Thinks 174

The Economist on Brazil’s decline: “After the military dictatorship in 1964-85, the country got a new constitution that returned the army to barracks, a new currency that ended hyperinflation and social programmes that, with a commodity boom, began to ease poverty and inequality. A decade ago the country was flush with oil money and had been awarded the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. It seemed destined to flourish. Brazil failed to seize the opportunity…Consecutive governments made three mistakes. First, they gave in to short-termism and put off liberal economic reforms. Second, in their efforts to shield themselves from the fallout of Lava Jato, a huge anti-corruption probe, politicians have resisted reforms that would curb graft. Finally, Brazil’s political system is a millstone.”

Why every student must learn cognitive science: by Vishnu Agnihotri. “Learning about ‘how learning works’ can help students develop more effective learning habits. For example, ‘mind wandering’ is a major issue for students and research shows that being able to focus attention in the first 5 minutes of a study session (‘settling in’ period) increases the ability to focus throughout the session. Chunking information into meaningful groups helps retention. Also trying to ‘retrieve’ what has been learnt (write down or speak what was learnt) is far more effective than reading the content repeatedly, underlining it etc.”

The Real Problem of Social Media Discourse: by Arnold Kling. “It’s not the falsehoods coming from a minority. It’s the bad taste of the majority.”

Imagining Mus: An Attention-Action Currency (Part 7)

Seconds to Sell

Attention is a hard problem to crack.

  • Morgan Housel: “You have five seconds to get people’s attention. Books, blogs, emails, reports, it doesn’t matter – if you don’t sell them in five seconds you’ve exhausted most of their patience.”
  • Exchange4Media (quoting research): “Human attention dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to just 8 seconds in 2018, beating out the ever-distracted goldfish, which clocks in at 9 seconds. This could mean that as a result, advertisers and publishers are struggling to hook consumers and keep them engaged.”
  • Wyzowl has some infographics on attention span.
  • Digital Doughnut: If you are an email marketer, you have only 3 seconds to capture the attention of your audience.

An alternate view from The Mobile Presenter: “If the human attention span was really that short, we would never have made it down from the trees. You have to be aware that there are two types of attention span: Focused attention is the amount of time that a human can focus his or her undivided attention on something. This, according to several sources, is indeed at around 8 seconds for the average human these days. For the context of presentations, however, the other type of attention span, called sustained attention, is more important. The average value for that attention span is somewhere close to 20 minutes.”

Adds Faris Yakob: “I recently saw a speaker from one of the world’s largest digital media companies claim, without substantiation, that on mobile our attention spans have decreased once again. We can now only muster two seconds for an ad, they maintained, which borders on the subliminal. It turns out that’s because that’s how much they get on average in the stream – it has nothing to do with the audience or effective brand communication.”

More from Andrew Littlefield: “Marketing departments have built entire strategies on top of this unproven assumption [of the Goldfish Myth]. They’ve pushed down the quality of their work, made it shorter and “snackable,” desperate to appeal to an audience of fish. Yet that same audience will watch a 4-hour football game or binge-watch an entire season of House of Cards in a single weekend. The result has been a wave of low-effort marketing content that floods your audiences timeline. It adds no value to your customer’s life, but we sit and wonder why our content strategies aren’t working.”

Put it all together and here is my take my how to grab attention (especially in the email inbox):

  • Communication must be based on an opt-in (subscription) and not spam
  • The Subject line is obviously important: this is where “Mus” can play a role by paying recipients for their attention (and action)
  • The content must not be purely unpersonalised infinitely long promotional broadcast – this is where microns matter
  • Ideally, there should be a dedicated inbox for brand marketing communication – here is where the micronbox comes in

The combination of subscription, an incentive (Mus) wrapped in a micron and delivered to a special inbox can transform brand-to-consumer communications. Just as loyalty programs reward the Best customers, Mus in microns are the key to unlocking attention of the Rest customers – moving them from inactive or semi-active to expectantly engaged.

