Category: Marketing

Attention Economy – 3

Alexian Chiavegato in Forbes: “Online, all news content is atomized. Every URL is in competition with another. Algorithms prioritize content on popularity, forcing stories twisted for an emotional response to the top of news feeds. Audiences are exposed to more and more stories that aim to trigger larger and larger emotional responses. The crucial flaw in this exchange is that we’re just not built to process this level of emotion so frequently. Our emotional capacity has a ceiling. You might think it takes a trauma or a global catastrophe to reach it, but a constant low-level assault on our emotions from the news can amount to the same effect.”

Charis Apelgren-Coleman in The Media Online: “When we think of attention economics, brands must entice users to volunteer their attention and spend money. It is also one of the most valuable resources of the digital age.  Publishers use eye-catching animations that call attention to the content. Sites send out frequent notifications with the goal of boosting engagement. Social networking sites are fueling the attention economy with the number of users using those sites every day. The dynamics of the attention economy incentivise companies to draw users in to spend more and more time on apps and sites. Of course, there is a negative side to this. There is an abundance of information out there and because of that, businesses are fighting for our attention. Netflix said last year that they had two big competitors – YouTube and sleep.”

Tim Wu in Wired: “By now, it is pretty well understood that we regularly pay for things in ways other than using money. Sometimes we pay still with cash. But we also pay for things with data, and more often, with our time and attention. We effectively hand over access to our minds in exchange for something “free,” like email, Facebook, or football games on TV. As opposed to “paying” attention, we actually “spend attention,” agreeing to the view ads in exchange for something we really want. The centrality of that deal in our lives makes it outrageous that there are companies who seize our time and attention for absolutely nothing in exchange, and indeed, without consent at all—otherwise known as “attention theft.””

Tristan Harris in Technology Review: “Right now, it is possible for large technology companies to make money by selling thinner and thinner “fake” slices of attention—selling fake clicks from fake sources of news to fake advertisers. These companies make money even if what the link or article leads to is egregiously wrong and propagates misinformation. This opportunism debases the information ecology by destroying our capacity to trust sources of knowledge or share beliefs about what is true, which in turn destroys our capacity for good decision making. The result is polarization, misinformation, and the breakdown of democratic citizenship. We need to create mechanisms that incentivize participants in the digital world to consider longer time frames and the broader impact their actions are having on society.”

Clara Lindh Bergendorff in Forbes: “We are at the beginning of the end of an era. The Attention Economy—the ad-based revenue model that has dominated the creative industries in the 21st century and made the incumbent social platforms some of the most valuable tech companies in the world—has paved the way for its own demise. The Creator Economy—made up of the platforms, marketplaces and tools democratizing creative expression and entrepreneurship; empowering an independent creative class to make a living on their passions—represents a paradigm shift… If we reclaimed our Attention (ciao Attention Economy!) and interact directly with the Creators behind the media and the products we love (hello Creator Economy!) we return to a world in which makers and consumers are more connected… The Creator Economy is a digital and global version of a world we used to know—one where we support and celebrate digital artisans directly.”

There are many views on the past, present and future of the Attention Economy. The one thing that stood out for me is that we cannot fight the Attention Economy. The question I started to ponder was: can we, the actual payers of attention, profit from it?

Attention Economy – 2

Sandeep Goyal in Business Standard: “Advertising, as a business, has always been about attention. The value of our collective attention, in fact, has helped fund all types of media — be it print, television, radio or outdoor. Six to eight minutes of paid advertising funds the actual “content” that fills every half-hour on television. Every quarter page of advertising pays for the balance page of news or editorial content in the newspaper. Without an active advertising subsidy, the internet also as it currently exists would be completely unsustainable. However, there is a fundamental problem with this “attention economy”. While the number of advertising messages that can vie for the customer’s attention is practically limitless, the attention they’re vying for is fundamentally limited. And that has been advertising’s eternal challenge. Every single day, there are more companies, with more brands and more products to advertise, which means there’s more demand for consumer attention than ever before.”

