Is Attention the New Currency in Public Relations?

Emily Page (00:01):
In 2012, one man in sunglasses and a tuxedo cracked the code of global attention. His song became the first YouTube video to hit 1 billion views and for a short dizzying time, it seemed the whole planet was galloping to the same beat.

Doug Downs (00:29):
He was not tall, not conventionally handsome, not even the prototype of a slick K-pop idol. But Park Jae-sang, known simply as Psy, had what others could not buy. He had timing. The world was hungry for something ridiculous. And Gangnam Style was that dish served with a wink, a smirk, and a dance move that was impossible to ignore. Now here's the part that most people outside Korea missed. Gangnam is a wealthy district in Seoul, the Beverly Hills of South Korea. This song was not a celebration, it was satire. Psy was poking fun at the men and the women who strolled Gangnam’s boulevards, dripping with self-importance, strutting, sipping lattes, chasing status symbols. He was mocking the pose and the world ate it up. For a moment, he had it in the palm of his hand. Heads of state did the dance. Children performed it at school.

(01:30):
Psy became the ambassador of a cultural in-joke that almost no one outside Korea fully understood. It was not just the music, it was a global inside laugh 1 billion times over. But virality has a cruel clock. The next single came, and the next. But the thunderclap had passed. He never recreated the lightning of 2012, yet he was clever. Instead of fading, he built P Nation, his own label, signing fresh K-pop talent. He moved from the clown prince of Gangnam to the man behind the curtain shaping the industry itself. And in the irony of ironies, the very man who once mocked the pretentious strut of Gangnam now lives it, a multi-millionaire, polished, still striding stages, still commanding attention. He became in some sense the parody he once skewered. Today, Psy is back in the spotlight with his massive Summer Swag concerts in Korea, pulling crowds of 30,000.

(02:36):
He's slimmer, he’s sharper and still under the scrutiny that always follows fame, police investigations, media questions, lifestyle critiques. He still has attention, but as always, attention cuts both ways. And that is the point. Psy’s story is the parable of the attention economy: easy to win for a moment, devilishly hard to keep, because attention without trust is a party that ends the morning after. Today on Stories and Strategies, we ask: if attention is the new oil, how do PR and comms professionals keep the wells from running dry? Because you can't just ride the horse dance forever. Oppa PR style. My name is Doug Downs.

Farzana Baduel (03:38):
And my name is Farzana Baduel. Our guest this week is Mark Lowe, who is joining us from Brighton. Hi Mark.

Mark Lowe (03:44):
Hi, how are you?

Farzana Baduel (03:45):
Good. Now tell us, you are in Brighton. What is Brighton like for those who have never been?

Mark Lowe (03:51):
Brighton is a town on the south coast of England, quite unique. Great Victorian heritage. The Prince Regent was the one that brought it to life. It's got an amazing pavilion, incredible Regency Georgian architecture. It's by the sea. It's a party town. Great life. If you've never been here, you've got to come here. It's brilliant. It's a great place.

Doug Downs (04:13):
I have been, how about that? I have been, long time.

Mark Lowe (04:16):
Ago. Yeah, we love it here. And close to London as well. Only an hour from London.

Farzana Baduel (04:19):
Oh, fantastic. Now it's one of my favourite places in the UK. Now Mark, you are the co-founder of Third City, one of the UK's top independent PR agencies. You are someone who has built a career helping brands cut through the noise with smart strategy and bold creativity. And you are a voice that people listen to on how technology and culture are reshaping the way we earn and hold attention.

Doug Downs (04:44):
Okay, and that hold attention thing, Mark, that might be the string I'm trying to pull on here. You've said that attention is now a vital commodity in today's economy. I just want you to unpack that for me because when I hear we got attention, I'm thinking top of the funnel and I'm like, you got an impression, you got a view. So why is attention something so important, something that we as PR pros should be paying attention to?

Mark Lowe (05:14):
Well, there's been quite a lot written about attention as a commodity, but it's not something that's talked about a lot in the PR sector, but I think it's quite a useful framing for it, a good way for us to think about it. Some people draw parallels between attention and something like labour. For instance, in the Industrial Revolution, prior to the Industrial Revolution, labour was just something that people did. It wasn't necessarily something that they thought of as a method of exchange, if you like. And then what happens in the Industrial Revolution is you get commoditisation of labour and you get the institutions that mediate that, if you like. And so labour then becomes something which we possess as part of a big, massive labour that might exist in the entire population. This is something that people like Marx write a lot about.

