Who Owns Your Attention?
Posted by Josh Klein
Who owns attention? The viewer or the one viewed?
Jinal and Geeta wrote about the ban on outdoor advertising in São Paulo. They highlight it as an example of the struggle between natural and man-made art.
I think it’s also an interesting example of the struggle for who owns our attention. An advertiser clearly own a highway billboard, but does a driver own his view of the countryside?
My economist friends would tell me there is a market failure here. Beautiful views are a public good. That is, “consuming” a beautiful view doesn’t preclude anyone else from doing the same, and it’s not possible to exclude someone from appreciating it. This creates a free rider problem, and the beautiful view declines because it has no caretaker.
But banning billboards isn’t an efficient or appropriate solution. I’m a big 1st & 5th amendment advocate; don’t touch my freedom of speech, and don’t take my private property for public use.
Maybe, like for farmers, advertisers should be paid to let the billboards “lie fallow”. In naturally beautiful areas, property owners should receive a subsidy if they keep their land ad-free.
Thoughts?
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6 Responses
I think the strongest argument here is for 1st amendment protection- free, public speech is something we wish to be careful about limiting, even if we find it annoying or ugly. That said, most (not all) econ arguments about advertising come down on the ‘it’s a bad thing’ side. While it’s not actually a free rider problem, it certainly is a collective action problem- it would be in the best interest of businesses if no one advertised and costly marketing techniques like public displays could be scrapped. In a world devoid of ads, however, there would of course be huge gains to one firm being able to advertise, hence the countervailing forces from other firms, etc., until omnipresent ads push things closer back to equilibrium levels. Likewise, there is a general sense among consumers that seeing ads is a bad which detracts from otherwise scenic vistas. While I ultimately disagree with the coercive force of the state to restric free speech, Sao Paolo’s method is certainly effective at solving the collective action dilemma.
One thing I would be interested to learn is what ads will be like 50 to 100 years from now. We can already see a trend where ads are becoming more like art (yes, this is relatively, if not obviously true). Will ads be forced to compete entirely for the aesthetic pleasure of consumers? I would think yes, especially as consumers become more and more cognizant economic actors and the world of information becomes so saturated that the only margin of competition will be niche preferences and hilarious jokes.
Thoughts?
Ads that solely provide aesthetic pleasure are, in my humble opinion, useless ones. I think the future of ads is less like art and more like product. I don’t think traditional economics arguments consider ads as features.
What happens when an ad provides actual value in addition to the value it provides as an ad? Amazon’s “other readers who liked this book also liked…” is an ad with real usefulness.
Ads that just compete on aesthetics are failures from the outset when there is so much potential to inform the consumer.
Not everything is a pretty commodity.
But perhaps creating something that is aesthetically pleasing that is branded - even in name alone - would generate a more positive relationship between a brand and the consumer. Most brands need to stop just selling products, and start giving something back in some way if they want to attract true loyalty, and create a real emotional connection between them and their target demographic.
Totally, Ben. I’m a big advocate of that aesthetic coming from the product’s usefulness itself. To me, it’s all about the unintentional artistic quality of something with a real function.
Beauty is function. Function is beauty. I’m so deep
Have you checked out METHOD products? They sell cleaning supplies that are eco-friendly, housed in design-forward packaging. Two fantastic reasons to buy from them. In a market dominated by giant companies, they are tiny. TINY! And they succeed because they have values, and aren’t trying to be the best. And they know it.
And i love it.
A lot of stores are selling them, but at the (artist formerly known as) Food Emporium, they are shelved on an individual display stand, free standing in the middle of the aisle in the dairy section - nowhere near any other cleaning suplies. Unique packaging? Unique location? Niche demographic? Sounds like someone read Purple Cow.
METHOD is great, and positions itself well as a brand. I’m a big fan of their choice to attack a niche and dominate it while the big clumsy giants ignore them. Or do they pay attention?
You’re a great example of the success of this approach. You want to cheer them on, and rightfully so. We all love an underdog.
And we love brands that enable us to live the way we envision ourselves. Look at bottled water, for instance. Ethos donates part of the proceeds of their sales to help children. Of course, bottled water is about as un-green-friendly as you can get no matter where the money goes, but that isn’t the vision they are selling.