Competing for Attention - Andrew Crofts
This month I read “The Attention Merchants” by Tim Wu, a thought-provoking study of how clever big business is at packaging and selling our time and attention to third parties, (i.e. advertisers). They are basically harvesting our time in the same way that they harvest our money. The book starts with the advertising posters produced by the likes of Toulouse-Lautrec, (after a nod to the great religions of history), and continues through the evolution of newspapers, cinema, radio, television, the internet and smart-phones. One element of the story is the rise and exploitation of “celebrity culture”, as part of the mechanism for capturing people’s attention, which reminded me that in 1990 I published a book brazenly titled “Hype! – The Essential Guide to Marketing Yourself”. The astonishing thing is that less than thirty years ago I was still only “predicting” an explosion in self-marketing. The full blast of reality television and the Internet was still to come. (I also r...