When I was a kid, I lost count of the times my father (mother, teacher, adult, grandparent, etc.) said “Pay Attention!” to me. Not that it mattered. I’ve always been something of a dreamer. It’s where I get my best ideas. Anyway, it seems that they were onto something. Attention, I mean.
It goes something like this…no matter how rich or how poor, how powerful or how weak, how young or how old, there is one common denominator in all our lives. Time. Each of us has the same 24 hours per day – no more, no less. How we spend this time is what occupies our waking hours. When I was a kid, time was a pretty simple thing to manage – get up, eat breakfast, go to school, come home, do homework, eat dinner, go to bed. What free time I had, I could choose to read (my personal favorite) or watch one of three TV channels, or listen to a handful of radio stations. Occasionally, I could go to see a movie or a play. That was about it. Now consider my daughter. This seven-year-old is growing up in a world with hundreds of satelite TV channels, ditto for satelite radio. Add to that dozens of magazines, CDs, DVDs, podcasts, MP3s and a host of other stiumuli. She has literally hundreds more choices in entertainment than I had at her age.
Pause with me for a nanosecond.
Traditionally, entertainment has been used as the carrot at the end of the stick that is advertising. You get to watch TV shows brought to you by (buy!) advertisers who won’t keep sponsoring unless you respond to their ads. When there were only three TV networks and roughly one radio station per format in any given area, advertising was easy. You wanna reach kids? Find the hot kids show and run your ads. Teens? Find the Top-40 radio station and give it a whirl. Wanna get the adults? Try Bonanza, Mission Impossible, or the 6PM National Newscast. Today…not so much. The audience has been fragmented by so many choices. (Ironic, though, that with so many choices, I still have a hard time finding something good to watch.)
Because we seem to have less free time today + more stimulation + more media outlets, its vital that we find a way to “capture eyeballs” with our marketing messages. If you think of time as currency (remember, Time IS Money), it’s easy to see how our need to get our message out eventually comes to “paying” people for their attention.
Ultimately, advertising will evolve to take these changes (not to mention Tivo and podcasts) into account. As it does, don’t be surprised to find that you are being paid, not necessarily in money, but in some kind of barter, where you receive something that you value in exchange for something a marketer values – your attention.
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