Brand trust—why human attention beats algorithms

Fortune calls this the age of algorithms. Some are calling it the age of AI. For advertisers looking to capture consumer spending in a world of infinite choice, the lure of algorithms, AI and performance marketing is all but irresistible. But it’s a losing battle. Performance marketing, in which advertisers, in theory, track the efficacy of their campaigns based on clicks and other online behavior, is attracting brands in ever greater numbers. And it’s understandable: At a time when it’s harder than ever to capture attention, brands are turning more and more to the big tech platforms whose claims to drive purchase decisions are backed by reams of data. Human attention is arguably the world’s most valuable resource. There’s a reason that the founders of the AI model developed at Google and used by ChatGPT and Midjourney is based on something called “attention mechanisms” which reflects the way that humans process language (they even called the white paper this idea was founded on “Attention Is All You Need.”) See all of the 2024 Small Agency award winners here Yet as I’ve watched the growing trend toward performance marketing over several years, four points are abundantly clear: Customer acquisition is the lifeblood of a company, and this is particularly true of new businesses. Startups spend almost half of all venture capital dollars marketing themselves, and a vast majority of that on platforms such as Facebook, Google and Amazon. But if you listen to experts on consumer psychology such as Marcus Collins, Gerald Zaltman and Colin Cooper, or just consider your own recent purchase behavior, it’s clear these decisions are far too complex to be reduced to a single online interaction. Consumer decisions are governed by a much wider range of factors, including memories, anxieties, stereotypes, cultural differences, associations and trust built up over years and even decades. These emotional factors are what give brands permission to curate cultural moments, and they’re what drive our decision to buy just about anything. Take the choice to spend $120,000 on a Porsche 911. That’s a decision that might begin when you’re 13 years old and see “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” or “Risky Business” for the first time. The idea of owning that Porsche unfolds over several decades and may reach its conclusion only amid your mid-life renaissance (sounds better than “crisis” doesn’t it?). Take a more modest decision such as going to McDonalds. That decision is also built up from a lifetime of memories and associations shaping how and where you choose to eat, and long-held ideas about mass-produced meals, portion size, customer service and affordability. A brand is a shared cultural belief about a company or product. It’s not just what I think about a brand that defines that brand to me. It’s also what I think other people think about that brand, and how they’ll judge me for buying it. This complex web of associations is why trusted media platforms that surround brands with cultural storytelling, such as Condé Nast, HBO and Marvel, still have so much power, and why the luxury brands that make up LVMH are only growing in relevance Brands take years, if not decades, to build but are easy to destroy. Advertisers that rely primarily on performance marketing are ignoring this—sometimes with disastrous results. Nike’s recent sales struggles, capped off recently by the company's market cap decline by $25 billion in a single day, follow a years-long shift toward performance and programmatic marketing over harder-to-measure brand storytelling and sponsorship. And in some cases, performance marketing is really ad tech using AI to get credit for consumer purchases that are going to occur anyway. And it’s not a sustainable marketing strategy in any scenario, especially if your competitors are going to drive up your bids for your own customers. If you believe performance media can get you a customer, you have to believe that same transaction controls the customer, and the next time, that same platform can move that customer to buy something else. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs What performance marketers have effectively set up is a series of toll booths on commerce globally. And the impact of this toll system is that companies without brands, media and products alike, will see their margins go to zero over time. Imagine I’m selling batteries, and I believe that I’ve sold those batteries because of a platform. According to the logic of performance marketing, the next time a customer wants to buy a pair of batteries they’re not going to come back to me, they’ll return to the platform, and the platform will prioritize the seller who pays the most. This is the logical conclusion of retailers becoming advertising platforms. This is not to say that brands should avoid performance marketing. It is nearly impossible to do so, and they should strive to be experts in how to use performance marketing. But it is to caution that overreliance will come at a price, and it is as important to invest in engaging consumers and culture for which returns will occur on much longer horizons. As the world’s largest companies invest deeper in AI and machine-driven models of advertising and commerce, the rest of the business world is following suit. In a sign of an ever-deepening dependence on this business paradigm, even tech VCs are buying NVIDIA chips so the next generation of tech companies have an advantage in training their AI models. But as someone who has spent time in media, tech and venture capital, it is clear that it is as important to focus on how you will earn human attention and what you will do with it, as it is to focus on the AI and algorithms that help you access it. The only thing that reduces customer acquisition cost over time is brand. Our most successful CEOs and founders get this basic fact—what we give our attention to shapes the people we become and ultimately the products that we purchase. Ultimately the most impactful use of human attention is powerful storytelling, played out over a long time in close alignment with compelling cultural moments, respect and trust. And that trust—our emotional attachment to brands—is uniquely human. 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Brand trust—why human attention beats algorithms

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