Thinks 173

Technology Review on how AI is learning how to create itself: “The history of AI is filled with examples in which human-designed solutions gave way to machine-learned ones. Take computer vision: a decade ago, the big breakthrough in image recognition came when existing hand-crafted systems were replaced by ones that taught themselves from scratch. It’s the same for many AI successes. One of the fascinating things about AI, and machine learning in particular, is its ability to find solutions that humans haven’t found—to surprise us. An oft-cited example is AlphaGo (and its successor AlphaZero), which beat the best humanity has to offer at the ancient, beguiling game of Go by employing seemingly alien strategies. After hundreds of years of study by human masters, AI found solutions no one had ever thought of.”

FA Hayek: “In civilized society it is indeed not so much the greater knowledge that the individual can acquire, as the greater benefit he receives from the knowledge possessed by others, which is the cause of his ability to pursue an infinitely wider range of ends than merely the satisfaction of his most pressing physical needs. Indeed, a ‘civilized’ individual may be very ignorant, more ignorant than many a savage, and yet greatly benefit from the civilization in which he lives.” [via CafeHayek] In the same post, Donald Boudreaux has many economics book recommendations.

Read: The Maidens by Alex Michaelides

Imagining Mus: An Attention-Action Currency (Part 6)

Pay (for) Attention

On the issue of paying for attention, Michael H. Goldhaber had this to say in his 1997 talk:

Contrary to what you are sometimes urged to believe, money cannot reliably buy attention. Suppose it did work that way. Then you could have been paid to sit here and listen closely even if I were to read you something as boring as the phone book or an unabridged dictionary. Presumably it wouldn’t even matter if I kept repeating the same few syllables over and over. If money could reliably buy attention, all I would have to do is pay you the required amount and you would keep listening carefully through all that, not falling asleep en masse, nor allowing your minds to wander. In truth, even if you had been paid a huge sum, this would be most difficult, and if you did it, it would be a testament more to your own deep sense of principle than to a general condition in which another roomful of similar people could be expected to do equally well.

Someone who wants your attention just can’t rely on paying you money to get it, but has to do more, has to be interesting, that is must offer you illusory attention, in just about the same amounts as they would if you had instead been paying money to listen to them — which by the way is closer to the case here. Money flows to attention, and much less well does attention flow to money.

And here is Brice Berdah in UX Collective: “Attention is a resource that can lead us to action. Once we have it, we can also pass it to someone else, and put her/him under the spotlight. To understand how attention works in our modern world, considering its relationship with money is vital. We tend to think that money can buy attention yet we fail to recognize that this feat cannot be achieved consistently. Money cannot reliably buy attention…Different forms of incentives are tested to have highly engaged users that frequent check back their feeds, the biggest one being gamification. It is the import of gaming reward mechanisms on non-game mediums, such as apps…By adding points, achievements, unique rewards, power-ups and random reward schedule, apps and websites developers can ease the adoption of their service and increase engagement.”

It was in this context that I had discussed the idea of microns and loyalty. Here is what I had written previously: “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.”

As I thought about the problem, I decided to narrow it down. Rather than target the entire universe of consumers, what if brands could just focus on their existing customers and reward the less active ones for their attention? The prize for entrepreneurs to get it right is a large chunk of the global advertising pie. For brands, it is an optimisation of their huge marketing budgets. And for consumers, their ‘delete’ mindset could be converted to a ‘delight’ mindset when it comes to dealing with the inflow of messages they get. How can a win-win platform be created for all? It was time to bring multiple strands – microns, loyalty, micronbox – together into a larger idea of “Mus” (pronounced as ‘mews’; and derived from the µ symbol that I have previously suggested as an identifier for microns). Mus can become the currency for attention and action.

