Harvard Business School professor and brand consultant Thales Teixeira, whose research focuses on the marketing principles of the attention economy, says advertisers are operating virtually blind when it comes to competing for consumers' attention.
Imagine standing blindfolded and voluntarily throwing money asia cell phone number list into a pit while competing with other marketers . It may seem far-fetched, but that's exactly what's happening to brands and their ad spend right now.
The advertising industry is broken. Today, the attention paid to advertising is uneven across screens and media, but advertisers are not taking this into account properly.
Why is the attention economy raising the stakes for brands?
If you're not familiar with the concept of the attention economy, it's based on the fact that consumer attention is limited and always comes at a price, which has skyrocketed in recent years. There are more companies popping up every day, with more brands and products to advertise, meaning the demand for consumer attention is higher than ever.
When you take demand that vastly exceeds supply and add rapid transformation in consumer behavior, you have a recipe for economic loss. The problem is that the supply of consumer attention simply hasn’t kept up with that demand: there’s no evidence that individual human attention capacity is growing. The population hasn’t grown as fast as the number of brands.
But what has changed is how quickly consumer behavior changes. For example, the way people use a particular social network is constantly changing. So when you take demand that vastly exceeds supply and add in the rapid transformation of consumer behavior, you get losses. Especially when you consider the increased pressure on CMOs to deliver great bottom-line results. It’s no wonder CMO turnover has reached a new high.
To avoid confusion, advertising effectiveness is not declining everywhere, but only in the media, traditional media, which no longer attract attention as much as they once did. But all is not lost. People still pay attention – under the right conditions – and there are proven ways to attract that attention more effectively.
Over the years of research at Harvard Business School and working with companies like Nike, Unilever, and Microsoft, Thales Teixeira has identified three simple principles for restoring value to the attention economy:
Buy attention correctly, without scattering yourself
Despite the rising cost and declining quality of television attention, advertisers are still wasting money by using a “spray and pray” approach to traditional media instead of shifting spend to digital and online media .
Unless your brand is the rare brand whose products are truly universally loved, you should only spend on media that allows you to precisely target, measure, and appropriately pay for the attention you receive. Often, making this shift requires overcoming significant risk aversion, inertia, and incompatible resources. But the reward is speed, precision, and audience impact.
