Consumer attention is the new currency.

Cutting through the information clutter and facilitating customer relationships is vital to effectively marketing your brand in the new "attention economy."

"Anybody who still thinks we're operating in an information economy, think again. In this Internet world, there is too much information and it's not getting any better," said Dave Hutchinson, president, Conversion Partners, said at AD:TECH.

"This fact is placing an escalating premium on consumer attention. Which, in turn, is making attention itself the new common currency for modern marketing," he said, in this noisy, hyper-competitive digital media landscape that we live in, attention is becoming the ultimate common currency for modern marketing. If you think of attention as a medium, it is the first medium where the consumer controls the inventory of this medium, not the Fortune 500 advertiser or the major media company or the ad agency," Hutchinson said.

David Tokheim, senior director of consumer intelligence for Brisbane, CA-based IGN/GameSpy, agreed the volume of the messages have become a problem, adding that consumers demand relevancy to the information being provided.

"If you want to reach our audience ... it is so important that you don't [tick] them off. And how do you not [tick] them off? Through relevance," Tokheim said.

"One of the programs we put together for the gaming companies and for the retailers was this framework from which they build their media plan. We call it the crescendo campaign. First you whisper, then you murmur, then you rap, then you preach then you scream. One of the problems we saw was everyone was screaming. All they wanted to do was scream [their message]," he said.

Excerpted from MediaPost, 7/14/04