How to Master the New Rules of Attention | Albert Thompson, Walton Isaacson

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 0:00

Have you heard of the Attention Stack? It's a simple framework for understanding the way marketers and advertisers think about reaching their ideal audience in a fragmented streaming ecosystem. And today we're catching up with Albert Thompson to learn all about it. Albert is the managing director of digital innovation at Walton Isaacson, working with brands like Unilever, Lexus, and Amazon. And in case you haven't had the opportunity to see Albert on stage, an ad-industry conference, he's here with us today. Welcome back to the State of Streaming Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Rowe, and today we're catching up with Albert Thompson to learn about how brands cut through the clutter and separate the signal from the noise of measurement. Enjoy. Albert Thompson, it's a topic I've seen you write and speak a lot about the attention stack. For our listeners who maybe haven't had that opportunity yet, can you tell us what the attention stack is?

SPEAKER_01 1:01

What the attention stack is. Look, it's interesting. So I don't I don't take credit for what the attention stack is. The IAB put out a report on the attention stack. When you looked at the wheelhouse, you saw streaming platforms, you saw social platforms and things that were gamified, which you didn't see as anything legacy. So what they said looked at was from their time and attention and a dedicated attention, meaning duration, not just a total accumulation of our day, but total just duration, like an uninterrupted stint. That was what the attention stack is. And for me, it was like, oh, this is very simple. That became the dynamic for which a series of things fell. And that's why when I went into, I think, Prague.io 2024, the theme of it was the wars for attention. You get a simplified in binary terms. We're trying to steal attention. The person in a dating app is trying to steal attention. You know, world leaders are trying to steal attention. Every time somebody press releases something you know is shallow or hollow or whatever, they're not really doing it. You're trying to steal attention. We're trying to steal it, hijrack it. And the whole idea is that attention gets you influence. Influence gets you power, and power should probably make money. And I think what people aren't oriented around is where human intention actually lies and how you actually harness it and capture it. I think there are a lot of things being chased in advertising and media, and no one is focused on the essential of the attention stack for their given consumer and half of it because this notion of your opinions aren't your own. They're an amalgamation of your environment, which around you, what's shouting the loudest, or what's most popular, what your friends are doing. But the bottom line is human's nature is always signaling. Okay. It's telling you where the attention is, it's telling you where to win. The question is, are you going to divorce yourself from yesterday and divorce yourself from the things you like and divorce yourself from your favorites and actually run down where real attention is so you can have influence, power as a brand, and you can make money so people transact as a brand.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 3:00

I think that everyone listening would agree those are indeed the goals of attention. And that's what we're in the business of doing is generating and selling opportunities for brands to be a part of that attention stack, thinking about how we activate, how we measure, how we reconcile and resolve a single identity and thinking about fragmentation. How do you approach that piece of the conversation? Okay, Albert, that makes sense. The attention stack, go where the eyeballs are. But how do I do it in a way where I'm not duplicating effort or wasting a ton of money?

SPEAKER_01 3:36

Well, I think look, when you begin to unpack the attention stack, you have to start to understand the rules of engagement where attention sits. Let's just say it's TikTok. You have to understand what TikTok rewards because that shows you how to participate, how you should land in the sandbox. It also established rules of engagement of what not to do. It also tells you what a user is willing to do. So if TikTok is willing to make somebody do it, then your through line execution needs to be about making people do the it.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 4:07

Literally do the thing like do the dance, go active, go to the restaurant, like actually take the next step and convert.

