Agencies and the Basic Attention Token
For the last twenty-four years, the Web’s advertising model has been fairly consistent.
Twenty four years ago, I happened to be in the right place at the right time to watch Brian Behlendorf wired up the first servers at Organic Online — the first digital agency.
Brian told me that big brands like Volvo and Ford wanted to purchase advertisements on websites. I did not believe him.
I got that one wrong: for the last generation, the whole business of paying for impressions on a Webpage has remained remarkably consistent.
Because a Website visitor leaves a trail of data breadcrumbs, website analytics soon became a thing, growing into an entire field itself, offering both website publishers and their advertisers a detailed view of audiences and the ‘reach’ of their marketing spend.
That seemed like a good idea at the time. Yet what started as insights quickly turned into an addictive acceleration into the deep profiling that’s led Facebook to its dead-end.
Facebook is pretty much the final word in analytics — knowing their users so well their profiles accurately monitor their emotional states. You can’t really hope for more than that.
We face an unpleasant truth: the Web advertising model as we’ve always understood it has played itself out utterly. There’s nowhere left to go.
You can double down — that’s certainly Mark Zuckerberg’s plan — but there’s no reason to believe the results will be any different. Different outcomes require a different approach.
For the last two hundred years, the relationship between advertiser and audience has always been mediated by a publisher — newspapers and magazines, broadcasters and websites.
Like so much else in the digital world, that connection between advertiser and audience is being disrupted. Disintermediated. Advertisers can now pay audiences directly for their attention.
While that’s always been theoretically possible (and is locally true when you consider focus groups) it has never been possible to realise that business model at scale. It’s simply too expensive to think about paying audiences for their attention. The advertiser has always had to rely audience aggregation.
Brendan Eich, the very bright fellow who gave the world Javascript way back in 1995 — creating the modern, programmatic Web — stepped forward last year with a very different kind of offering, one that he believes can fix the bind that we’ve worked our way into — this increasingly unhealthy arrangement where advertisers continually pump publishers for more detailed user profile data.
It’s called the ‘Basic Attention Token’.
Because of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin it’s become easy to create digital money. People have now started to spin up all sorts of ideas for how they’d use money for specific purposes.
In Brendan Eich’s case, he developed a new kind of digital money — a token — that’s designed to be used to pay for the attention of a Web user.
Rather than paying Fairfax or SEVEN or Bauer Media for a thousand impressions, the advertiser establishes a direct relationship with audience members.
Ok, so that sounds like a lot of work. Why would you do build these direct relationships when you can get a thousand impressions from an aggregator?
Because this is all about relationship, and it all turns on single insight — when you change who gets paid, and for what, you build a bridge over the gap between brand and audience.
This is an emerging point of opportunity for any firm that helps brands build those relationships.
This is the old-yet-new way to connect with customers; honouring the relationship by paying audiences for their attention, using that to change the way the audience thinks about and relates to brands.
It’s easy to imagine brands working to recognise which members of the audience they should be lavishing their attentions upon — and it’s easy to see that brands would pay for this.
Rather than being profiled by others to onsold en masse, the audience reveals itself; its value to a brand can be gauged by the depth of information offered up — both by the brand and its customers.
In the system envisaged by Eich — and already substantially in place — advertisers can pay for audience attention in Basic Attention Tokens.
These Tokens have real monetary value — worth around seventy-five cents apiece.
The audience can spend these Basic Attention Tokens consuming any content of their choice, creating a virtuous cycle, where a strong brand relationship is reinforced by a meaningful content experience.
That’s always been a goal, but it’s always been difficult to guarantee. When the audience starts driving, that sort of thing happens all the time as a matter of course.
All of this is already in place: the Basic Attention Token can be used in the Brave Browser to compensate the audience for it attention while simultaneously compensating content providers on sites such as YouTube.
It’s a beginning. It’s not very big right now. But then, neither was Web advertising back in 1994, when Brian Behlendorf co-founded Organic Online.
As was true then, this is an idea whose time has come.
