Paid Attention

Innovative Advertising for a Digital World

Faris Yakob

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781398602519
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Digitales Marketing

The advertising attention marketplace is a confusing and vast playing field where the rules have changed drastically over the last decade. Make yourself heard and win the attention of your target audience with the new edition of this ultimate guide. Paid Attention delivers new and innovative insights into advertising ideas: what they are, why they are evolving and how to use them in day to day strategy to ensure commercial stability within a changing digital landscape. Packed with real-world examples of advertising campaigns such as Google, Sony and Old Spice, it provides a robust model for influencing human behaviour and toolkits that offer best practice on brand behaviour and effective communication.This second edition includes two new chapters exploring the latest evidence about attention spans and trends in online advertising, as well as new case studies on compelling brand ideas. In a world where being a consumer is confusing, learn to take control of the situation and make yourself heard in today's crowded attention marketplace.

Epilogue

Talkin’ about your generation

Generations seem to turn over pretty fast.

Well, technically I guess they don’t, since you need to be born during a certain arbitrarily defined time period to be X or Y or whatever.

I recently saw an article that indicated that I was a millennial. This confused me, since I had always known myself to be a tail-end member of Generation X. Since the dates are arbitrary, different sources use different years. I suddenly wondered if I had been ‘disaffected’ at all, and whether I should be more ‘entitled’, since the media suggest these are the defining adjectives of those generations. Then I remembered something that Clay Shirky once said: that defining cohorts is functionally equivalent to writing horoscopes, except about decades rather than months.

In Being Digital, Negroponte says that ‘each generation will be more digital than the last’,¹ and media generations turn over faster and faster, as new media emerge. This is worth remembering. Whether you consider yourself a digital immigrant or native, keep in mind that being native now is not what will be native soon. And I mean very soon. You have to run to keep up with an accelerating culture.

With this rate of change, when I’m asked for advice by people getting into the industry, I try to make it useful by being vague, because only principles will have longevity in a time of flux:

• Be nice. All the time. To everyone.
• Try to meet other nice people who are interested in the same things as you.
• Equally, converse with people who have different points of view.
• Don’t be afraid to change your mind.
• Don’t get (too) cynical.
• Stay interested in what you do.
• Stay interested in other things too.
• Never be afraid to ask questions.
• Reading is for awesome people.
• Write.
• Take pictures.
• Develop your own theory about how ideas work and what they are for – but don’t fall in love with it.
• Become a geek or an expert on something – anything.
• Steal everything – every trick and idea – and make them your own.
• Travel to other parts of the world, especially places that are hard to get to.
• Have fun. Seriously. If it isn’t any fun, it won’t be any good.
• Don’t worry too much – it’s only advertising, after all.

References

Introduction

1 Shakespeare, W (1991) Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene II, Dover Publications, USA

2 Mashon, Michael [accessed 19 November 2014], Sponsor [Online] https://web.archive.org/web/20141028224750/https://museum.tv/eotv/sponsor.htm (archived at https://perma.cc/3EHG-TYC5)

3 Siegle, MG [accessed 19 November 2014] Eric Schmidt: Every 2 Days We Create as Much Information as We Did Up To 2003 [Online] http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/04/schmidt-data/ (archived at https://perma.cc/Z3QQ-DZM8)

4 Shirky, C (2011) Cognitive Surplus: How technology makes consumers into collaborators, Penguin Books, Reprint edition, UK

5 Dyson, Esther [accessed 19 November 2014] The Rise of the Attention Economy [Online] http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/12/201212271132754429.html (archived at https://perma.cc/595T-RLN2)

6 Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds [Online] https://www.kff.org/racial-equity-and-health-policy/press-release/daily-media-use-among-children-and-teens-up-dramatically-from-five-years-ago/ (archived at https://perma.cc/H4KH-A7A8)

7 Bindley, Katherine (21 March 2012) [accessed 25 November 2014] ADHD Diagnoses in Children Up 66 Percent [Online] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/21/adhd-diagnoses-up-by-66-perent_n_1370793.html (archived at https://perma.cc/99V6-WYFJ)

8 Mahdawi, Arwa (19 August 2014) [accessed 25 November 2014] Satire is Dying Because the Internet is Killing It [Online] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/19/satire-tag-internet-killing-facebook-tag (archived at https://perma.cc/5C32-D64J) (The research itself is a little spurious in its conclusions, but it gives a sense of the pervasive feeling of the time.)

9 Shannon, C and Weaver, W (1971) The Mathematical Theory of Communication, University of Illinois Press, USA

10 Gilbert, D (2007) Stumbling on Happiness, p 215, Vintage, USA

11 Sunstein, Cass (28 April 2008) [accessed 25 November 2014] Solidarity in Consumption [Online] http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=224618 (archived at https://perma.cc/2GP3-LYLX)

12 This maxim is often attributed to Jesus Christ, but is much older, recorded at least as far back as 500 bc in Analects of Conf...