Like many people, I think the Attention Economy (discussed here and here and here is a big thing). Why is it big? Because technology makes your attention a quantifiable asset of ever-increasing value. You have access to more and more information from a diversity of sources (attention scarcity) and you also have tremendous control over what you pay attention to (including not paying attention to advertising as I mention here). What’s more, technology allows others to record and quantify this precious asset in powerful new ways.

Access to your attention (both your historical attention profile as well as your dynamic “here and now” attention) is the precious currency that every company on the Internet is seeking. It will continue to become more valuable as new companies compete for it. The Internet will always provide us with an unbelievable number of options, but it won’t give you more than 24 hours in a day.

Online companies that figure ways to control/broker/protect/enhance your attention will reap huge rewards. John Hagel has a great post on this idea here, in which he states that people will seek out infomediaries that provide ever increasing returns on their attention. And the folks at Attentiontrust.org write about this all the time.

You may be thinking, if this is true, why don’t people think about their attention as a form of currency? In the future I think we will. But let’s face it; this is complicated stuff (it is for me anyway). Making it more complicated, a lot of the recent discussion about attention has centered on the concept of getting attention online as a new form of self-worth. Esther Dyson recently commented on this here and others have chimed in (see this post for example, “I can be Googled, therefore I am”).

I’d like to stay away from this more esoteric discussion. Although important, I don’t think we will get to this level in the attention economy until we show the mainstream how their attention currency can help them obtain more pragmatic benefits. (Andy Lark makes a similar point in his blog here). What kinds of pragmatic benefits am I talking about? For starters, how about the delivery of increased relevance and direct monetary value.

This is what Jellyfish is all about. Our mission is to provide consumers with an easy way to obtain maximum benefit from the most valuable form of attention they provide online: their buying attention. From this frame of reference, attention is better referred to as intention; the intent to do something. Both the present intent of an online consumer to buy some product or service and their historical record of buying intentions is the gold of the Internet. Buying intention is to Internet companies what crude oil is to Saudi Arabia: it is the underlying resource that funds everything. Before talking specifically about how Jellyfish wants to help you leverage this intention, let’s explore the primary way your intentions are being tapped by search and content providers online today, namely, to sell advertising.

Advertising and the Database of Intentions. Credit to John Battelle and his seminal post on the Database of Intentions here for recognizing that Search Engines collect individuals’ intentions on a massive scale and profit from those intentions through advertising. Google, to name one intermediary, has already made billions by connecting the intentions of its users to advertising (e.g., millions of people type their intentions into that magic search box every day and Google’s Adwords program auctions off those intentions to the highest bidder). The more these intentions can be tied to commercial (buying) intent, the more money Google and the other big engines make. In this way, Google makes money because it is a marketplace of intentions (see post here on Google as a market).

Thus, advertising subsidizes the true value proposition of Google and the other major search engines, which is to try to connect you to the world’s information. Similarly, advertising subsidizes all kinds of other content provided online, from blogs to the latest Web 2.0 companies. This isn’t new. Media has sold your attention to advertising for a long time. It is the bargain you have struck: I’ll put up with advertising on my television so I can watch this football game without any extra charges. Thus, there is a very established marketplace for your attention. It’s called advertising.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. For example, I love Google and Yahoo! when I want to find something (like the text of the Bill of Rights or fuel mileage on the Toyota Prius) because I can get a great return on my intent to find that information. The advertising doesn’t mess anything up because it isn’t the focus of this kind of search. It is more of a necessary evil so I can use the engine for “free.”

But what about when I have my credit card out and want to buy something? Do I get the best return on this kind of intention? Is there an intermediary that does for buying what Google has done for general search? I don’t think so. Why? Because these kinds of searches are primarily about advertising (connecting buyers and sellers) and the existing online advertising models (CPM, PPC) fail to align incentives properly between the consumer, the advertiser and the intermediary connecting them. The existing advertising models are all about the intermediary. The system is set up to maximize the intermediary’s return on my intention, often at my expense.

When I enter an “intent to buy” search today, the current advertising model creates a misalignment both in terms of the relevance of my search results as well as the distribution of $’s generated by those searches. Here is how: Let’s say I want to buy a coffee maker. When I type in this search at Google or any other intermediary (Yahoo! or Shopping.com, for example) the intermediary works hard to put the companies in front of me that have agreed to pay the most for my intention in the form of advertising fees. Thus, the more the intermediary is able to collect about me (my zip code, clickstream, etc.) and the more I use it to find things to buy, the more money it can continue to extract from the advertisers for access to me. The current system is misaligned because the search engine puts the company with the highest advertising costs in front of me (which creates the need for higher prices) with little regard to whether this is the best choice for my particular needs (relevance). As I have mentioned before, it reminds me of the mistrust we have for commissioned sales people that try to sell me the product or service that garners them the highest commission. Most of the value created by my buying intention is flowing to the intermediary in the form of advertising fees that primarily benefit the intermediary at the expense of the buyer and seller. To make it worse, this advertising system is hidden from me in that I have no idea why a particular advertisement was put as a top result and what it cost that company to get in front of me. Is this the best use of my intention data for either the buyer or the seller?

You can start to find discussions about this across the blogosphere. For example compare Robert Scoble’s post here about the use of attention data to create more and more advertising value for intermediaries with this Blogation post here, which argues that Google is keeping increasing amounts of information on its clients and advertisers alike to further its profit at expense of everyone else involved.

I think we will soon reach a tipping point where consumers are going to realize that when it comes to their buying intentions, search intermediaries like Google/Yahoo/MSN (and a host of vertical engines) are keeping too much value for themselves (advertising $’s) without delivering a corresponding increase of value to the consumers participating in this system.

At Jellyfish, we want to be this tipping point. We think the way to do so is to fix the underlying advertising model to align the incentives of all three parties involved in a sale (buyer, seller and intermediary). The advertising market does a good job of maximizing the value your intention (GYM have PPC auctions that do this everyday); it just hasn’t done such a good job of fairly allocating that value among the key stakeholders. In our marketplace, we plan to allow the existing advertising system to set a value on your intent to buy, but that value (e.g., your intention currency) will flow to you, to the advertiser, and to us only when we do a good job of using that intent (and your historical buying intentions) to connect you to the product or service that is right for you. This will happen seamlessly and without you even thinking about it in terms of driving a maximum return on your buying intention. In the transparent marketplace at Jellyfish, advertising will transform into intention currency and that currency will be used to efficiently match buyers and sellers.

And this is the way we think the attention economy will start to catch on for the masses: By integrating its core concepts into an easy to use application that has direct, tangible benefits to the end consumer and advertiser alike. The average consumer may not think about it as intention currency, but we hope the increased value to that consumer will ensure that she continues to come back each time she has intent to buy something online as opposed to just an intent to search for information.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 5th, 2006 at 3:26 pm and is filed under Transparent Advertising, Attention Economy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.