buying attention is not a long term plan.

I'm no longer sold on the concept of buying attention.

It makes perfect sense in a broadcast media world with few channels, the world traditional advertising was born in. It even makes sense, to an extent, is a world of hundreds of cable channels, with a few category defining hits in each major time slot. Buying attention makes sense if you can cajole a large number people to sit through something they don't really want, in order to access something else.

A short list of things that break the functionality of buying attention: pvr, p2p file sharing, content distribution across regions and markets, streaming, time shifting, format shifting, fragmented audiences. All of these things are made worse by attempts to control them, as making it harder to do each of these things individually, decreased the barriers to removing the advertising from the content at the same time as sharing, shifting, etc.

As always, the fight to enforce the rules of the past just broke the present a little bit faster. Ask the music industry, they seem to have figured it out, now that it's too late for them to go back.

You can no longer reliably buy attention. You can, however, create something that is worthy of attention. You can create associations with a personality, or outlet, or with content that people would like to pay attention to. You can sponsor things worthy of attention, without interfering. You can earn attention, or positive associations, in any of a million ways.

But none of them are the strict exchange of money for attention that traditional advertising is based on. That deal is no longer as effective as it once was. What's left is earning attention, or supporting others as they earn attention.

The major difference is, before you could get away with piggybacking on the value created by others. If you expect people to watch your messages as the price for watching 'Lost', you aren't earning attention, you are interested in buying it.

If you asked someone to care about you, as a cost for caring about someone, or something else, they would laugh at you. I would laugh at you.

You don't force people to care. You don't ask nicely for them to care. You offer them a reason to care, and you hope that the reason is good enough that they do.

You can't buy attention. But I can give you a long list of ways to earn it, if you're interested.

the integrated content debate.

Over the last month, I've been trying to keep my online writing / outposts / profiles more up to date, and more connected.  This has gone fairly well, as it serves to keep me involved in more of my accounts online, commenting, communicating, writing and linking more.  But I also wonder if the feeling of RSS incest that I get when something particularly vapid travels my watched corner of the blogosphere, is going to start to kick in for the small group of people who follow me, and the even smaller group who follow me on several different networks.

Currently, My tumblr, twitter, and facebook accounts will post links to anything that goes up on broken gent.  Similarly, facebook and broken gent link to all other accounts online of note.  It won't be long until I try to integrate my tumblr feed into my facebook account as well.  I admit I worry that people will think the multiple locations are meaningless if they interconnect too much, but my rationale is this:

Brokengentleman.com is for my theory and experience related to communications.  I use tumblr as a less focused clearing house for what interests me, and brokengent is definitely part of that world, as well.  Facebook is about me in entirety, so I intend to unify my various accounts there as well as I can.  Twitter is really just a collection of status messages, and linking to blog posts there is the same (in my mind) as changing my MSN status to 'New post at brokengentleman.com'.

Is this level of interconnectedness, which will probably only increase, beneficial, or will it only serve to over-saturate my already limited market / audience with the same content.  I can't say yet, but I'll be watching, and probably changing my approach to fit my observations.

ground war (update).

I was planning on expanding on the ground war philosophy, and what was laid out in fixing protest (2), but that is going to have to be delayed until the end of the month, as I may use the ideas in an assignment for a class this term.

At the same time, if all goes well, at the end of the month I'll have the base ideas and theory down in a PDF magazine for easy (and slightly more attractive) reading. This will also, I hope, be a chance to put some of my ideas on selective infodensity into practice.

So that, and stress, have led to the radio silence. Regularly scheduled programming, go.

Oh, and I'm slowly working on a LinkedIn profile. Ignore the mess, if you find it.

paris hilton and the attention arms race.

As mentioned in this earlier post, The Rebel Sell influenced my view of many things in society as a kind of arms race. While I read not too long ago that Paris Hilton could best be considered a platform, rather than a celebrity (the argument being that she can aid promotion by associating things with herself, but can’t promote her own works successfully), I’m starting to think that she’s actually the perfect example of the arms race worldview in terms of the mass media.

Let me explain.

We live in an over saturated media landscape. Whether it be advertising or television channels, or celebrities, we are blasted in the face with an insane amount of information on a second by second basis. I don’t know about anyone else, but even going to school in a suburban area, I’ve gotten so used to the noise that silence feels eerie.

What do small children do when no one is paying attention? They start to yell. And when all the children start yelling, they begin to act out. In the same way the girl that no one paid attention to in grade 10 ends up making some bad decisions in her quest for attention, people (in this case, media producers) decide that being a little ridiculous isn’t a big problem, as long as people are looking. Upping the t&a isn’t that high a price to pay, as long as people keep looking. Starting every episode of CSI with three dead hookers and an exploding caddy isn’t that bad, if someone will please for the love of god look.

Having your homemade nightvision porn leak online for every teenage boy to spank it do isn’t shameful anymore. It means people are looking. And the simple fact that people are looking means that you matter, regardless of issues of respectability.

Paris Hilton being famous is the end result of the attention arms race. So are movies where Johnny Knoxville and the Jackass crew get the shit beat out of them by bulls. It has nothing to do with quality. It’s the simple reality that there is so much signal out there, that getting people to look is seen as a matter of being more attention-grabbing than the other guy.

This makes perfect sense, given the broadcast model of mass communication that has dominated for the last several decades. More reach meant more power. Louder meant more power.

The problem is, signal is now noise. All of it. And yeah, people will look when a screech emerges from the static, when a bright flash disrupts the snow. But what happens when that stops being a distraction, and people turn off the radio and the TV?

When signal is noise, you basically have three options;

1) Create a new type of signal.

2) Make people seek you out, instead of vice versa.

3) Get louder.

Obviously, the last option eventually stops working. So, two more things to explore. But the point I’m trying to make is, if you want attention, and screaming isn’t getting it, a conversation will. Interaction is louder than night vision pornography. Creating a discussion among others is essentially viral marketing. Creating a discussion with them, and with you, often falls into the world of crowdsourcing.

Which I guess, is something to talk about next post.

EDIT: some more stuff to look at regarding signal as noise.
NYT article
Anti-Advertising Agency Clip

a way of seeing.

Reading 'The Rebel Sell' was probably one of the major moments in shaping my view of human relations. The view espoused therein of commerce as an arms race has proven applicable to many, many things.

(The gist is, keeping up with the Joneses results in the Joneses trying to pull back ahead, and vice versa, until everyone is unnecessarily spending beyond their means. Heath and Potter (the authors) call it a Collective Action Problem, and invoke the prisoners dilemma to explain further. In the name of all that is holy, buy the book.)

For the last few days, I've been asking myself how do you win an arms race? I've also been refusing to accept the standard answer I would give, which is not to play.

So. How do you win an arms race?

Turn it into a ground war.

Much as guerilla warfare seems to continue to do well trumping ever increasing military budgets the world over, crowdsourcing seems to do the same thing to flush media outlets. I'll admit that crowdsourcing also happens to fit very easily into my ideals about the way media can and should, in some cases, be run. A similar point could be made about guerilla marketing, if we didn't live in a political climate where a lite brite could shut down a major urban centre.

There was a lot of input today that led to me scribbling this down into a moleskine, and I'll get to the related idea at some point in the near future.

Ground war. That is all.