SPEAKER_01 4:15

It is personify product trial. So having said that, you want the your attention and how you've oriented it, what you're testing, all about getting people to try it as well, to do what TikTok says you need to do, what a creator says you need to do. And I think that a lot of things is you look at where attention is lied, you look at the rules of engagement, because they're there of telling you how to win, how not to show up, and you get the signal, the throughput to pull you into the narrative to get people to do the thing you want to do while you have their attention. And as simple as that sounds, there are a whole lot of people who aren't just doing that. Look, you want to show up at an event activation, look at how best to activate. Look at who does the activations the best. Look at study a live nation, study a Coachella, a South by Southwest. Look at the best, the best of how to show up and that they get traction. Okay. I think once you understand the blueprint of how to show up when you once you get the attention, then is that what are people doing? Because what they're doing is what you can measure against or track against or or uh balance engagement against. Like literally, human nature is very clear on what it is willing to do and unwilling to do. People just don't pay attention to what human nature is unwilling to do. There's certain things they don't want to do in an event, they don't want to do in your physical activation. And there's certain things they will do. Like they may make a slap fool of themselves, they may take a go on selfie camps, they may play games, you know what I'm saying, in terms of uh, you know, cornhole or something. And then there are things they're like, no, we don't want to do that. And there are things they're like, no, people don't do that when they show up in person. People that just keep it real about what they want to do. And then there is, well, how can we design and interject a new experience that if they knew was possible or available, they would do it. Remember, the human brain hasn't changed in 10,000 years. We just got tools that allow us to do more stuff. So if we're a fool, we just have tools that allow us to be a bigger fool. You know what I'm saying? It's like if there are ways that we like to engage high touch, there are things that allow us to be even more higher touch. There are people who can go from being the introvert to the extroverted introvert. So the introvert who's out in space participating, but they like still like to keep to themselves. You know, the idea is that you look at activation as a way of allowing people to personify themselves while you have their attention. The more you get them to lean in, the more threads of attention you flipped into them. And again, those simple premises, people aren't doing. But that plays out across every single channel type, every single exposure point, all the way to CTV, because CTV will is second screen, and it always has been. So what are people doing a second screen on the phone? What do they might be willing to do? Well, if there's a call out on the screen to do something, they may do it if it's up there long enough. Here's the stupid thing. Put a QR code on the screen for three seconds. The human brain can get their phone out of their pocket, unlock it, hold it up, and scan it and know what it is in three seconds. So guess what? That thing has to be up to 30 to 60 seconds to have a shot. Again, what is human nature willing and capable of doing? It can't respond in three seconds. It can respond in 30 seconds. All you have to do is participate in a conversation and know that. These are basic. Remember when people used to put a URL up on the screen at the end of the spot? No one reads it. Nobody should read it while they're driving. That's right.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 7:32

We're not encouraging that.

SPEAKER_01 7:34

Ronum could read it as an in card, as an in-card in a commercial. They know what the logo is. Oh, yeah, yeah, that's Mercedes-Bitz. Oh yeah, that's Louis Vuitton. It only takes a second. But to the URL is www.lo, I don't even know how to spell Lu.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 7:47

I've never seen it before. I've never gone there before. I haven't literally typed those letters in that sequence. I don't know what that is.

SPEAKER_01 7:54

Correct. Again, these are very common sense oriented. And I just think people lose their mind coming up with things that are an idea that are actually a very stupid idea. And it's it's not that hard. We're over-stylizing things instead of keeping it very simple. And again, when I say the the human nature hasn't, you know, really expanded in 10,000 years, the human brain really hasn't evolved in 10,000 years. It's finding ways to create more capacity, but it still does the same thing. Hunter gathering. Okay? So I need to gather information and go hunt down and resolve. Give me enough time to hunt for it and then gather the intel and then make a decision. We're not designing experiences for basic hunter-gatherer modes. I just don't understand. So we got to go all the way back. Correct. Well, that's why you hear me say things like marketing is the parent company, which it is. And I think a lot of people are deluded. You know, people have this delusion, I like to say, or as we want to call delulu. They're delulu that advertising and media is the parent company. No, marketing is the parent company because it sets the frame. Advertising, sales, media, supply chain, manufacturing, distribution, those are derivatives under marketing. What marketing says is we got to make money. We're in business to make money. We're the entity that connects consumers to our product and a marketplace. That is marketing. That's why they call it marketing. Okay, so the idea of marketing is that you have to be able to speak the consumer talk and give them the opportunity to come into the frame and make a decision about you. They got to get along with you before they go along with you. A lot of advertising is just go along. It's like, no, I don't know who you are. We got to get along first. That's to be a value exchange. Your attention should be dementialized around how are you gonna get me to go along, get along with you, to like the brand, like the offering, to then make a decision to choose you. When you start breaking it down to brass tacks of marketing as the parent company with the consumer at the core, you make more sensible decisions. Even in social media, you say, well, how do we accomplish this? Well, we have to accomplish this by setting a proper frame on our brand presence. Maybe we have to show up in 20 posts because the 20 posts can unpack the let's get them to really like us, and then they'll decide to choose us, then they'll trial us, then they'll evangelize us. That makes common sense, but a lot of that is not showing up at the executional level. I think people need to turn down the noise and more signal. So the goal is less noise, more signal. More signal means more precision in the thinking and the execution.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 10:24

It feels like we almost need to flip it on its head. Like we need to, we need to flip the paradigm over and look at it differently, where right now we're focused on solving measurement first and working backwards from there. Or what are we really measuring if we don't understand the attention, what someone's willing to do, what they're likely to do, what's even capable. We're worried about measuring the investment today to preserve today, but we're really missing the bigger opportunity.

