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On my walk to work this morning, I had what I think is a little epiphany about this whole Attention thing I wrote about the other day. One of the things that kept tripping me up was that everyone kept referring to "advertisers" as the ones being interested in attention data. While I do agree, I think the primary target is retailers (like Amazon), and especially those who advertise with Search Engine Marketing. The idea is that rather than going with a cost-per-click model, wouldn't they rather go with a cost-per-lead, since that's what they're hoping will come with a click anyway?
I'm completely aware that this is a semantic issue, but it seems like a pretty big one. Maybe I've completely missed it again, but if not I think AttentionTrust and those involved need to consider their messaging must more closely. I know that retailer is probably not the best term, but advertiser to me is very misleading. Maybe it's because I'm in the advertising industry, but when I hear advertiser I think either marketing company or I think huge conglomerate (read: Nike). For big brands, especially those offline, advertising is not so much about generating leads as it is about generating brand awareness. Of course a lead is what they eventually hope to generate, but because of the offline purchase cycle, this becomes an important step.
As I write this, however, I realize that even for big companies this could be important as a tool to find influencers. As I mentioned in my last post, the one thing that jumped out with AttentionTrust was the opportunity to market one-to-one. There's no better way to move product than to find the influencers (cool kids) and get your products in their hand, on their feet and in their head. Word of mouth works.
I agree that it does offer some big opportunities for cutting out the middlemen and talking directly to companies that you're interested in. With all that said, though, there are still a number of unanswered questions in my mind. So here's a lit of things I get and don't get about AttentionTrust
1. I get that I deserve to own my own attention data and with the help of the Attention Recorder I can hold onto that information. I also understand that someone like /ROOT can, in theory, help me to find companies who are interested in exchanging my data for goods or services.
2. I don't get how this process could work the opposite way. If you're a company trying to generate a lead where you reach out to the consumer, how could you use attention data to find that person without them offering it to you?
3. I don't get how a company knows your attention data is actually valuable. Joshua Porter mentioned this in the comments of the last entry and I think he's right: how do you know it's not false metadata?
4. I get that I can choose to share or not share my Attention data with whoever I choose and that there are big opportunities for companies to use my attention data to give me extremely personalized services.
That's about all I can think of for now. I'm enjoying this conversation and feel like I'm actually starting to wrap my head around this Attention stuff. But there's one really big thing.
I think it's important to remember that.