During the 2010 World Cup, Adidas changed the way they talked to potential buyers of their products. Rather than doing what they had done in the past, which was drive people towards their websites with the promise of star clips and prize competitions, they decided to concentrate all their marketing effort on Facebook. This meant that instead of trying to lure people into their own walled garden, they went out into the high street. They called it "fishing where the fish are".
At the moment, it looks like it's Facebook's world. We just live in it. It is the element in which all people below a certain age spend their days.
I'd never heard of Facebook until my son came home from his first term at university saying that everybody used it. He graduated this year. There is no more dramatic measure of how much the world has changed than the fact that in that short time, Facebook has become more valuable than News Corp.
This is not about Facebook. What's more important is that in that time, the relationship between media and its consumers has been turned on its head. The traditional contract between the media and its users has changed forever and owning the means of distribution no longer guarantees you attention.
Waking up to reality
Adidas's move recognises the fact that even the biggest, most glamorous commercial site can’t be a destination in itself. Doesn't matter how big you are, your brand identity is probably not enough. There's no point thinking that more than a tiny set of people wake up in the morning with your brand on their mind and therefore what the seller of sportswear has to do is make sure that his brand is at least in people's minds when they do. If Adidas are prepared to face up to this fact, how much more should publishers be swallowing their pride, packing their rods and heading to the riverbank to fish where the fish are?
Adidas have recognized that we're living in an attention economy. This is the dropping penny of our time. It's no longer our stuff that matters – whether that means trainers, pop records or the pages of a magazine - it's the attention of the user. This is the inevitable outcome of providing the customer with so much choice that your product and your message about it, is far less valuable than their attention. The customer is in charge. They have untold options but only a limited amount of time and long before we can get their time, their loyalty or even their money, we have to snag their attention. Suddenly all those outlandish predictions about the possibility of getting people to listen to new rock groups by paying them to do it, don't seem so far-fetched anymore.
Struggling to be seen
Magazines, like everyone else, have to get used to their new position in the hierarchy of the attention economy. They used to command a certain amount of people's attention merely by being in the market place, by virtue of the fact that five out of the ten people sitting opposite you on the tube were probably reading one. That ubiquity has gone and with it a huge amount of profile. At the same time, other toys have swarmed into the downtime magazines used to occupy. People no longer feel lacking something if they don't buy a magazine. It's perfectly possible for them to get on a plane for a long haul flight and not feel as if they need to weigh themselves down with paper reading matter.
It's this shift in people's habits which challenges magazines as a medium, rather than any dissatisfaction with the medium. Teenagers at a bus stop look at their phones when they used to look at Smash Hits. The women who used to dream about buying while flicking through the pages of a glossy are now clicking through pages on eBay.
But surely, they still need us, don't they? No, they don't. They might want a magazine, but that's a different thing. This revolution is less about needs than changing habits. Many people in magazines haven’t got used to that. Too much of the talk around apps for iPhone or tablet, for instance, is about trying to breathe new life into old formats. Not enough is about defining the new habits of the attention economy and looking at what we might have to add to them.
Publishers used to know how to get people’s attention. They bought ads on the TV. It was expensive but effective. They put a gizmo on the cover to tip the unsure. It was inefficient but it worked.
Setting the tone
Where do we do our attention-getting nowadays? Too many publishers look upon alternatives like social networking as a no-cost way of achieving the same impact. It's clearly the case that somewhere right now there is a conversation going on that your magazine would love to be part of it. This doesn't mean you’re allowed to burst into people's digital living room and fling open a suitcase full of samples. For a start, there's a tone that works in social media. It's called sincerity and there's no use faking it. One of the reasons for the decline of MySpace was it became seen as a place where people sold you things rather than a place the right people hung out.
In most cases, people choose to hang out with those they know already or have come to trust through some shared interest. This makes sense. People give most of their attention to people they already feel attached to. They increasingly take advice and direction about what they should do and what they should buy from each other. Magazines have to engage with that rather than think they belong to some special priesthood. The expert has to get out there and sell his expertise because if he doesn't some amateur will. If I want to know what item of entertainment technology to buy in years gone by, I would have gone to a specialist magazine. Now I just go on the Word website and ask people.
Give and take
There's a transaction here. You only get people's attention if you're prepared to do something for them. A healthy relationship in the attention economy depends on lots of acts of kindness and consideration. As Malcolm Gladwell pointed out recently, the larger a social network gets, the weaker are the ties between the people within it. You have to work to strengthen those ties. The attention economy is not simply a question of being informed about something. We're all informed of, or aware of, millions of things that we don't focus on. And focusing on something is only half the battle. What we need people to do is not just focus on our products but also focus on them sympathetically.
Where’s this all going? I don't know in detail but I do know you can no longer treat readers as passive consumers. What we're seeing at the moment, is the gradual emergence of a semi-pro class of contributors. Every month, Word's site adds 500,000 fresh words posted by readers. Thanks to the way we try to cultivate good manners and civility, most of what they write is readable. Some of it we actually publish every month in the magazine.
Yesterday, a reader posted a funny poem about Britpop. I contacted Steve Lamacq, the voice of Britpop, and he kindly recorded himself reading it. Then we posted this on the site. This is a tiny, trivial example of a pro-am collaboration, conducted entirely by email, but I can only see this kind of thing growing. We must do things with the readers as well as for them. If people feel you have a stake in them, then they are more likely to have a stake in you.
Star turns
Just as people increasingly take note of each other, they also take note of individual voices. In the attention economy, columnists and personality writers wield a new power. Because they have command of a certain way of putting their message across, they can engage in a way that a magazine brand with all its history, sensitivities and compromises, never can. In the attention economy, Caitlin Moran may draw more readers to the Times than the Times may deliver to Caitlin Moran. Journalists are going to have to get used to pushing themselves forward.
This is not simply a question of getting on the TV. I was talking to an author recently with a strong web presence. Having appeared on Sky News, he assumed this would result in a dramatic increase in traffic to his blog. He found it wasn't nearly as effective as actually handing out business cards to people when he made a personal appearance. Personal contact is gold in the attention economy. Scale is less important than person-to-person contact.
What kind of messages get across? In the attention economy, people respond to messages that are crisp, direct and provocative. Those messages travel far beyond a magazine's narrow constituency. One of the reasons the Daily Mail website is so popular is it has headlines which are, in some cases, longer and more explanatory than the stories they sit above. And on the web, they can engage, titillate and outrage all kinds of people who would never wish to be seen reading them.
Setting the agenda
Every day, the planet becomes obsessed with some new controversy, whether it's Chilean miners or the love life of Cheryl Cole. It's sobering to look at Google rankings and note how few of those stories come from magazines. Digital media has sent a gust of bracing vulgarity through the world. Often it has left magazines looking slow to get to their point and not very sure what their point is.
This could be because our value system was developed in the days when the newsstand was everything. It was built for gentle persuasion rather than impact. In the attention economy, magazine people have to accept that a certain amount of the time we spend endlessly polishing our message may have to be clawed back. If your editor is a talented communicator, what's the best use of their time? Stroking their chin endlessly over a pithy caption, arguing with a photographer or actually interacting with the people they should be communicating with?
This brings us back to Adidas. When they chose to fish where the fish are, they had no guarantee that they would work out a way to fish profitably. What they do know is that they have no choice. In the attention economy, magazines, like sportswear manufacturers, have to get out there and accumulate some currency, rather than sitting around, smoothing their skirts and hoping to get asked for the next dance.
