Paid Attention: Innovative Advertising for a Digital World Paperback – April 28, 2015

I just finished reading this book and I have to say: Thank you Yakob! It is very hard to find books that combine theory, personal experience and case studies in a way that you actually learn from. Plus, the storytelling of the book is great and easy to follow. It has a bonus, it give you real tools that can actually help you in your everyday work. If you are in advertising/marketing you have to read this.

A good book on the subject. Needs some review for next editions because of some typing erros

Probably the best text that I read over the past 5 years about advertising and digital. Simple and clear, and very transparent on how our industry and agency model should adapt - or reinterpret- their core business.

Faris is a genius. Read this book if you want to understand the soul of marketing and advertising. It's not just about campaigns and ads and social media. Faris elevates the conversation to the fundamentals of grabbing human attention, and the history of the industries that attempt this every day. His wit, intelligence, and thoroughly researched concepts will give you a strong foundation from which to build a business and brand.

Faris Yakob starts off as you would hope for a book called Paid Attention, explaining that it is no longer possible to purchase the magazine, program or time slot to have your entire target audience seeing and/or hearing your message. Media have multiplied, fragmented and taken the audience with them.But then he walks away from the argument. He gets on his horse and rides madly off in all directions. There are lots of references to studies, psychological, biological and case. There’s lots of name dropping. But he doesn’t examine the state of paid attention. The last third of the book is about working in ad agencies: what do ad agencies do, the importance of advertising awards, how creativity works and how it should be broken out. The exalted act of stealing. The evolving role of the planner.He cites all kinds of wonderfully creative marketing campaigns which were considered successful, but as in medicine, the operation might have been a success, but the patient died (New products have an 80% failure rate). There’s a lot of evidence Yakob reads widely, fiction and non. But then, he cites the dubious authority of Jonah Lehrer, a totally discredited author/researcher. Twice.Yakob can be refreshingly truthful, calling market research wrong and the traditional purchase funnel “explanatory fiction”. All the brainscanning advertisers pay for only proves we don’t know how or when decisions are made to purchase their products. Forget about why. Dictating when and where content will be encountered is impossible for much of an on-demand world, he says. “Calling people consumers tricks you into thinking they spend their whole lives buying stuff, or thinking about buying stuff. But they really are not that interested.”Which brings me to his focus on brands. By limiting brands to consumables purchases, he (and every other writer I’ve seen on this topic) leaves out all other kinds of brands. Not all brands imply something to buy and not all “relationships” are commercial. You don’t have to have a “relationship” with a brand – the holy grail of ad agencies in the social media era. FBI conjures an unmistakable response in everyone. So does Red Cross. The Salvation Army. Mount Everest. Uncle Sam. Smokey The Bear. They do not speak to product value or aspects or functionality, luxury or low end, customer service or lifetime guarantees. Or style, innovation or class. They don’t advertise on the Super Bowl, Yakob’s favorite wellspring of examples. But they are extremely strong brands. And we can learn from them, if someone would bother.From this book, I imagine Faris Yakob to be highly intelligent and insightful. It might be fascinating to see him apply himself totally to a single thesis and dig deep. This little book does not show that effort.David Wineberg

For all of us who are involved in the marketing world this book es perfect.

Thanks to the author for such a well versed book that offers much info and insight intriguingly about advertising in general. Yet, relatively little had been written on how to make advertising innovative, nor make the most out of new/online media. May not satisfy the professionals well, but definitely good for anyone who read for fun.p.s. Below please find some favorite passages of mine for your reference.The most over-asked question by five year olds is the most under asked questions by adults – Why? – Dave BirssThe word advertising is derived from the Latin advetere, which means to draw attention to something (literally, to turn towards). Pg4All media, in totality, can be understood as the world’s total available bandwidth. Pg4Content became digital and ubiquitous and this led to the idea of an attention economy. Content is now abundant but the human attention that can be allocated to it is finite. Pg5This attention economy is not the intention economy beloved by vendors, who grab consumers’ attention in order to sell them something. Rather, attention here has its own intrinsic, non-monetizable value. The attention economy is one in which people spend their personal time attracting others’ attention, whether by designing creative avatars, posting pithy comments, or accumulating “likes” for their cat photos. And that means less attention for the advertisers who are paying for it. – Esther Dyson pg5Effecting change is an inherent function of all communication, because communication is persuasion. Who (says) What (to) Whom (in) What Channel (with) What Effect. Pg6Humans have an inbuilt desire to spread their own ideas. There are compelling anthropological reasons for this. We pass on our ideas in order to create people whose minds think like ours, because this delivers an evolutionary advantage; there is safety in numbers. Pg7A brand is simply a collection of perceptions in the mind of the consumer. – Paul Feldwick pg17When musician Dave Carroll’s Taylor guitar was damaged in transit on United Airlines, he attempted to deal with the matter using standard customer service channels. He says that after nine months of fruitless negotiations, he decided to write a song about it. The song United Breaks Guitars has had more than 12 million views on YouTube,….Finally United’s MD of Customer Solution telephoned Carroll to apologize and ask if the carrier could use the video internally for training. Pg36Individuals want an easy life – humans are like electricity, following the path of least resistance. Working in a call center for the minimum wage doenst tend to make people especially invested in the brand they represent, so they palm off customers, get rid of them, drop the call. In fact, many call centers offer bonuses on call volume, so it is actually going to cost an operator money to keep talking about this problem that they haven’t been empowered to solve. Pg37If you don’t trust your employees to tweet freely, it’s an employee or leadership issue, not an employee Twitter policy issue. – Tony Hsieh pg37The whole premise of the site is that everything is more valuable when you have context about what your friends are doing. That’s true for ads as well. An advertiser can produce the best creative ad in the world, but knowing your friends really love drinking Coke is the best endorsement for Coke you can possibly get. – Mark Zuckerberg Pg38It is not emotion or reason, but always both. Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb is an exploration of the huge, underappreciated role of randomness in life. Taleb looks to understand the stochastic limits of epistemology. His core thesis is that we think we know how things work, because our brains like cause and effect so we apply a deterministic model to observation. This leads us to make mistakes and leaves us open to being “blown up” (trader lingo for losing beyond what you believed possible) by very rare events of huge magnitude. Taleb dismisses classical economics as pointless due to its reliance on the increasingly hollow rational man construct. Unfortunately, we are intellectually wed to binary oppositions, so once we realize that emotions had a role in decision making, an opposition was established between rational and emotional persuasion in communication…..Thanks to people such as Phineas Gage, who have had accidents that damaged their amygdalae – the almond-shaped groups of brain nuclei involved in emotional reactions – we know this simply isn’t true. When people lose access to their emotions, they are no longer capable of making decisions. We like to think of ourselves as rational beings, but without the heuristics of emotion to help us, we would never be able to decide anything. Pg46-7To truly see, we must pay attention. Pg51There is a famous and probably apocryphal story of a Toyota executive who asked his teams to brainstorm “ways to increase their productivity”. This proved unfruitful, until he rephrased it as “ways to make your job easier”, which led to many, many suggestions. Pg117We tend to overestimate the effect of technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run. – Amara’s Law pg137

An excellent work with exceptional currency. In my experience, Paid Attention was substantive enough to add knowledge, insightful enough to help me "break frame", and short enough to hold my attention. All in all well worth reading if you are a marketer, a technology executive with a business model predicated on social technology, or a media or business executive framing your corporate social strategy.