Can you teach an...

It's a question I have asked myself fairly continuously over the last four decades and it’s fascinating when you consider how much innovation has entered the landscape over that time. When I first started in business, desktops took up most of the desktop, mobile phones came in a suitcase with a whip antenna, and Mr Berners-Lee was still writing software code for Plessey.

I recall, I was a CMO at a self-congratulatory awards ceremony back in the day - we had just swept Grand Prix for some act of creative genius (that I hadn’t really had much to do with), when a chap from the, now long-gone COI, waved a feature phone at me and said we should be putting our TVCs on here…he was probably a bit pre-inflection and it was at least 10 years until we did. I twigged there was more to gain from watching and learning early technology adoption and letting others take the risks.

A mate worked as a talent scout in the record industry, they were blessed with the best of everything back in the 80s including vinyl and natural musical talent, she had the earliest form of email I was totally captivated by little dos messages which popped up on screen, but again it would be years until I could stop mail merging outbound printed letters and hit e-send to all.

TV exploded from 3 channels to hundreds, then the Internet (called new media at the time) replaced TV, breaking down international boundaries and deposing print media from their authoritarian place of control. I remember Facebook, Twitter and Linked In launching all launching; streaming services like Napster and Netflix, when just a twinkle in their creators eyes. It has been a genuinely incredible journey, but what have I learned along the way?

I think it’s probably as simple as don't jump first, learn to adapt...and work out the difference between trends and fads.

For sure, to be human is to innovate and adapt, ironically normally in equal measure to our fear of change, but it’s still hard to believe that in no more than a couple of generations we are now the most technologically savvy species on the planet (not that the competition is great); the older me certainly wonders how the younger me filled his time without all this gadgetry and tech.

Having eventually braved a jump into innovative technology (actually a bit more of an unsteady teeter through a number of mobile, tech and data businesses and start-ups) I find myself on the team at Dragonfly AI and facing another inflection points as we enter what we think will be a big year for Attention.  

As a rule "The Year of" Inflection points are typically predicted either badly or over-enthusiastically by trade pundits and are not normally a point in time; more a measure of media activity achieving a critical mass – as a for instance the year of the mobile was predicted continuously from around 1990 to around 2010 and when it did, it wasn’t a flag waving day to remember – it just sort of happened.

In Dragonfly's world we focus on forecasting predicted consumer attention and how it is measured, we help our clients quite simply get better results from all their visual collateral. We’ve been in market with our attention prediction platform since 2014, so of course we believe we are close to a tipping point where brands globally will see the significance of attention metrics in creative performance enhancements.

But what is attention and why is it important?  

In our world now super-saturated with content in every channel, cut through is vital, ultimately everything we make to communicate with consumers has a destination or touch point where the consumer first comes into contact with it. We basically reveal a previously unseen layer of biological attention, instantly identifying what your consumers see when they see your content, what’s pre-dominant, what’s likely to get missed and how it sequences.  

Our platform provides a ton of smart attention metrics, taking away not just the guess work and subjective creative bias to simply shows us what works in terms of human attention. Our user community uses the Dragonfly platform to test and adjust content until it’s “human ready” before it's published. 

We work with brands and agencies producing all forms of pre-market visual content to ensure it is fully optimised before its published on everything from packaging to POS; and from e-commerce to digital display, making sure it is delivering exactly what we want...from pack shot focus, to comms hierarchy sequencing. 

Because our platform can ingest from any source and test in any channel it’s really versatile and our brand partners are trained to use it so they drive the insight and can control their content better than ever before.  

When we meet potential clients, we typically come across two types of response:

Those who get it but don’t want to break a process to work out where attention fits (and sometimes that's regardless of the acknowledged benefits optimised attention will deliver).

The other response is I want to understand what attention can do for me but don’t know where to start. To anyone in this category, make yourselves known, I would be happy to show you in person.  

Our experience is that if we can provide force-multiplication for both top line efficiency and bottom line performance by some pretty significant factors - it's a no-brainer to take a look at the role of attention. But in this article of mixed metaphors – you can lead a horse to water but you can’t force the focus of it's attention…or can you?  

So is 2023 the Year of Attention? Frankly I don’t really care whether it is or not; what I do care about is helping brands find and communicate with their consumers efficiently, which is all the more important in the current context.

I always reflect in these written blogs that Dragonfly AI is a visual analytics suite and words can seldom do justice to it...so do give us a shout and a 10 minute spin through will explain visually all you would ever need to know about attention but were afraid to ask…and if an old dog like me can learn it – we all have hope…