Selling Sex

We're all trying to figure out the mother lode of online advertising. And they key concept to that, like my advertising professor used to say is: grabbing eyeballs. And how do you do that? Sell through sex.

Being edgy and creative are different concepts, yet they mean the same in marketing parlance. Viewers have been anaesthetized to such an extent that the marketing people should not be worried about stereotyping or offending people. There is so much sex and nudity in advertising that the combination is mind numbing. So what the marketing guys should be more worried about is on being ignored because of the viewer being desensitised to the image.

Essentially, what is offensive to my parents’ generation need not necessarily offend me. The radical and in-your-face concept moves from the extremes towards the centre. And what is now the extreme will be the ‘centre’ in a few more years. What I am trying to say is that edginess is a dynamic concept that marketing theories hold on to for dear life. And if at any point the ad is not edgy enough, they OD on it.

Advertising agencies and their clients would not spend millions of dollars in making ads if they didn’t think they would give them the publicity they need to sell their products. Why would they invest in a lost cause?

However evil I think the advertising world is, and much as I hate to admit it, sex sells. And like SeongBae said, movies and advertising are getting more violent and obscene. Products are pitched with such explicit sexual imagery and innuendo to the extent that some even border on pornography. But then again, sex sells and we’re all buying.

will media become more provocative?

I believe this “lack of attention due to information overload” in this century is one of the reasons why TV, movies and advertising are getting more violent and obscene. It makes sense if you look at this issue from media companies. Media are all about getting attention, and I guess they have to do what they have to do to catch up with these “busy people.” But then, what is the boiling point for this attention-begging phenomenon?

People will pay more attention to more violence and obscenity first, but they will eventually get used to it. It’s like the Jerry Springer Show. People got used to seeing so called “freaks” on the show that they don’t consider these “freaks” to be freaks anymore. Back in 1990s, gay people were considered to be extraordinary to put on the Jerry Springer Show, but nowadays, if Jerry puts some random gay couples on the show, it will not draw much attention from viewers. Gay couples in this century are pretty much normalized compared to 10 and 20 years ago. This is why the show is becoming more and more provocative. (I don’t know if "provocative" is the right word choice. I tried to think of an English word to properly describe this.)

So, here is my point of view. If media companies try to get more attention by becoming more provocative every time audience becomes apathetic toward the media’s degree of provocation, would there be some kind of boiling point for this? How far will the definition of “provocation” keep changing over the courses of time?

Adaptation in the age of ADD

The most startling thing about this sessions' reading — chapter 1 from Davenport and Beck's "The Attention Economy" — was to realize that it had been published in 2001. In "digital" years, that might as well have been the dark ages: before ubiquitous cell phones and text messaging; before Facebook and the like; before other Web 2.0 applications that are highly attention-intensive—in short, before our digital lives really became crazy. It's remarkable to realize how taxing all of these daily, almost constant distractions must be on our brains ... but is all of this making us stupid (as Jacie brought up)?

Clearly, we've all become a little more ADD in the way we approach information: We skim, browse, surf, and otherwise gloss over wide expanses of data ... but, then, we have to out of sheer necessity. Perhaps this is rewiring our way of thinking, but it (meaning the digital realm, especially the Web) is also expanding our ability to create, collaborate, connect, explore, co-critique, and expand our understanding. As Jacie pointed out, by allowing us to "forget" certain things that we can always Google later on when we need that piece of information, this should free up more brain space for greater niche knowledge and deeper wells of creative thought. In this sense, as we increasingly learn to manage our everyday information overload, we (theoretically speaking) should be able to adapt such that we can parcel out our attention more effectively—in other words, we're learning how to give less attention to the useless spam (mostly because better filters have improved that dramatically since 2001) and, hypothetically then, we should have more time/attention for the work that matters. Again, we're talking in theory here, since I recognize that we're still so inundated with information that actually carving out quiet space for creative work is getting harder and harder to do.

So, bottom line: The "attention economy" hypothesis put forward here certainly has merit in today's environment, but it doesn't account for the likely improvement, over time, of individuals in the way they manage that scarce attention.

Ah, but at the end of the day, I didn't really get through this article in full ... I just couldn't give it my full attention. ;)

measuring attention?

With so much information and so much to do, we use our own ways and often times we use new technologies help us manage our tasks, time, and attention. Then the debate starts here. There was an article on atlantic.com arguing Google is making us stupid. Guess you know I would not agree with that...... There's counter-argument from nytimes.com, however, saying technology doesn't dumb us down but frees our minds.

I like the second article on nytimes.com a lot more in that it argues we are in an era with so much information that advanced technology helps us save time and spend more time on creating. Similar to what we saw in attention economy, the article from nytimes.com also argued:

In a knowledge-based society in which knowledge is free, attention becomes the valued commodity. Companies compete for eyeballs, that great metric born in the dot-com boom, and vie to create media that are sticky, another great term from this era. We are not paid for our attention span, but rewarded for it with yet more distractions and demands on our time.

It is really interesting to see that a HP scientific calculator was banned in some classrooms in 1972 with the fear that it is detrimental to human intelligence. Well, ban calculators! Ban computers!! Ban SPSS!!

Sorry.... back to attention, thus companies use money to buy attention and users trade in their attention for something else. Attention, compared with cooking pot model, seems to be more concrete in that attention can be transformed into other currency more easily. But even though it seems more concrete, it is still hard to measure. One measurement suggested was time, a poor measurement. How else can attention be measured?

Here's a link to the videos of Poynter's eyetrack method (?).