SPEAKER_01 10:57

100%. Because look, you have to start with the absence of information. Marketers advertise whatever you want to counts and brands. There's information they don't know about the consumer in front of them. I don't know what you think about this product. I don't know what you think about my spot. I don't know if you're even willing to buy it through uh engage to a television. I don't know if you're willing to go through the store. They don't know. They have behaviors on record, but they don't know for the impression they just delivered. Start with the absence of information. The absence of information is, okay, to what degree is there actually attention on the spot? Because if you're not measuring attention, what are you doing in the first place? You have no business being in the game.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 11:30

Did this go to a human? Did they give me their attention? And then we can worry about everything else.

SPEAKER_01 11:36

They just walk out the room and little Johnny, who's four years old, walking around in his diapers, and he's not looking at your stuff, but he's in there playing with a toy, but there's a human presence, but you need to know that that person who's the check writer actually just watched. So the fact that you're not measuring attention, stupidity. Again, the war is for attention. If they don't, if you don't have their attention, they will buy nothing. There's nothing to buy, there's nothing to sell. Marketing is broken. So the first thing you talk about was the absence of information. Do we have their attention? So let's measure attention. So Lumen, T-Vision, realize it, call up. Okay. The second thing we talk about is is there willing to transact? Is there willing to buy now? Have we done enough? Well, let's put a bug, a QR code, an activation point on the screen to see if we are there. Maybe there's not enough maturity in the product awareness. Maybe they're just not comfortable where this is going to take them. But at the end of the day, Amazon is already trying to prove out there's a percentage of the people who know the product maturity enough, they will clip. So now we can start to measure willingness to transact now or later. So we need to put QR codes bug on the screen to collect information relative to the rest of it. The second thing we need to do is we need to look at product or brand exposure sequencing. Sequencing. And this is kind of my favorite thing. When I was on Digidate's panel, I was talking about sequencing. And I said, here's the normal sequencing that is available. You can activate a CTD campaign now where you have the product on the home screen. So I loaded up Hulu Prime, Netflix, and there's an app before, okay, you told me you're in the game. You're on the OEM platform or whatever, or you're gonna, you're, you're part of the app experience. The next thing is I turn on the show because I'm there to see the show, I'm not there to see you. In the show, there's the product. Wow, somebody did dynamic product placement. I wonder who did that. Maybe it was a company Rembrandt. It allows you to do dynamic product placement post-production. Who knows? Well, or maybe you got it at the script level. Don't know, but now I see the product. I'm like, oh, that's curious. They're using it, they're talking about it. That's interesting. So now I see it in context. Then I hit the ad slot. The ad slot explains, hey, that product you saw, not literally, but subliminally, this is what it does and why you should do it. And here's where you can buy it. Then the next time it comes up on screen is the same ad with a QR code. By the way, you've now seen us on the home screen. You saw us being used in the show, naturally. You saw an ad that kind of explained what we do. Here's an ad that says scan a QR code to buy. That is the natural evolution exposure of an individual to a product they may consume. So that should be the sequencing of the ad experience, probably largely only going to be delivered on connected TV. And that's the truth because that's how humans make decisions.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 14:11

Now, you know what happens in real life? What happens in real life? None of that. None of that actually works in real life, does it?

SPEAKER_01 14:18

Nah, no one does that. All they do is say, turn on an ad and run the rotation. That's right. That's right.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 14:24

Serve it to auto intenders and just magically deliver me more sales. Correct.