(05:59):
And then obviously as individuals we possess a small amount of labour, a small amount of that resource. I think that there's now a way of thinking about attention in the same way, which is that if you think about it, attention as a resource, if you like, it's something that is finite and it's something that can be monetised. And in a way, if you look at the history of attention as a resource, or as the economy of attention if you like, it actually really mirrors and tracks the history of advertising itself. So the first concept in advertising was this idea, I think it was in the New York Sun, that you could, rather than trying to marketise the giving of information through a newspaper, the best thing to actually do to make money, the innovation, was that actually you should market the attention that people pay to that information.

(06:48):
And that is the birth of advertising itself. What we've seen then more recently in the last 20 years is, I think in the PR sector, we like to talk about advertising being in decline, but of course advertising is in massively rude health. But what's happened is that the business model of advertising has been taken in large part from the advertising sector into the technology sector. So what you see is technology companies that come along and they become the experts in the marketisation of attention. And the way that the technology companies think about attention, people like Google, literally is as a resource. It's a resource that's finite and it's a resource that we constantly need to tap. And as there is an abundance of information, again, this isn't my quote, I think it's Herbert Simon, abundance of information leads to a scarcity of attention. So it does operate exactly like a market, and we should think of attention almost as an economic fact, if you like. And that's a really helpful way, I think, to think about public relations.

Farzana Baduel (07:45):
That's really interesting. So looking at attention in the lens of as a currency of sorts. Now growing up, God, I was a teenager 30-odd years ago and life was pretty boring. I would just be watching TV and there were a few channels, and if I took the Tube, I was so bored I would just be looking at the adverts in order to have something to do, something to read whilst I'm on the Tube. And now, of course, I don't even look at the adverts half the time on the Tube. I don't tune into TV; I go straight to streaming. I pay the extra, I dunno, 20% to cut out the ads. So what does that mean now for brands? Because they have to work so much harder today, they're not just competing with other brands, they're competing with what's coming through on our phones, politics, entertainment, they're competing because all of a sudden we have everything at our fingertips. It's such a different world to the world that we grew up in.

Mark Lowe (08:48):
Yeah, I'll address your first point first. I think you're absolutely right. The difference between now and 20 years ago is that when you put content into the public space, you are literally competing with the entire history of human content.

(09:04):
And that was simply not the case 20 years ago. And that's what we talk about. This idea of the abundance of attention means that competition is as fierce as it has ever been. And I think what that's done in the marketing sector really is, as some of the business model of advertising has become slightly undermined, for instance, the making of money from production or from commercial media, that business model really has been taken by the tech companies. You've then seen a blurring of the boundaries between traditional disciplines within marketing and PR agencies starting to look a bit more like advertising agencies and vice versa. And what you're seeing there really is all these disciplines competing in one market, and that is the market for attention. That's really the space that we're all playing in.

In terms of how that applies to brands, well, in a sense I think we need to become what I'd term attention entrepreneurs. We need to think creatively and innovatively about both medium and message. So it's about making sure that you've got people who are native to and understand the grammar of specific media. In the last few years you've seen the growth of short-form video, algorithmic video, and that requires a sort of visual literacy. In the previous period with Facebook and Twitter, what you saw was a more textual form but compressed. Now you're seeing the rise of podcasts, which I think are giving more space for discursive analysis around ideas.

What you're seeing are lots of different media that are emerging out of innovation and digital change, and what you need to have is literacy within those media. Then, in terms of advice for PR people and for brands on the marketing communications side, you need to approach things as an attention entrepreneur, not someone tied to a specific medium, but someone who understands what would work on any medium that exists. And this applies to advertising too. The currency is ideas, because earning attention is a lot more efficient than buying attention.

Doug Downs (11:22):
I like that. And I like to look at politics as a bit of a lesson for us in PR, especially big election campaigns. In the US election last year, one party had twice as much money as the other party. They were able to generate an awful lot of attention and failed somewhat miserably, losing all three levels of government in the US. It's the Democrats that had the money and the Republicans, not that they were broke but didn't have nearly the war chest. Is politics a good theatre for us to study as PR pros when it comes to the attention economy, Mark?

