Attention marketing is the term, coined by internet entrepreneur Steve Jelley to describe a particular business model that has evolved around the growth of social media on the internet. It was popularized by the book Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable by Seth Godin.
The phenomenon is an extension of marketing, which describes the generation of consumer interest or inquiry into products or services of a business. Traditionally, businesses have generated customers using the techniques of Internet marketing, such as search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimisation (SEO), banner ads on specific websites, email marketing, and mobile advertising.
Social media companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, by contrast, do not rely on these tools to generate user attention. User-generated content makes up the majority content on these sites; users therefore view content on the sites according to what interests them most. This behaviour collapses the traditional barriers between content, distribution and marketing, as any activity on a social media site effectively achieves all these three functions simultaneously.
Business opportunity
Rather than interrupting users' attention in order to market to them, the business opportunity available to social media in capturing people’s attention and channeling this attention to an appropriate vendor when it presents itself as a genuine desire to buy.
Previously, it was very difficult and expensive for business to market themselves on anything other than a mass, or broadcast basis. Targeting messages to individuals, at any kind of effective scale, was all but impossible. But social media has changed that. By using social media channels to target according to users' attention, business and other organisations can make their messages far more relevant and appropriate to individual consumers.
For businesses to suddenly shift commercial focus from the mass attention of a broad audience to the particular attention of individuals, however, requires a complete change of corporate mindset. Inside media and marketing organisations, content production, distribution and marketing have traditionally occupied different - and usually warring - silos. Because of the intimate connection between the content and the opportunity to create a lead, however, attention marketing necessarily collapses these silos and brings them together.