Mint (AFP report): “In today’s digital world, attention time is a most valuable resource. “The digital economy is based upon competition to consume humans’ attention. This competition has existed for a long time, but the current generation of tools for consuming attention is far more effective than previous generations,” said David S.H. Rosenthal in a Pew Research Center study in April 2018. “Economies of scale and network effects have placed control of these tools in a very small number of exceptionally powerful companies. These companies are driven by the need to consume more and more of the available attention to maximize profit.””

Mark Manson: “…The new scarcity in the internet age is attention. Since there is a surplus of information, more information flowing through our society than any of us could ever hope to process or understand, the new bottleneck on our economy is attention. We now live in an attention-based economy. This is why today we are each bombarded with over 3,000 advertising messages per day. This is why these advertisements get zanier and more nonsensical…because the goal of advertisements is no longer information but simply attention.”

Sophie Perryer in The New Economy: “Brands don’t want your dollars anymore – they want your eyeballs. The ominously named concept of ‘eyeball marketing’, where a business’ value is derived from the amount of attention it garners, rather than its revenue, has become the modus operandi for today’s digitally focused brands. These companies are eschewing the notion that paying customers are loyal customers, and are instead looking to less tangible metrics… Loyalty is the ultimate attention filter as it prevents consumers from even looking for other information, products or services.”

Albert Wenger: “Our limited attention can readily be absorbed by ever refreshing content. Humans are maladapted to the information environment we now live in. Our brain evolved in a world where when you saw a cat, there was an actual cat. Now we live in a world of infinite cat pictures. This is analogous to our maladaptation to sugar for an environment that is now sugar rich (largely artificially so). Checking email, Twitter, Instagram, watching yet another YouTube clip or Snapchat story, or episode of one’s favorite show on a streaming service—these all provide quick “information hits” that trigger parts of our brain that evolved to be stimulated by novelty. The limited availability of attention has become the key new source of economic rents. Companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter are valued in no small part based on the amount of attention they have been able to aggregate, some of which they then resell in the form of advertising. As a result they invest heavily in algorithms designed to present ever more captivating content to their end users in order to monopolize their attention.”

Will Oremus: “Algorithmic feeds are highly efficient at amplifying posts that stand out from the feed enough to pause people’s scrolling fingers. Each social app can choose — and tweak — which types of engagement it wants to optimize for, but they’re all optimizing for engagement because that’s what they can measure. The result, regardless of platform, is a feed full of attention-grabbing content. Feeds full of attention-grabbing content are great at keeping us hooked, keeping us scrolling, and keeping us coming back. But while these feeds may be addictive, they’re also exhausting and numbing. When every post in your feed has been selected from a huge pool of possible posts for its attention-grabbing qualities, you can start to feel shouted at, manipulated, pandered to, and overwhelmed… New digital media products [like Clubhouse and Twitter’s “Super Followers”] are focusing on low-volume, high-attention relationships rather than high-volume, low-attention feeds.”

Attention Economy – 1

We are living in what is called the Attention Economy.

Wikipedia: “Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems. According to Matthew Crawford, “Attention is a resource—a person has only so much of it.” In this perspective Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck define the concept of attention as: “Attention is focused mental engagement on a particular item of information. Items come into our awareness, we attend to a particular item, and then we decide whether to act.” As content has grown increasingly abundant and immediately available, attention becomes the limiting factor in the consumption of information.”

Berkeley Economic Review: The term “attention economy” was coined by psychologist, economist, and Nobel Laureate Herbert A. Simon, who posited that attention was the “bottleneck of human thought” that limits both what we can perceive in stimulating environments and what we can do. He also noted that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”…Our attention has always been limited, valuable, and scarce. But what distinguishes the present day is that technological advances have made an overwhelming amount of information available, strategically aimed at capturing our attention. As for the general public, it has never been easier to garner such personal levels of attention though means like social media.”