SPEAKER_01 14:32

So it's it's one of those things like you're not starting up a campaign to gather information about what is possible and set the campaign up for those exposure points to capture information to tell you. Because all these companies who do these things, who do the home screen placement, the ad slot placement, the in-scene product placement, the ACR technology, all that is there to give you metadata to tell you what your chances are of winning. So you can figure out how to re-go back into the market, or you have to retool the messaging or the offering or the placement. That's why you have to set up a campaign to capture missed information. And no one is doing that. Why? Well, there's inherent laziness of business. That's one thing. And that's on both sides. People have to do very little to get an insertion order. People have to do letter very little to set the insertion order into play. What they're not saying is the consumer has already made it clear. I've made decisions to buy product because I have seen it in Marvel films. I've seen it in TV shows. That's why we're doing it. That's why we buy it. That's one of the impressions. The other thing is I saw it on the home screen. I was interested. They had me immediately. They had me at hello, they say.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 15:37

So you put Chick-fil-A on my home screen, and Chick-fil-A is top of mind. Guaranteed in our household, Chick-fil-A is the most requested thing that we correct.

SPEAKER_01 15:47

Absolutely. The consumers already said that. There's information to prove this. So why are you not setting it in motion? And then that becomes your new playbook. Because marketing is about what is the playbook? We got a whole bunch of horrible signal callers in the game, dude. Like, you can't run an offense. You've never played, you should probably have played a skilled position over there. Hopefully quarterback to really, really know. But you have people who played none of these positions that are trying to be signal callers in inbounding and marketing. They're just doing what's most popular and doing what their boss said they wanted to see. So there's no craftsmanship in the space. Because if you design these things this way, then you will get the information that will teach you and your client about how to inbound the next time out, and you get smarter and smarter algorithmically. So the idea of an algorithm is no different than parents telling kids what to do. I mean, think how many business rules you've given your kid. Oh, wow. You're programming the machine. Awesome.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 16:39

I've given him the appearance of choice several times built into his algorithm.

SPEAKER_01 16:44

Yeah, same thing. That same thing's not happening in business. We need to be pro the me now the machines to program us to teach us how to show up in the market. Okay. And the the appearance of choice is you can buy this ad type, this ad type, this ad type. But the data says for the best experience, you need this slate of exposure points. So we're like, okay, well, you gave me the choice point. You gave me the blueprint. We're not, we're not deploying the same thing. We're not allowing the machines, the platforms to teach us the same thing. You look at Samsung's uh insights, and I've looked at their insights, and I'm like, wow, why are the streaming platforms not sitting with you weekly? You have all the data. You are the web analytics, you are Google Analytics for CTV and TV. Yet there is not a weekly status call about what you're seeing in the apps. That makes zero of zero sense. And the reality is people are selling and able to close and make money without having to give the consumer intelligence because the consumer behaves very ignorantly. Instead of saying, Yeah, but we have weaponized intelligence for you. Here's how to make it go. So some of this is in the value chain, isn't aspiring to something better. The data is there. I've looked at data from Roku, I've looked at it from Tupi, I've looked at it from Samsung, I've had conversations in with Visio. So I know how this works. But you have agencies who are buying basic Betty like placements. They don't want to try anything new. And you have brands who don't know any better, so they show up as Betty. What are we talking about? When the idea is that there's data that can make you the Marilyn Moreau of the modern era in street. But it's amazing to watch the mediocrity constantly show up because money is flowing on the foundation of mediocrity instead of accelerating the intelligence to take things to a new level. All the information is there. It is in print. Unfortunately, it's in white papers. It's not in headlines.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 18:37

That's a truer challenge. I do see that as a huge chasm. I have the opportunity, obviously, to have conversations like this and to meet a lot of folks. And there is a whole arbitrage opportunity in just translating very boring, stuffy academic research into that playbook that you're talking about that signal callers are probably lacking. How do we bridge that gap? It feels like there's an opportunity for someone to win disproportionately. Someone's going to figure that out and beat everyone else, or are we just going to continue to chase like the lowest common denominator?

SPEAKER_01 19:22

So you asked who's going to win. I think it's going to be the AI agents are going to win. Maybe not win out, but win first. And what I mean is look at uh Virgin Voyagers. They're the cruise line on the Virgin in terms of we deployed 50 agents. Well, 50 agents is basically an agency of record scope. If you line up all 50 agents and you lot up an agency scope, it's probably one-to-one agency's done. I think we're going to see a world where AI agents are deployed from the platform side that come downstream and capture information and start doing what agencies were supposed to do. Look, the whole idea of agency is decisioning. That's what the word means. So what you're going to find is other people are like, look, you don't want to take up the decision, we will. All I need you to do is crack that door open. All I need you to do is send a little bit of a blurb over, and the agents will take over. So you could see a platform, a network saying, we have these agents. The same way Walmart launched Marty. This is brilliant. Everybody's been into Walmart and seen it.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 20:17

Yeah, tell us about Marty. I don't know Marty.