Thinks 172

This Centuries-Old Trick Will Unlock Your Productivity: by Ingrid Rojas Contreras in NYT. “Using self-mesmerism I felt overtaken on a cellular level by a serene form of concentration. I began to accumulate pages and finish my projects.”

Poverty Reduction and Economic Growth: by Lant Pritchett. “Broad-based growth, defined as the process that raises median income, is far and away the most important source of poverty reduction. There is no instance of a country achieving a headcount poverty rate below 1/3 of its population (at moderate poverty line of $5.50) without achieving the median consumption of that of Mexico. This is not to say that there do not exist anti-poverty programs that are cost-effective and hence should be expanded, or, conversely, that there are anti-poverty programs that are not cost-effective (or even have zero impact on poverty) and should be cut back or eliminated. Analyses of these types of programs would enable a more efficient use of resources devoted to poverty reduction. But large and sustained improvements in global poverty will almost certainly have to focus on how to raise the productivity of the typical person in a poor country, which is a key source of national income growth.”

David Perell: “Writing gets easier when you think of yourself as a painter, where each draft is a sketch that builds up to the final painting at the end. People freak out about first drafts because they write them as if others will see them. Artists take a different approach. Knowing that nobody will see their sketches silences the eye of judgment so they can play with ideas.”

Imagining Mus: An Attention-Action Currency (Part 5)

AIDA: Attention to Action

In the world of marketing, the AIDA (Attention-Interest-Desire-Action) formula is still at work. It dates back to almost 125 years ago. From Wikipedia: “The term, AIDA and the overall approach are commonly attributed to American advertising and sales pioneer, E. St. Elmo Lewis. In one of his publications on advertising, Lewis postulated at least three principles to which an advertisement should conform: The mission of an advertisement is to attract a reader, so that he will look at the advertisement and start to read it; then to interest him, so that he will continue to read it; then to convince him, so that when he has read it he will believe it. If an advertisement contains these three qualities of success, it is a successful advertisement.”

An explaination from Vizion:

AIDA is a hierarchy of effects model of the marketing funnel. Each consumer must pass through one stage to proceed to the next. For example, if you don’t first attract consumer attention, you have no hope of inspiring interest in your product or service, and certainly can’t expect them to take action and purchase an item that hasn’t inspired interest.

In this way, the hierarchy of effects mirrors the crucial marketing funnel – with each step, fewer consumers proceed toward final action for your product. Let’s say you capture the attention of 80% of your total audience with your initial advertisement, to the point where they desire to learn more about your offerings or your company as a whole. Then, only a portion of those with the desire will actually reach the tipping point and make the commitment to make a purchase. In this way, the AIDA formula narrows the number of consumers involved with your campaign until the final few convert into customers.

More from Ryte:

The AIDA model is based on four individual stages that attract interested parties who are deciding on a product or service.

  1. Attract attention: The product must attract the consumer’s attention. This is done via the advertising materials. It is a type of “eyecatcher.”

Examples: a window designed in a striking way, a sensational YouTube clip, or a themed newsletter, or a graphic on a landing page.

  1. Maintain interest: In the first phase, the attention of the potential customer is piqued; their interest in the product or service should be aroused.

Example: detailed information on the product is presented, for example, the product description on a website, a product brochure or flyer, photos, or video clip of the product.

  1. Create desire: If interest in the product is aroused, it is the seller’s task to persuade the customer that they want to own this product. In the best-case scenario, the advertisement or the product itself creates the desire to purchase.

Example: the seller provides clear examples of the advantages of the product or service, taking into account the daily lives of the target group. In the online shop, a bullet point list can generate the desire to buy. This desire to buy can also be awakened by an advertising medium that specifically addresses the emotions of the customer.

  1. Take action: As soon as the desire to buy is aroused, this must be transferred into an action, that is, the purchase.

Example: In the case of online shops, this would ultimately be the shopping cart process, in which a customer is lead to a conversion. The customer can be encouraged to buy the product with a call-to-action.