Michael Goldhaber in 1997: “If the Web and the Net can be viewed as spaces in which we will increasingly live our lives, the economic laws we will live under have to be natural to this new space. These laws turn out to be quite different from what the old economics teaches, or what rubrics such as “the information age” suggest. What counts most is what is most scarce now, namely attention. The attention economy brings with it its own kind of wealth, its own class divisions – stars vs. fans – and its own forms of property, all of which make it incompatible with the industrial-money-market based economy it bids fair to replace. Success will come to those who best accommodate to this new reality.”

Nielson Norman Group: “Many services online are offered for free. In the attention economy, attention is not only a resource but a currency: users pay for a service with their attention. Today, the dynamics of the attention economy incentivize companies to draw users in to spend more and more time on apps and sites. Designers who create sites and apps understand that their products vie for the limited resource of users’ attention in a highly competitive market.”

Asher Joy in Business Today Online Journal: “In the past, we were the customers, now, our attention has become the product. In the so-called “attention economy”, our attention is constantly bombarded with information, from social media, television, or news sources, such that it is difficult for one particular information source to truly captivate our attention and influence us. An easily distracted audience means that marketers must devise new strategies, whether that be through addictive/engaging UI or through social media “influencers”, to endorse their products in order to stand a chance in this new economy. As a result, human attention has become commodified, and harvesting this attention is now an integral part of the revenue generation strategy implemented in numerous business models. Essentially, the attention economy is fed by a vicious cycle in which we are the product of the attention economy yet also the customer who is unknowingly manipulated into reinforcing it.”

Ads and Attention

Brands will spend $650 billion in 2021 (source: Statista) across all media channels vying for our attention. That comes to just under $100 for every one of the 7 billion people in the world. India’s advertising industry is about Rs 62,500 crore in 2021 (source: Dentsu Digital Report), or about $8.2 billion. This comes to almost Rs 500 for every Indian.

None of that money comes to us as consumers. It goes to intermediaries – publishers, media platforms, search engines, agencies, and the like. The result is an explosion of ads that we see everywhere – everywhere our attention is, the ads are there. Ad spends can grow, but our attention is finite – we cannot create more time in a day. And in a world with increasing wealth and new brands rising to challenge the old, our attention becomes even more valuable. The result: more ads, more spends. This flywheel accounts for the huge valuations of digital intermediaries and destinations like Google and Facebook – every action of ours is tracked, packaged and sold. Profiles, preferences and privacy are juxtaposed in the search for that perfect ad which will grab our attention and make us act. Just as we are buyers, we are also being sold – our attention auctioned to the highest bidder every digital moment.

Ads envelope us wherever we go. Outdoor hoardings, ad breaks on TV, wrappers on newspapers that take up the first few pages, ads on search engines (nicely disguised to look like content), pop-ups on free content portals, ads in our online feeds and streams – they stalk us everywhere. The more free content we desire, the more we pay – every action (or inaction) being recorded for eternity, and then shared and matched to create a digital twin in the quest of the right message at the right moment on the right channel. We are the products in the Attention Economy and there is no shortage of buyers willing to pay for fragments of our time.

As I have been writing about microns, loyalty and the inbox, I also began to think about attention. Is there a way to monetise our attention? What if brands could reward us for our time and actions? In the non-digital world, this was impossible to do because brands could not identify each of us uniquely. But in a digital world where every click and tap of ours can be tracked, can we become recipients of the huge monies being spent by brands in reaching us?

Bringing to Life

So, how can the micronbox be brought to life? There have been just a handful of inboxes in our life in the past 25 years – Hotmail, Gmail, SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger. What will it take to make a new inbox become part of our daily routine? Many things have to fall in place to make it happen.

