Brands need to steal consumers’ attention from someone else: Faris Yakob
The world has reached the point of attention saturation, with consumers so engrossed in media, that brands seeking to speak to them have to steal their attention from somewhere else, Faris Yakob has warned.
Speaking at Mumbrella’s CommsCon the founder of Genius Steals said the time for public relations to become the predominant carrier of messages had arrived as traditional advertising struggles to carve out a slice of people’s attention span.
Yakob said that from the time of Shakespeare when Marc Antony demanded “lend me your ears”, the attention economy had become more and more important.
“Attention has a value, therefore we can infer that it is finite because only things that are finite have value,” Yakob said.
““The creative industry has begun to understand that earning attention is crucial,” he said.
Wow, I never thought of that! That is earth shattering! Listen up, everyone, Faris Yakob says….
Oh boy, I hope he didn’t get paid to say that.
Well it’s quite easy to take one simple sentence from a presentation without context or nuance and be cynical.
If you put the emphasis on ‘earning’ then frankly there are many creative industry people who still don’t get that, or don’t get it very well.
But if you take what Faris says as a whole, in his conversations and in his book, then it’s far more detailed and intelligent than your half assed comment suggests.