Marketing in an attention economy (I)
Posted: Tue Jan 28, 2025 9:51 am
Twenty years before the Internet, Alvin Toffler was already complaining about Information Overload. But never before has consumer attention been so fiercely contested . Give us a few minutes of your time to learn how companies can stand out from the crowd in the attention economy.
In 1970, in his visionary Future Shock, Alvin Toffler popularized the expression “ information overload ” to describe the difficulty in processing all the information available at a given moment in time to make an appropriate decision. A year later, Herbert Simon took the analysis a step further:
What information consumes is quite obvious: it consumes attention. The more information, the less attention. Therefore, the abundance of information creates poverty of attention and the need to distribute it effectively among the abundance of information sources that can consume it.
Herbert Simon
Information Overload in a world where the World Wide Web was bank data two decades away and the extraordinary 1.44MB floppy disk fifteen years away from seeing the light of day . Spare us…
THE NEW POSSIBILITIES OF WEB 2.0
The Web, however, would make the prophecy of information overload a reality.
Unfortunately, there is a tendency to replicate the known in the new, repeating communication strategies in different media . Marshall McLuhan warned of this fact in the 1960s, leaving us with a beautiful summary that is so often ignored: “the medium is the message”. The medium counts, but the mistake was repeated . In just a few years, the Web was invaded by mass advertising that some consumers learned to ignore and others, less patient, came to hate. A specific term was even coined for the first situation: ad blindness .
Spreading advertising had become too easy and cheap, but being heard/seen became progressively more difficult . By providing new possibilities, Web 2.0 amplified consumer resistance and widened the gap. The production of information ceased to be a corporate monopoly; we all went from being consumers of information to consumer-producers; the download generation gave way to the upload generation . And today we share more than ever: ideas, opinions, photos, videos, tweets, likes. In short, consumers have become less dependent on brand communication; between stimulus and purchase, pre-purchase has been established in the ZMOT .
Exposed to hundreds of advertising messages every day, consumers have become more suspicious, have learned to filter ads and, when they can, have reacted. How? Precisely by dispensing with mass communication, and by gathering information online from peers or from new services that have been created in the meantime, and by being more demanding in the selection of sources to which they pay attention.
In 1970, in his visionary Future Shock, Alvin Toffler popularized the expression “ information overload ” to describe the difficulty in processing all the information available at a given moment in time to make an appropriate decision. A year later, Herbert Simon took the analysis a step further:
What information consumes is quite obvious: it consumes attention. The more information, the less attention. Therefore, the abundance of information creates poverty of attention and the need to distribute it effectively among the abundance of information sources that can consume it.
Herbert Simon
Information Overload in a world where the World Wide Web was bank data two decades away and the extraordinary 1.44MB floppy disk fifteen years away from seeing the light of day . Spare us…
THE NEW POSSIBILITIES OF WEB 2.0
The Web, however, would make the prophecy of information overload a reality.
Unfortunately, there is a tendency to replicate the known in the new, repeating communication strategies in different media . Marshall McLuhan warned of this fact in the 1960s, leaving us with a beautiful summary that is so often ignored: “the medium is the message”. The medium counts, but the mistake was repeated . In just a few years, the Web was invaded by mass advertising that some consumers learned to ignore and others, less patient, came to hate. A specific term was even coined for the first situation: ad blindness .
Spreading advertising had become too easy and cheap, but being heard/seen became progressively more difficult . By providing new possibilities, Web 2.0 amplified consumer resistance and widened the gap. The production of information ceased to be a corporate monopoly; we all went from being consumers of information to consumer-producers; the download generation gave way to the upload generation . And today we share more than ever: ideas, opinions, photos, videos, tweets, likes. In short, consumers have become less dependent on brand communication; between stimulus and purchase, pre-purchase has been established in the ZMOT .
Exposed to hundreds of advertising messages every day, consumers have become more suspicious, have learned to filter ads and, when they can, have reacted. How? Precisely by dispensing with mass communication, and by gathering information online from peers or from new services that have been created in the meantime, and by being more demanding in the selection of sources to which they pay attention.