First, microns have to become popular. Microns are a new format using email as a transport mechanism. For microns to succeed, both brands and consumers need to adopt microns. For consumers, the attraction is that these are short messages and have something of value rather than just standard promotional content. If a loyalty program can become embedded in microns, that will offer an additional incentive for consumers to prioritise opening microns. For brands, the higher open rates of microns will create a good reason to switch from pure promotional emails. If microns can consistently demonstrate 50% open rates, brands will find microns an attractive proposition.

Second, the popularity of microns will actually lead to an increase of email communications – which will drive the need for a dedicated inbox for microns. This is where the micronbox comes in. Initially, it can just aggregate the microns that are delivered to our primary inbox. Over time, the micronbox email address can itself become the identity for subscribing to marketing mails from brands. The attraction of the micronbox will be that it will be spam-free. By controlling the visual display and timeline of emails from the IMAP server, the micronbox can create a much more compelling content consumption experience.

Third, the use of email as a transport layer is what can drive adoption. There is no need for consumers to download yet another app. Each of the 4 billion mobile phones in the world already has an email client! All that needs to be done is that it needs to be configured to read from a different email server. (A dedicated app for the micronbox can be built just like the Gmail app, but that doesn’t have to be a priority.)

Finally, the micronbox’s interactive capabilities will convert the email inbox into a conversational interface. While WhatsApp and SMS have this today, the challenge is that the brand channels are mixed up with the personal communications channels. The customer mindset in WhatsApp is to communicate with friends and family, not with brands. Brands are important enough that they deserve a dedicated inbox – brands now have the requisite data to do 1:1 engagement with each of us. AI-powered chatbots can power infinite such parallel brand conversations with customers.

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The micron-verse with the micronbox at its core offers a better world for brand-consumer communications. Many things have to go right to make this new future a reality. I am reminded of a GE campaign from the late 1980s that I used to see a lot on TV during my stay in the US – “We bring good things to life.” Microns are a good thing we should all work together to bring to life.

Micronbox

One way to build the future is to imagine it and then take the steps to make it happen. Let’s do the same with the micron-verse. Let’s look ahead a few years and see how brand-customer engagement has changed.

Each of us has a micronbox. It is built on email so it doesn’t necessarily need a new app or identity. This new inbox collates all the microns from our Gmail inbox and organises them better. No microns from a brand which we have not subscribed to make it through. Only a single email from a brand is present – older, unread mails get layered together into that single email. Thus, the micronbox only has as many emails as brands we subscribe to. Microns that we read are automatically deleted unless we choose to save them for future reference. (To elaborate: automatic deletion and especially only those emails getting saved which come from a conscious choice gives us and the brand added information – that people really care about this particular content; this is something that a simple open rate vs ignored will not capture.)

Microns are interactive. So, instead of just a static one-way communication, microns become dynamic and engaging. One can buy a book right from the micron itself, expand a new story to read more, provide feedback or answer questions – right from the inbox, without having to click through to the website. (The magic which makes this possible with emails is AMP.)

An element of gamification makes it fun. Customers/subscribers earn points for opening and engaging with microns. The more the continuing engagement, the better the rewards. (This is similar to what credit card companies offer – the more you spend, the more you earn. Basically, loyalty and discipline is being rewarded.) They also earn points by sharing information about themselves with brands so the communication they get is more personalised creating a mutual win-win. They can control what personal info they share with different brands. All this helps in increasing the signal-to-noise ratio in the inbox.

The micronbox is clutter-free. Instead of a ‘delete’ mindset when dealing with emails, there is a ‘delight’ feeling as we scan it. Brands have become friends whose messages are never ignored, read promptly and always acted on. Brands provide us useful info which make daily life better. They offer us what we need rather than what they want. They learn from our actions to make the relationship better daily with every interaction.

(Aside: This is the key and the core of a successful brand-customer relationship. The essence of a market economy – where businesses grow only by successfully meeting their customers’ need – at the lowest cost possible (else their competitors win). So if business in this sense is about meeting needs, a reinforcement of trust starts to happen between business and customer through microns – businesses promise to meet customers’ need and customers in turn provide the needed information/preferences.)

