State of Marketing!? Welcome to the Age of Attention Wars
Algorithms, Ads & Audiences
Marketing has reshaped the course of our history, made western world more richer than the counterparts. People have a sense of community belonging and cooperation right from the dawn of human brain evolution. Companies and brands have used Story telling as a vehicle to reach millions if not billions of customers. By implementing these gimmicks brands get to develop mind share the feeling of belonging to a group or cohort.
For the purpose of this post, let’s limit the marketing to post WW2 and how few books like Scientific Advertising by Claude C. Hopkins (1923) have strategized theories that were put in practice to influence peoples decisions in purchasing products and ultimately compounding the nature of consumerism.
“Don’t speak to the crowd—speak to the man. Every ad should tell a story meant for a specific reader, not a vague mass.”
– Claude C. Hopkins, Scientific Advertising (paraphrased with original intent)
Market Forces:
For better part of last couple of decades, companies have build systems that can capture the attention of users. Systems underlying to applications needs scale like infra upgrade to meet the demand of users, this potential laid path to Ad exchanges to support the unit economics for growth. In my working memory of using apps; companies like Reddit, Facebook, Google were able guide the onboarding with selection criteria of interests that necessarily improve the system behaviour towards the users preference. This allowed the companies to hyper target the likeable products (apps, movies, etc.). Personalization has become a major theme for almost 3 decades.
Circa Covid-19, personalized products like TikTok have paved path to short form content consumption. Ultimately nudging companies to incline towards viral short form content creation, which appeases to Gen-Z, alpha at mass. Why them ? cause they are digital natives and majority of the cohort from these generations are by default adapted to this world of Electronic devices around them. In short the extension of symbiotic relation with devices is natural and its part of natural evolution.
Attention span has been shrinking by nature as with the duration of content creation. IMO, if history has taught a lesson on attention, it is that we as humans would like to synthesize information from multiple sources and use them to our advantage to survive in the world. Over the course of history human species have started writing on rocks, scriptures, printing press, books, radio, TV, Computers, Mobiles, AR glasses etc. If we examine the trajectory closely each paradigm has provided an opportunity to cut short the information gathering process. To summarize this info is to help readers understand the process is a natural extension of human behaviour not any generation’s fault.
What Now ? and going forward..
Short form content creation is going to be next big thing in marketing, especially the way Cluely has emerged in seeking users attention. By and large this wave is exciting and interesting times to watch out on new avenues will emerge to reach audience in an innovative way.
Observe the trend is getting traction and interestingly this behaviour is consistent with emerging companies in the space. To be fair the short forms perfectly fits within the realms of digital natives. For eg, screenplay, camera angles, shots, lifestyle, relatability, routine, habits and everything in between is packaged to appease segment.
Text to video generation models will be leading the way for marketing in the short term growth or to become viral instantly. We already see glimpses from companies adopting this strategy. Which is win-win in marketplace : for service providers (Veo, Sora), brands to make users accustomed to this new way of brand adverting, consumers get huge catalog of products to select from competition.