Mark Lowe (11:57):
Always, and it always has been. Not just in terms of the attention economy but throughout history, I think the two things feed each other. Obviously there are learnings that come from the commercial space and the branding space that come into politics. In our present moment, brands probably have more to learn from politicians than the other way round. Whatever you think of Trump or whatever your political approach is, he's a genius attention entrepreneur. It's no accident that his background was as a TV producer, because that’s the first thing he understands. He also understands the power of a memetic idea, a big idea which symbolises something really important. The building of the wall is the prime example of that on the right: “Build that wall.” It's not a realistically achievable thing, but it is totemic; it symbolises something a lot bigger.

Farzana Baduel (12:49):
Do you know, Mark, I think you're absolutely right. I think it's quite interesting, President Trump's background in entertainment and how he has leaned into that and understood that a lot of people just don't want that highly scripted politician rhetoric, those generic speeches that actually at the end of it leave you thinking, what did he just say or what did he mean? I wanted to lean into a book recommendation, Mark, that you gave me earlier in the year, The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu. He talks about something interesting called the psychology of attention and the psychology and persuasion that's used to hijack human attention. Yes, there are all these wonderful apps, and they almost set a standard for notifications to come as and when, but at what cost? Do you think we're learning about the cost of giving our attention away to our phones and are starting to value it as a currency and put safeguards around it? With my phone, I now have turned off all the notifications other than from my family, they can get through, but only when I started realising the cost.

Mark Lowe (14:05):
Yeah, one of the things Tim Wu talked about, and in a number of other books as well, is the way that Google developed the concept of behavioural surplus. It's quite interesting how when Google started, they didn’t want to advertise. This is true of many tech companies, they start off believing that they could sell a good or a service in and of itself, but they quickly come to realise that the most valuable thing they can sell is people's attention.

(14:33):
This is where Google were the great pioneers, and all of the big tech companies have been helped by a lack of regulation or a lack of willingness by governments or legislators to intervene or to think of attention in the way it should be thought of, as a public good. Another really good book I’ve been reading is by Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. It’s a kind of treatise on how we've effectively given away our privacy, given away something without realising that we have, to technology companies. We should think of attention as a public good in the same way that water or utilities or services are, and our attention as citizens ought to be protected.

There are steps that we can take ourselves to do that, and trends that move in that direction. I heard Tim Berners-Lee talking recently, or our creative director Henry relayed this to me, about the “age of intention” rather than the age of attention: if we're going to give away our attention, we should give it away with intent.

Farzana Baduel (15:49):
It is also very reassuring to see all of these books behind you, Mark, your incredibly full bookshelf and all these books you've been reading. I must say that I used to read religiously a book a week at least, and I think in the last 10 years, I'm ashamed to say that I barely scrape one a month. Doug, I don't know about you, are you still an avid reader, and do you think our attention spans are shot?

Doug Downs (16:18):
I'm right with you.

Farzana Baduel (16:19):
Yeah, you're the same?

Doug Downs (16:20):
Right with you, because I'll lose myself in a scroll for half an hour. Or if I'm watching the baseball game and there's a commercial, it doesn't hold my attention. I decide to divert my attention to a meaningless mind-numbing scroll.

Mark Lowe (16:35):
But we're also teaching ourselves to do three or four different media at once. You're reading a book, watching television, on your phone.

Doug Downs (16:43):
I can multitask, Mark. I'm the exception.

Mark Lowe (16:48):
Yeah, well, that's what I like to think about myself as well. But I do wonder how much attention we can actually pay when we're trying to absorb so many things at the same time. And this is just a background from Zoom, by the way.

Farzana Baduel (17:03):
Oh, is it?

Mark Lowe (17:05):
No, I'm joking. It's real.

Farzana Baduel (17:09):
Oh God. You can see my sorry pile of books. I need to build them up for the whole visual kudos of background meetings. I was chatting to a client the other day and saying we need to make content a lot shorter. We were talking about YouTube videos versus short videos and long film, and the client said, is it true that people's attention spans are reduced? Because I still see people binging a TV series on Netflix for five hours. So is it that attention isn't reduced, it's just that we have to work harder to earn it, which I thought was different.

Mark Lowe (17:51):
Yeah, I think we need to be attention entrepreneurs, and you are seeing in politics those people emerging and being the most successful. From the left, since we're talking about American politics, and I'm aware there are other countries’ politics we could talk about, if you look at the Momani mayoral campaign in New York, that was a sort of left-populist, or left-pluralist, campaign. He didn’t behave like a typical populist in that he didn't have a big enemy to destroy. But his campaign was extremely Trumpian in that he used big memetic ideas, for example, making shops public, bringing them into the public sector. Big ideas, probably not achievable themselves, but representative of something that underlies them.