What has made the micronbox such a widespread global success is the fact that it is built on the email transport layer. Email is an open standard and allows anyone to publish via SMTP. We have control on the inbox and can use different email clients built using the IMAP protocol. This openness of standards continued with the micronbox – with one addition. The right to publish by a brand had to be matched with a subscription from the customer – only then is the communication channel established. The control is always with the subscriber who can decide to terminate the relationship at any point.

Email Marketing and the Inbox

The digital revolution sparked by the Internet needed a unique identifier for every individual. That was the email address. Cookies and device identifiers on mobiles were also additional mechanisms to identify people, but they still afforded some anonymity to the consumer. An email address was precise because it delivered communication directly to the inbox. And thus rose to prominence the field of email marketing. Brafton offers a nice history of email marketing. (Email marketing (along with SMS) has also been Netcore’s primary business for the past 14+ years.)

Writes Neil Patel: “People are inundated with interruptions, pitches, and advertisements everywhere they look. Though you might think your email is special. But to the reader, your email is one in a million — and not in a good way. This is why it’s important to remember where you are and use good manners. Getting into someone’s inbox is like being invited to their home for dinner.”

There are 3 inboxes which are central to our digital lives – SMS, email (mostly Gmail), WhatsApp. These ‘messaging apps’ are the way we communicate – 1:1 and in groups. These inboxes are also the endpoints for brand communications – from OTPs to receipts, from the ‘what’s new’ to offers. Each inbox has its own unique characteristics and thus serves a special purpose.

The email inbox has multiple advantages over the others. SMS is largely limited to text and 160 characters (even though RCS promises to enable rich media in the inbox). WhatsApp, owned by Facebook, has many restrictions on who can send and what can be sent. Both are also expensive. In India, SMS costs 13 paise and WhatsApp costs 30 paise. In comparison, emails cost 1-3 paise and can have text, images, audio and even video as content.

The popularity of email as a communication channel has also led to a rise in spam – hindering the effectiveness of marketing communications. Gmail’s folders and sorting algorithms are not the lasting solution. I believe the time has come for a dedicated inbox for brand communications.

I had written previously about an idea I called the microbox, “a custom inbox for viewing and engaging with microns. Brands should be able to directly publish to this micronbox – as long as they have permission to do so. Customers can get a significantly upgraded viewing experience than the conventional email inbox with its linear list of incoming emails. The micronbox has the potential to transform brand-customer engagement the way WhatsApp upgraded person-to-person mobile communications from the SMS inbox.”

So: can we create a micron-only inbox for brand communications? How will this two-sided platform work – why will brands send messages to yet another inbox and why will we as consumers further divide our attention with a new inbox?

Lester Wunderman

I first heard about Lester Wunderman from Ajay Row in our MartechBrain conversation. Ajay strongly recommended reading Lester Wunderman’s book “Being Direct”. Wunderman writes: “This is a book about direct marketing, about how to advertise profitably in a postindustrial, information-based society. It is a book about how manufacturers and consumers may engage in an interactive dialogue affecting the behavior of both. It is also a book about the changing paradigm of brands — which used to represent a cluster of product values but now increasingly identify clusters of consumers’ individual needs. I have written this book in the form of an autobiography to show, step by step, how I learned to make advertising pay. It is based not on theoretical hypotheses or secondhand case histories but on the recorded results of the many billions of dollars’ worth of advertising I helped create and whose results I was able to measure. I will describe the rules as I learned them and show how I discovered them — the facts, the hunches, the breakthroughs, and the frustrations — the experiences I used to create the campaigns that succeeded and others that failed.”