SPEAKER_01 20:18

Marty is the family man. Like he loves Walmart. And he just nerds out where you find your stuff, where deals are and everything. Imagine Marty on the NBCU side or CBS side or cops media side. And Marty is like, I'm going to help you crush it on this local TV campaign. Give me the parameters and what you're chasing down, what you're dealing with. And our AI powered taxonomy is going to make the match. It ports right into the machine, the stack, it turns it on and it turns it on. So Marty got you, baby. And that's what we're going to see. We're going to see a bunch of Marty's take up agency.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 20:59

A question I'd love to get your perspective on, Albert. What is premium?

SPEAKER_01 21:04

Premium luxury is in the eye of the beholder. The most precious asset in the world is time. And the best quote all hers, I think was Sam Harris said, attention is the cash value of your time. Where your time is best spent, that is the cash value, and that is attention. There are a lot of things that will come in the frame as time. So when you start to ask about luxury and premium, to me, premium and luxury is the cash value of your time. And I think what people have to acknowledge when you look at the younger generation has a different definition of premium and luxury. And for them, it's where it's where it's worth the most, where it best matches to my identity. It is not as necessarily what is most expensive and not always what is most scarce. In this particular world, premium is what the top 10 or 100 say it is. But you have to remember we make decisioning in the long tail. You and I are making Hair choices in the long tail. We're not making it on in premium in the top 100 echelon of the internet or companies. Like there's no such thing as a top 100 barber. I mean, what are we talking about? There's no such as a top 100 uh seven barber shops in my town. Right, correct. So when people say this idea of premium, premium in terms of safe, like it's safe, it's it's tested, it's accredited, it's validated. Like what are we talking about?

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 22:28

I think better than better than what better than premium.

SPEAKER_01 22:33

And what you find is there's not really specificity on premium. I know the bias that comes with premium. And, you know, look, for good, bad, and indifferent, I've had premium clients. I work on premium brands. I understand their definition, but some of them, by actual attributes, they are. Some of them is, no, that's what you're PRing. If I looked under the hood, eh, you're really about more or less you're a value brand, you're a value offering. Uh so I think when people, when the trade death starts come out with top 900 premium sites, I'm like, well, you just protected the the portion of the internet who has the spoils of riches and did help build it. But we don't make decisions there. We may consume content there. We they may galvanize more of the American populace. We make decisions in the long term. Let's talk about the amount of decisions we made in the drive-thru of a QSR versus walking around in Nordstrom. We love Nordstrom, we love SACs, but we make a lot of decisions at the gap while we're pumping gas. Sure do. That's the long tail. And we're at gas stations or charging stations multiple times a week. Women make decisions in a nail salon. You know, what are we talking? In a grocery store. Those aren't premium. You know, so it's a very different construct to look at the conversation of. Let's say fast channels. Fast channels burning through the stream sphere. 3,000 plus, documented, okay. Um, why? Because they meet the specificity of content that matches my identity or my culture. Let's take uh multicultural. Three, four, maybe black TV networks, how many fast channels? A thousand. I don't know, five hundred. Let's take Latinos. You have through two major ones in maybe three tier twos, you know, Canela, you have, you know, Unomaz as Techos of the World. I don't even know who's actually around at this point, but how many fast channels are there for them? That's where the growth is for Latino consumption and streaming. And here's what the thing: the fast channel sectors like the NBA's D League. It's a development league, meaning proven model, some audience, decent enough script, enough traction, public-facing signal, something that networks need to snatch up. It's kind of like bring them up off the practice squad. We're ready to go for prime time. It's Monday night football now. You know what I'm saying? So when you start to look at it, are those premium? No. Matter of fact, the premium platforms are witnessing erosion to fast. So they're going down as fast as almost in a hockey stick growth. Fast channel growth is looks like retail media commerce media growth. You're just saying that to protect your moat. So premium as a as a signal is a moat protection mechanism. It is not necessarily a consumer truth. And I think there's the difference between the two. So I have no problem saying, hey, we're in a premium group. How? I'm like, how is a premium? Give me, is it story writing? Is it uh accreditation? And no, there's no fraud, you know, the people well paid. Uh, is it that by uh viewership? Like, what are we talking about? Is it level of engagement? Is it passed along word of mouth? Is it part of the culture? There's so many attributes to really say, is it really premium? You're saying it's premium, and you have the people to endorse it as premium. It's kind of like saying this is dermatology or dentist-backed. Okay. It probably should be. It's got to go in somebody's skin and somebody's mouth. I hope it's backed by them and not on the other side of the spectrum. So, what does that really mean? I think it gives you on the it gives you on the playing ground, but it doesn't mean it's the North Star. And I think that is the disruption that is coming, in particular to streaming, when you start to look at fast channels and other things that are growing, when there are other signals. You also look at the splintering of personas. So the world of personas is like premium to which one of my personas? To my football persona, yeah, you're premium. You got all the game. Sure. Thank you. Uh, but to my fashion style, are you really premium? No, you don't even talk about it. So you're not even in the game.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 26:27

