Pinko Attention

I just had a fantastic conversation over coffee with Tara Hunt of Pinko Marketing fame. There are so many parallels and intersections between AttentionTrust's mission of empowering people to exert control over their data, and the Pinko Marketing manifesto (concisely encapsulated in the "New Power Pyramid" above).

For starters, a key aspect of Pinko's philosophy is that listening is more important than talking. As individuals, we're less and less interested in what marketers are trying to tell us, and we'll go to great lengths to avoid their unwanted, intrusive, irrelevant attempts to capture our attention and broadcast their message. Instead, we want them to listen to us--we want them to pay attention to our needs, our desires, our interests, and respond appropriately, in the time and manner of our choosing, not theirs.

And the infrastructure that will support applications of this approach to marketing will be built on attention data. As individuals, we're constantly expressing our needs, desires and interests through the data we generate during the course of our daily activities--our clickstream, our browsing history, our tags, and on and on. But right now much of the data that we create is inaccessible to us--it disappears into corporate or government silos, few of which make it possible for people to get their own data back--so it's of use only to the entities that own those silos.

This state of affairs makes it much harder to effectively implement Pinko Marketing principles. If we can't access our data and use it to speak on our behalf, how can marketers hear what we're saying? Listening to what we say explicitly--in our blog posts, for example--is a start, but it's insufficient. Despite the growth of the blogsphere, it's still the province of a small minority of Internet users. In contrast, every Internet user in the world is constantly generating data that effectively constitutes an individual voice, a means of expression, if only it could be heard.

I think there's a great opportunity for people working on attention and people working on Pinko Marketing (and the application of new marketing principles in general) to work together to help individuals find new ways to express themselves, help marketers find new ways to listen, and build an infrastructure that will make the whole thing work.

tags: attention attentiontrust attention+trust attention+economy attention+data pinko+marketing tara+hunt