thereceptacle

On some level, the ultimate promise of the web has always been truly personalizable marketing. The web offered the first portal through which truly unique advertising experiences could be provided to each user, and could be more accurately targeted to that user’s interests and habits, hopefully increasing the chances that she will click on the banner or add to her shopping cart. The missing link here is the mechanism by which the advertisers collect information about users to use in tailoring these custom ad experiences. To this end, information hungry vendors have been finding cleverer and sneakier ways to record our browsing, viewing, listening, and consumption habits—to record where our attention is being spent.

AttentionTrust seeks to retain that information as a user’s own property. The argument is essentially that if companies are benefitting from this information, that it has value. If it has value, is a commodity, and has an owner who must be compensated. This seems to me like a new take on an old debate. This is less a privacy concern (although proivacy certainly factors in), and more of a fair trade issue.

Herman Simon once said:

“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”(via Bokardo).

This view clearly denotes attention as a quantifiable commodity, which AttentionTrust President Steve Gilmour has dubbed “Attention Metadata”. It could be easily argued that the sale of Attention Metadata would benefit advertisers as much as users. Rather than spend money on developing clever ways to encapsulate and then analyze searches, browsing habits, click patterns, or even email messages - and then spend money in court defending these practices - the money would go more directly to the users, who would provide cleaner, more useful data. The user, in turn, would get a more personalized ad experience, increased transparency as to who has what information, and some sort of compensation.

I have enrolled with AttentionTrust and I’ll be very excited to see how far they can take the issue.