Ben Young
Ben Young
July 28, 2023

Edition #410

Kids versions of sports events, TikTwitter & Alf is making a comeback?


First edit from an airport in a while! Last week I mentioned the Twitter thing, where Elon is using attention to measure the success of the app. And also, there was an eMarketer on how if you look at Metas share of attention vs its spend, marketers should be assigning a lot more to Meta! Kind of Mary Meeker vibes.

And I just wanted to revisit that. Because attention IS all the rage, and really, it is about mind share. If you can get more attention in a day, you have more mindshare. It’s the same thing.

I kind of like a few clients that were expressing their share as a percentage of Facebook time, i.e. we got 1 minute of viewing, in an average 16 minute usage on Facebook. I forget the exact number. But the idea was to get more than their fair share of time.

And that’s what Twitter is trying to do, to find ways to provide more value to users, so they spend more time. And in turn draw more users in. And Facebook does the same, they just don’t talk about it in the same way. They’re competing for a share of your digital time.

And we’ve just had a huge run up the last decade of expanding digital time. But that growth is (or maybe has) slowed, with covid return to work. But also, there is less time in the day now to convert to digital attention.

Which is why attention keeps surfacing as a metric, because it is the scarce resource. Although some reasons for it are a bit weird. Like you used to run Google Ads and get ‘view through conversions’. With the idea that people who saw the ad and it assisted in conversion. But then some of those ads weren’t even in view! So really they didn’t help at all. So then viewability was used, to go, only count ads that were seen. So then ads were jammed above the fold, or floating, to boost viewability.

Now attention is being used to score ad slots as a quality measure. This ad slot gets more attention than this one in a panel study. So you should bid more for it.

Or like Nudge, using attention as people engage, to see the impact of any experience.

Attention is mindshare.

Also, ICYMI, I shared our new growth handbook last week, read more here.

Notable stories this week

  • Ryan Reynolds is bringing back Alf for a branded content series.
  • F1 did a kids broadcast in the weekend, here’s what it looked like.
  • Elon Musk’s rebranded Twitter cuts ad prices.
  • Intuit launches media network for small businesses.
  • Why and when to launch products during a recession.
  • A decade ago, Jeff Bezos bought WaPo. Now he’s paying attention to it again.
  • Twitter changes logo to X in corporate rebranding.
  • Publishers cry foul as SSPs claw back revenue lost to MediaMath’s bankruptcy.
  • TikTok launches text-only posts to rival Twitter.

Deals/M&A

  • Altice is weighing a sale of Cheddar.

Campaign of the week

  • Choosing Earth: How to accelerate the energy transition. EDP with FT.

View all 2023 best campaigns.

Datapoints of note

  • Spotify ad growth was 12% YOY.
  • Spotify has more than 100,00 video podcasts on the platform, up from 70,000 in March this year.

That’s it for this week.


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