Wunderman lists 19 principles of direct marketing in the book:

1. Direct Marketing Is a Strategy, Not a Tactic
2. The Consumer, Not the Product, Must Be the Hero
3. Communicate with Each Customer as an Audience of One
4. Answer the Question “Why Should I?”
5. Advertising Must Change Behavior, Not Just Attitudes
6. The Next Step: Profitable Advertising
7. Build the “Brand Experience”
8. Create Relationships
9. Know and Invest in Each Customer’s Lifetime Value
10. “Suspects” Are Not Prospects
11. Media Is a Contact Strategy
12. Be Accessible to Your Customers
13. Encourage Interactive Dialogues
14. Learn the Missing “When?”
15. Create an Advertising Curriculum That Teaches as it Sells
16. Acquire Customers with the Intention to Loyalize Them
17. Loyalty Is A Continuity Program
18. Your Share of Loyal Customers, Not Your Share of the Market Creates Profits
19. You Are What You Know

A few interesting points from Lester Wunderman in a 2008 interview to Clickz:

Media has returned us to personal engagement. This is a good thing. But this is also where I worry. I don’t want to make friends with people who want to sell me something. The supermarket got it right. They proved that you don’t have to be a friend; they only had to provide products at fair prices. That changed the retailing world. I remember going shopping with my mother [as a child], and we went to shops where they knew our names. The butcher knew what she was accustomed to buying. Data is returning us to that kind of relevance. It’s creating warmth that has not existed in advertising when we were starting out.

… We never had a click before. We did have other relationship vehicles (coupons), but we never had this situation where both parties are aware that something further is going to happen. The consumer clicks because she wants to know more. The marketer is aware of the click and wants to do more for the consumer. We never had that signal that could be the beginning of satisfaction for both parties. It has to be dealt with carefully. Corporations have got to set up departments that are sensitive to potential danger that the click can create.

… The difference between a consumer and a customer is what makes success and failure. A consumer might become a customer. A customer is someone who is using a product. If you have a customer, you have to nurture that relationship. You have to make sure the customer continues to buy your product. I think there are going to be tricks and promotions within advertising and marketing. These will cement those relationships.

Ray Shulz wrote about Wunderman in an obituary in January 2019: “[W]hile it is hardly premature when a man of 98 dies, it has to fill email marketers and everyone in this business with sadness and a certain awe. Not that Lester ever focused on email marketing in particular, but everything he did before it paved the way for it.”

Email marketing has become one of the key pillars of direct marketing, and that’s what we turn to next.

Direct Marketing

Let’s start with some history of brand-consumer communications. For a long time, this was done via mass advertising – TV, radio, print. As more niche media platforms were launched, it became possible to segment audiences. Then came direct marketing – individuals could be identified by their addresses and mailers sent to them. Starting in the mid-1990s, the Internet brought in very targeted advertising – and also pricing based not on size of audience, but on performance (clicks, form fills, transactions).

Let’s dig deeper into direct marketing, before we get to the world of email marketing.

From Wikipedia: “Direct marketing is a form of communicating an offer, where organisations communicate directly to a pre-selected customer and supply a method for a direct response. Among practitioners, it is also known as direct response marketing. By contrast, advertising is of a mass-message nature. Response channels include 800-numbers, reply cards, reply forms to be sent in an envelope, websites and email addresses… Direct marketing is attractive to many marketers because its results, positive or otherwise, can be measured directly. For example, if a marketer sends out 1,000 solicitations by mail and 100 respond to the promotion, the marketer can say with confidence that the campaign led directly to a 10% conversion. This metric is known as the ‘response rate’, and it is one of many clearly quantifiable success metrics employed by direct marketers. In contrast, general advertising uses indirect measurements, such as awareness or engagement, since there is no direct response from a consumer. Measurement of results is a fundamental element in successful direct marketing.”

