways to use them will be a focus. While technology often advances unpredictably, screens are probably likely to persist for a while. That's because out of the five senses. You have the five ways of putting information into awareness. Vision has the highest throughput to the brain. We are multiple breakthroughs away from anything faster. Number four, Virtual things will be very popular. As the video game industry continues to boom, it's likely that very soon people will routinely spend their time in virtual environments. This will mean daily interaction with virtual content and maybe even virtual people. Number five, Generative algorithms for text, images, sound and video will improve dramatically. Machine vision, automatic speech recognition and natural language processing have made tremendous advancements in the past five years. Algorithms can already generate extremely convincing content from scratch. Six machines will help us produce content. Machines will suggest assets to include in the content you're making, or subsets of content to include. Executive control will remain with creators, but the ideation and production process will become increasingly automated. So what are the implications of all of this? Are we headed towards powerlessness over our own attention? Among other things, understanding attention is something any sales or marketer needs to do, because attention is a zero sum game and the average human is bombarded. So we need to get smarter and smarter.