AIDA starts with attention and ends with action. Once brands initiate a relationship with us as consumers, then starts the process of engagement via email, SMS, WhatsApp or push notifications. And yet we choose to ignore the majority of such messages – even from the brands we like. 85% of promotional emails aren’t even opened. A majority of push notifications cannot be delivered because app users have blocked them. So, how does a brand get through? The buzzword now is experience: brands have to create or offer awesome experiences for us to pay attention. This “pay attention” triggered a thought: while brands have loyalty programs that reward transactions, what if brands could actually move up the funnel and pay for attention and action? Today’s digital world can easily enable such microtransactions. Yet, it hasn’t happened. Will it work? How can it be done?

Thinks 171

Rita McGrath and M. Muneer:: “The core idea of discovery driven disruption (DDD) is that rather than creating an expensive, risky plan for an uncertain venture, one must break it into stages. At each stage, identify and test assumptions, ideally at lowest possible cost and time. That will de-risk ventures and make an early exit possible if things don’t turn out as expected. Instead of fearing failure, one can then turn the question into: ‘What is it worth to our organization to learn something?’ Whatever the outcome, if the answer is found to be worth the investment, it need not be written off as a failure.”

The Socialist Algorithm: by Geoff Hodgson. “We may dream of socialist democracy, but in the end we must learn from history and from analysts who show the dangers or impracticalities of socialist solutions to the problems in the world. In short, statist socialism cannot co-exist with democracy and with the protection of human rights.”

Thomas Sowell: “Given how prone all human beings are to mistakes, in all kinds of institutions, one of the most important characteristics of any decision-making process is its ability to recognize and correct its own mistakes. Businesses that do not recognize their own mistakes, and change course in time, can face bankruptcy, even when they have been very successful in the past. Individuals suffering the painful consequences of their own bad decisions have often been forced to change course in order to avoid impending catastrophe, and in many cases have ended up with great personal fulfillment and insight going forward. Various governmental institutions, however, have major built-in barriers to changing course in response to feedback. For an elected official to admit to having made a mistaken decision, from which millions of voters are suffering, is to face the prospect of the end of a whole career in disgrace.” [via CafeHayek]

Imagining Mus: An Attention-Action Currency (Part 4)

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?

Thinks 170

The dangers of decision fatigue: from The Economist. “Taking a break can boost productivity…Mental activity can result in physical exhaustion, as anyone who has spent a day in successive meetings can attest. In the middle of a business trip, nothing can seem more enticing than the solitary silence of a hotel room, with no clients to amuse or placate in sight. Breaks can also boost creativity. It is easy for the brain to develop tunnel vision when it is working hard. There are times when the mind needs to roam free.”

Meritocracy, Not Democracy, Is the Golden Ticket to Growth: by . “The price of abandoning it will be less wealth and more poverty…The surest sign that a country will be economically successful is not the health of its democracy, as some liberals like to think, or the leanness of its government, as some free-marketers imagine, but its commitment to meritocracy. Singapore is a soft authoritarian power. But it has transformed itself in a few decades from a poverty-stricken swamp into one of the world’s most prosperous countries, with a higher standard of living and a longer life expectancy than its old colonial master, because it is perhaps the world’s leading practitioner of meritocracy. The Scandinavian countries have some of the world’s largest governments and most generous welfare states. But they retain their positions at the top of international league tables of prosperity and productivity in large part because they are committed to high-quality education, good government and, beneath their communitarian veneer, competition; in other words — meritocracy.”

James Otteson: “What markets enable, then, is extensive networks of cooperation. Indeed, the networks can become so vast that it might be literally impossible to know or trace them all. Adam Smith claimed – in the eighteenth century – that an attempt to trace out all the links in even a single chain of cooperation “exceeds all computation.”” [via CafeHayek]

Imagining Mus: An Attention-Action Currency (Part 3)

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.”