Attention Economy

This week in the DLD Hubert Burda said that their business is attention. Basically all advertisers are in this business - how you attract the attention of the consumers to your customer’ product?
As any manager knows, in order to manage a successful business you got to be able to measure yourself very accurately. So the question of course is - if you are in the attention business, how do you measure the attention of the users?

This is a huge question that many companies are trying to answer these days. We at NuConomy think that we have a very unique answer to this question, but of course there are also other companies who came up with their own solution for this.
2007 was the year that basically everyone agreed that it’s about time to stop just counting on page views numbers and fins some new metric. Some call it attention, some call it engagement. No matter what’s the name, the idea behind it is to better understand how the user actually interact with web sites. Meaning, not just the pages he visits but also his interaction inside those pages.

Although companies such as us and others are already offers some solutions to this new measurement needs, big advertisers still have to deal with two major problems:
The first is the fact that there is still no standard to this new metric. And if there is no standard, you can’t compare yourself to your competitors or even between different campaigns across different ad networks, sites and platforms.
The second problem is how to correlate attention data from the real world, to the attention data collected in the digital one. If you deploy campaigns in the web, TV and billboards, how can you track a person activities on the web and in the bricks and walls shop and understand this is the same person.

I don’t believe 2008 will bring us the answer to the second question, but as for the first I will guess that by the end of the year, we will get see emerging new standards and terms coming from the IAB.