Define “Attention” Carefully: 5 Questions With Faris Yakob

Every so often, Media Future politely barrages an industry leader with five questions on a variety of relevant industry topics. This time, we’ve spoken to agency veteran Faris Yakob, founder of Genius Steals and author of Paid Attention: Innovative Advertising for a Digital World.

How do you define “attention?”
Carefully. As a psychological phenomenon, which up until very recently we have only been able to study or discuss subjectively. fMRI work chases blood and oxygen and activity around the brain, which is starting to reveal more to us. Whilst it seems obvious — our attention is the directed, focused expression of our consciousness — it’s complex. Attention has multiple states, which work differently. It sets up weird illusions in our thinking — meta-cognitive errors — because it makes us too confident about our perceptions and memories, which are biased and flawed. It actively suppresses the perception of details, to enhance focus, and then our brains lie to us about that. We only see a tiny circle in the center of our view in detail, but if seems to us as though everything is the same. It is connected to emotions, but emotional moments tend to further suppress details.

It certainly isn’t possible to conflate it all into one thing and then swap that idea for the media currency of impressions, which are fungible.

What compelled you to write a book about attention?
Partially is that it lies at the foundation of so much of advertising. TheAIDA model of how advertising works, and the impression currency of media, are both predicated on the idea of attention, and yet we have a very naïve understanding of it. Partially it was the idea that it has become scarce as a function of its attractors becoming abundant. The word advertising derives from the Latin advetere: to draw attention towards something. So if part of the advertising industry’s function is to attract attention, I thought we should perhaps understand it better, and consider what’s been attracting it before and now.

What’s a good book you’ve read recently?
I’ll go one better. I publish an annual[ish] Ex Libris that shares some things I’ve been reading that I think people might be interested in.

IT CERTAINLY ISN’T POSSIBLE TO CONFLATE [ATTENTION] ALL INTO ONE THING AND THEN SWAP THAT IDEA FOR THE MEDIA CURRENCY OF IMPRESSIONS.

Name one trend you see emerging in the next 5 years that will legitimately change how we think about advertising (versus is just hype)?
Well, here’s where prediction and desire get mixed up. As I discuss in the book, there are 2 broad sides emerging. One is the continuing championing of interruption, the inevitable escalation of the arms race for attention. The other is thinking differently about advertising and its value proposition, thinking about the role of brands in the world, and culture, and social behavior, considering how advertising can deliver value, become a force that isn’t actively disliked, that doesn’t irritate, that ads value to consumers and clients. I see both continuing.

But.

Mobile will flip this year, next year, to becoming the only important screen, which brings all kinds of opportunity and challenges, since we really haven’t worked out how advertising exists there, beyond the obvious troika of search, apps and app install banners. Mobile ties all other media together, squeezes them into your hand and pocket, let’s them interact with others.

In fact, I’d say that in 5 years there will only 2 discrete kinds of media. ‘Digital’, which will mean everything delivered through screens, mostly through mobile, some through the device formerly known as the television. ‘Physical’ which means things in the world you can’t shift or block: billboards, installations, events, shopper marketing.

And I think that will force us to change how we think about advertising.

What’s one pressing issue that the advertising industry is ignoring right now?
Ad fraud is a huge one, but it’s part of the ever widening gap between understanding brands, behavior and business and what too much of the industry’s time is spent doing, managing digital complexity of various types.

Agencies are brilliant business models. They separate ideas from executions, which means they can evolve into anything, but mostly agencies remain firmly focused on film.

The fact that clients see less value, and less integration, and want to further suppress agency fees as part of marketing spend.

And finally, the fact that we don’t really understand how advertising works, especially not in light of the challenges presented by behavioral economics and modern cognitive science, which serve to show we dimly understand consciousness and human behavior at best, and our claims to direct that behavior through messaging are hard to substantiate.