Doug Downs (18:50):
Mark, really appreciate your time today. Thank you.

Mark Lowe (18:52):
Thank you, thanks both.

Farzana Baduel (18:53):
Mark, I do have one question for you that was left by our previous guest, Richard Bagnall, measurement guru.

Richard Bagnall (19:02):
In five years’ time, what does he or she think that a PR agency or a high-performing in-house PR team might look like?

Mark Lowe (19:13):
In the agency world, and in-house as well, AI will have taken a lot of low-level tasks off the table, and that potentially is a really good thing. Hopefully those teams will then concentrate on the truly strategic things. One of those is competing for attention. Another thing, and we’ve not really talked about it, is the relationship between attention and trust. I know trust is something you talk a lot about on this podcast. There’s a complicated relationship there. People who understand that relationship will be vitally important because there have always been two sides to the PR industry, one about gaining attention and telling people about things, and another about trying not to get attention.

You will need attention entrepreneurs, people of all ages and generations familiar with all kinds of media. I'm not one of those who believes that AI will eliminate jobs for younger or junior people. It's not clear that those jobs are the most at risk. The one thing AI is not yet able to deliver is true creativity and originality. So you're going to need original thinkers, attention entrepreneurs, digital natives, people familiar with media, and then AI to do all the stuff we don't need human brains for.

Doug Downs (20:59):
Awesome. Your turn, Mark. What question do you want to leave behind for the next guest?

Mark Lowe (21:04):
I'm going to pass on a question that I thought we should have gone into on the podcast but perhaps warrants another one. Can you gain trust without first gaining attention?

Doug Downs (21:16):
No, you can't.

Mark Lowe (21:19):
I don't think you can.

Doug Downs (21:20):
But then trust and attention can destroy each other, cannibalise each other. People don't trust those they think are seeking attention. So there's an element of that going on.

Mark Lowe (21:36):
Exactly.

Doug Downs (21:36):
There's danger, you need to do it the right way and listen to people at the same time. I'd liken it to a comedian, who I think are the best presenters on the face of the earth, better than presidents. I asked one once, while you're speaking are you listening at the same time, reading people and taking cues? He said that's the whole job, while you're delivering, you're reading. And I think that's one of the ways to get attention most effectively: measure it and understand whether you're doing it the right way, and maybe listen before you seek to get it.

Mark Lowe (22:19):
Exactly. Listening is something I'm constantly working at and not always succeeding, but you can't have attention unless you listen.

Farzana Baduel (22:29):
Thank you, Mark.

Mark Lowe (22:30):
Thank you both.

Farzana Baduel (22:33):
Now here are the top three things that we learned from Mark Lowe, our guest. Number one, attention. See attention as a finite resource. Mark explains that attention is now like labour in the industrial age, a scarce, monetisable commodity that underpins modern advertising and PR. Number two, competing in an attention market. Brands and agencies aren't just up against each other anymore; they're battling all kinds of media, politics, entertainment for attention, which demands creativity across all platforms. And number three, being attention entrepreneurs. Earning attention is more powerful than buying it. Communicators must act like entrepreneurs, taking risks, adapting to new media, and creating ideas that resonate.

Doug Downs (23:28):
I like the idea that he challenged the notion that we have shorter attention spans. Not necessarily, I think we're just more conditioned to accepting interruptions. My phone pings, I check it; I wonder if anybody's texted me recently. I think we're more distracted.

Farzana Baduel (23:47):
Yeah.

Doug Downs (23:48):
If Mark got your attention today and you'd like to send him a message, we've got his contact information in the show notes. Stories and Strategies is a co-production of these attention seekers: Curzon Public Relations, JGR Communications, and Stories and Strategies Podcasts.

Hey, what are you doing this Friday? Me and Farzana go live every Friday afternoon to talk about the week's events and put a PR lens on them. David Gallagher from Folgate Advisors joins us. Catch us on LinkedIn or YouTube this Friday at noon Eastern or five o'clock British time. That's high-tea time, right? You can have it with us on a Friday, talk about the news through a PR lens.

Thank you to our producers, Emily Page and David Olajide. And lastly, do us a favour, forward this episode to one friend. Thanks for listening.