[First published in The Economic Times Brand Equity, April 2024]
In the year 2005, Andrew Fischer, then a 20-year old web designer and product photographer went viral across all media, globally. This was a time when viral had not become mainstream. Fischer offered his forehead for advertising on eBay to the highest bidder. A snoring remedy brand, SnoreStop paid Andrew $37,375 for keeping the brand logo tattooed on his forehead for one month.
Bizarre, is what one would have thought then. Maybe not now, in this era of a booming influencer economy and the celebrity-industrial complex going mass.
Anything that can get attention is media. Or like independent analyst Eric Seufert’s now famous and popular quote “Everything is an Ad Network.”
Last week, it was reported that JP Morgan Chase bank has announced Chase Media Solutions, offering advertising solutions to brands, targeting Chase customers. Yes, a bank is now also a media platform.
Audience aggregation opportunities naturally lend itself to media (attention) business. Buy audiences cheap with free content (news and entertainment) and sell them to advertisers. This pattern of harvesting attention was more or less the same over the years. From the penny papers of 1830s to radio and television. In the digital era, it progressed to offering some functional benefits for free such as search for information, social networking, etc..
In digital, one of the earliest attempts was not purely based on a free service. Prodigy, backed by the likes of IBM and Sears, and one of the earliest network services (1990), built its business of connectivity with the hope of building huge advertising revenues. Advertising revenue was to offset the loss-making connectivity business. Incidentally, shopping business model was Prodigy’s Plan B.
With the arrival of retail or merchant media, it is no longer free. Audience aggregation is based on a functional benefit, but it is not free. The functional benefits are revenue generating and is the core of the business (shopping, ride hailing, etc.). And selling attention is an additional opportunity, a meatier one though, because the core business reveals much more about the customer, making it valuable to trade.
Apart from the large online retailers, there are more businesses now keen to profit in the business of attention. Cars.com, United Airlines, and Marriot Hotels are some of the businesses that announced their media networks in the past year. And now, the banks!
In the 1920s, when advertising was moving from newspapers/billboards to radio and then later to television, the debate was whether one can invade into the privacy of living rooms or not. The revolt against advertising happened in 1930s, post Great Depression, and then in the 60s with the counter culture movement. But everything soon died down because ‘people simply watched more TV’.
Will we soon have ad-blindness? Maybe yes. Maybe no.
Recently, on the way back to the office from a client meeting, a colleague looking through the car window and seeing multiple billboards exclaimed “wherever I turn, it is ‘buy’ ‘buy’ ‘buy’”.
If Descartes had to say something about our times, it might be ‘I buy, therefore I am’.