What is attention?

The American Psychological Association defines it as “a state in which cognitive resources are focused on certain aspects of the environment rather than on others.” To that, we’d add one more important factor: attention is finite and, therefore, valuable. Nobel laureate psychologist and economist Herbert Simon observed  in 1971 that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Tech theorist Michael Goldhaber expanded on this in the 1980s, stating, “obtaining attention is obtaining a kind of wealth that puts you in a preferred position to get anything this new economy offers.”

Attention in the digital world

These perspectives have only become more relevant with the emergence of digital commerce. We are currently living within an “attention economy,” where (to paraphrase Thomas Bryan, the author of “The Attention Economy”) human attention is a scarce and valuable commodity, where advertisers and digital platforms compete above all to capture and monetize user focus.

Attention and advertising

In this world — defined by deeply emotionally (sometimes enraging) content and the endless scroll — finding the space and the ways to not just be seen, but to be heard and understood is critical. Too often, though, the tools available to advertisers fail to accurately measure attention, settling instead of inexact proxies like clicks or impressions.
To win in this world, advertisers must move beyond such tools as their measure of connection, and look instead to attention as the measure of whether a message is meeting its audience.

That’s where we come in. To learn more about how Synexus can help you connect with your audiences through the identification and leveraging of high-attention, high-quality media environments, reach out to us today.