From Cyberclick: “An essential aspect of direct marketing is that the consumer response is measurable: for example, if you offer a discount for an online store, you should include some kind of cookie or pixel to let you know if the user has used of the code… The most powerful and innovative direct marketing strategies want to elicit a reaction in the target audience using content delivered directly to the consumer, both physically and through the email marketing. A very striking graphic design, a surprising product, or a video that touches the heartstrings of the listener, can elicit a direct response from the consumer.”

From CFI: “The term “direct marketing” was first popularised by an American man named Lester Wunderman. In 1967, he identified trends in marketing and defined it using the term “direct marketing.” Thus, Wunderman is considered to be the father of contemporary direct marketing. Coincidentally, he was also responsible for the creation of the toll-free 1-800 number, an invention that is still widely in use today.”

Can It Work?

What I have described above is a theoretical construct. At present, microns are in their infancy (we are just getting started with the idea at Netcore). Emails have generally been free from incentivisation; so, to imagine a loyalty program for microns can be considered as wishful thinking at this stage. Making one idea a success is hard enough, and here I am combining two big ideas together – microns and loyalty. So, can it really work? Let’s take them one at a time and then together.

We are being flooded with brand emails in our inbox – and all sorts of other messages in our other inboxes (SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger) and feeds (Twitter, Instagram, Snap, Pinterest). Brand messages have to compete in our inboxes with messages from family and friends, and the various groups and communities that we are part of. Attention is the prize that everyone wants and it is getting splintered into micro-moments where the mindset is more ignore and delete, rather than read and delight. It is in this world that microns can come like a breath of fresh air.

Emails come into our mailbox rather than us seeking them out and that is their superpower. With a focus on building a long-term relationship and a daily habit, some brands can become part of our life with the useful information that they provide. Microns are the best carrier for such nuggets – short and simple, clearly identified and useful. Made-for-mobile microns are the vehicle for brands to become friends. Friends are always welcome to connect with us; similarly, brands can use microns to make that connection via a subscription. Content will play a critical role for making microns work; too much promotional messaging and customers will opt-out or ignore. AMP offers a way to make microns interactive and open a whole new world of interesting use cases. That has been the thinking behind us creating MyToday, a made-for-microns publishing-subscription platform.

Adding elements of loyalty and gamification can make microns much more rewarding. Our attention has a lot of competition; if someone is willing to pay us for it, they have the potential to stand out. By disintermediating the media and ad platforms, brands can build a direct hotline to their customers, with the rewards working as magnets for visibility, engagement, actions and eventually, transactions.

While many brands have their own loyalty programs and could potentially add microns as another mechanism to earn additional points, a better approach would be to start with the customer’s inbox and craft a rewards program that incentivises all actions done within. This would necessarily have to then be a loyalty program that cuts across brands – that is what I have described in this series. Inbox attention is the prize; and there is no better inbox than the email inbox. Every other inbox has its limitations – SMS costs a lot and is limited to text, RCS is not widely available and dependent on the mobile operator, others like WhatsApp are controlled by a single entity who can alter the rules at will. The only mailbox free from monopoly control is the email inbox.

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To summarise, there is a very interesting opportunity to build a loyalty program which monetises attention via microns by building a two-sided platform: connecting brands and consumers. It needs to have two components: the earn (how consumers can get the reward points) and the burn (how can they redeem these points). The innovative format of microns (short, informational, identified content) combined with a multi-brand loyalty program can lay the foundation for a big breakthrough in brand-customer engagement via the most ubiquitous identity that customers have – their email address. Such a program could, in short order, become the world’s largest loyalty program.

The entity that does it successfully can then open up the exciting world of rethinking the inbox itself for microns. Hotmail created a personal inbox for us in the late 1990s, Gmail made it hugely better in the first decade of the 21^st century, and WhatsApp reinvented it for the mobile era in the 2010s. Imagine a new inbox for the 2020s that connects an individual’s dual identity (email address and mobile number) with a focus on brand messages rather than P2P and group messages. Microns can serve as the building block for this next-generation ‘gamified’ inbox. That’s our next story.