What is “attention”?
I remember a few years ago when I was working to position myself as a social media marketing expert. There was one particular influencer I followed for a while. He boiled his entire message down to this central kernel:
“Go grab that piece of attention!”
His style was a little splashier and in your face than mine tends to be. I personally wouldn’t talk that way (although maybe I should…🤔). But his message stuck and has shaped my thinking. He conceived of the entire human species as one big audience containing one big commodity. The commodity is attention.
He’s right. It really is that simple. Simple is not the same as easy. The simplest nuts often take the most effort and experimentation to crack.
Because knowing about audience is not the same as knowing who your audience is or how to persuade them to send some of their limited supply of attention your way.
But the entire game of human life is one of understanding audience, which is why it has a place in my model of existence:
A while back I wrote about audience, where that word comes from, and what exactly it means. You can read that here: https://aaronjmarx.com/blog/a-christmas-agreement
Today, let’s take a similar approach to “attention”. How old is that word, and what does it ultimately mean?
Linguists have traced it back to 1374, in Chaucer, who wrote The Canterbury Tales. He borrowed it from Latin.
The Latin construction is at-tentio, derived from ad-tendere, both of which literally mean “stretching toward”. Do you see it? Tension. Tenderness. Tautness. Tightness. Pointing in different directions, flowing from our cognition and desire.
When you are communicating in any way you are always asking members of your audience to stretch out toward you (myself included at this very moment as you read this).
What stretches exactly? The soul? The spirit? The essence? Metaphysical opinions vary. But this linguistic chain indicates a sense of individuals searching, meeting one another, seeking unity.
When I think about human commerce, the exchanges we seek and enact, this is how I imagine it. Many, many individuals and overlapping audiences, with limited attention that is always stretching in some direction or another, searching, seeking a goal. I think the goal is a sense of completion, and you need to figure out how your product, service, and organization fits into that collective project of completion. Once you do, you will meet your goals.
A long time ago something that was purely unified , timeless and spaceless (God and/or a cosmic singularity) divided into and/or created individual agents who must act in time and space. Attention is nothing more than our process of stretching out between one another, driven by a deep desire to reunify.
And your organization is part of that. You promise some sort of completion. So, who is stretching out in that direction? That’s who your marketing, and indeed all of your communication, is ultimately for.
Everyone is giving their attention to something right now, because it’s not optional. We’re consigned by spacetime to be looking in some direction or another. If you have something that will offer completion (and I think we all do at many different levels), figure out who it will help, and stretch in their direction so that they will be compelled to stretch back. When the two stretches meet, agree on terms, and shake hands, value is exchanged, and thus created, and so the net worth of creation continues to grow as we move closer to collective completion 🤝
That’s the essence of commerce.
And Chaucer gave us a crucial piece of the equation back in the 1300s with his clever importation of ancient Latin into English.
The better part of a millennium later, we are still engaged in the same process.
So stretch out, meet your audience(s), and go grab that piece of attention!