Why accountants will change the internet and why you should be happy about it.
“…Let me try and explain the difference between the Impression Economy and the Attention Economy with a real world example:
My wife is going away for the weekend. I’m in charge of our 3 boys aged 8, 6 and a terrible 2. Just before she heads out of the door she reminds me that Jean needs to be at his cricket match at 9am, Tian’s medication has been measured out and I should not ‘accidentally’ leave Petri at the park.
“Are you paying attention?” she asks as I scroll through my Twitter feed.
In the impression economy I can answer with a resounding, confident and truthful, “Yes”.
I have indeed registered her as an impression. I am definitely aware that she is there and that she is saying… something.
In the real world, however, I’m about to get my ass kicked.
Humans don’t live in the impression economy, we live in the attention economy and my dearest wife knows this. She also knows (as should all advertisers) that she requires a certain type of attention for the communication to be effective.
“Have you been listening to what I have been saying?” comes the follow-up.
In other words: Did you listen from start to finish (time) and did you do so without reading tweets (intensity)? This is how you measure attention in the real world. Not by registering an ‘impression’.
(There is a third metric of attention: knowing if you’re capturing the attention of the appropriate target audience, but I hope my wife never asks that question.)
Marital problems aside, how do we apply the fundamentals of the attention economy to digital advertising?
Well, we start by measuring attention in a way that makes sense…”
A few comments:
Terrific read the attention economy is the battlefront completely agree impressions are useless, it’s why I worry about Twitter as it’s the key metric they are pushing.
Excellent article and great read! All makes perfect sense and sooner it becomes reality the better!
What a brilliant article, BRILLIANT I SAY! I am involved in a start up channel currently and while performing my “due diligence” to understand the advertising industry it just kept striking me how amazing it is that no one seems to notice the shell game that is in play. Sooo much of what you have written is credible logical and rational… which means…