You're not even relevant to me.

SPEAKER_01 26:28

Correct. Matter of fact, it doesn't really exist for this category, so no one's premium. You know what I'm saying? I mean, there are really specific qualifications, almost down to the persona level of premium now. Same thing with luxury. This is a functional water, and I'm into that lifestyle. This is premium to me now because I don't want to spend the time blending it myself. And there's a convenience factor to it. Uh, but this over here, no, that's been around 50 years. It ain't really premium. I mean, it may be the number one seller of root beers over the years, but I mean, I don't consider that premium. It's just been on the planet longer. Like, what are we talking about? So there's so many filters now around premium that I think the executive leadership needs to acknowledge how that notion is rolling. They actually have to re-establish that frame and then re-market that back into the marketplace.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 27:16

So, an opportunity like the conversation about activation and measurement, a converse, an opportunity to reframe how we're thinking about it. What is premium? Well, what is premium? And let's define those things for ourselves. How do we think of ourselves as a brand? How do we think about the attention being relevant, showing up? I think that your example of the fast channel growth is really interesting, where maybe an advertiser writes that, oh, that's that's cheap, that's free TV, no one wants that. But to your point, it might be the most relevant thing I watch all day. It might be the thing I look forward to the most. And what a what a great opportunity.

SPEAKER_01 27:56

Yeah, a thousand percent. I mean, look, someone had posed on a panel before mine at a summit I spoke on a year ago. And they said, I don't know if Fast Channels, you know, is it's here to stay. We'll see. It was an executive. I got on the panel and said, uh, people stole cable in the US. Facts to stay because the free cable.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 28:15

We're old enough to remember stealing TV.

SPEAKER_01 28:18

Yeah, right. So guess what? Now they get to do it legally. It's staying. The danger of it is discounting its importance of it. No, no, it's the underdog, it's the challenger, but it is coming full frame. And that's why I said you need to reframe it from it's free and it's not premium to it's the development league. It's gonna prove concepts you don't have to swing at and probably miss. You have to remember TV networks, Hollywood was used to manufacturing attention. We're gonna make this film, it's gonna be amazing. And since we own all the points of distribution and it'll be the only thing there, they'll have to watch it. That was Hollywood. We want to make this film, we'll put it out there, we're gonna market, they're gonna go see it because we got such a headline, even if the movie was crap. You start to see the same thing in others. TV show did the same thing. It's a showwriter's idea that's gonna be made, it's gonna be funny, we're gonna put it out there. They can show that we got a minimum amount of views because it took up a slot. They had a minimum amount of views. That's like replacing the gas station on the corner with the next gas station, but there was already a thousand people a week who stopped into that gas station based on its physical dress. All we did was take the real estate. So for a long time, Hollywood has treated cinema, film, TV shows like the real estate business. We own the land, we own the slot, we just put something else in there and we'll get the attention. And then here comes fast. It's like, nah, over here, dude. It's annoying. Y'all got eight minutes of commercials, and we made this show for the one million people who are from Colombia. They want to see Colombian actors and actresses because they didn't want to see people who are Mexican descent. That is disruption. And then you play that out to 20 countries of origin, and next thing you know, you have erosion from Telabundo and Univision if they don't defend their moat, and they're not gonna defend it by saying premium.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 30:05

We are just getting started, obviously, with uh with how this is all gonna play out. We're gonna talk uh a little bit upcoming. We're gonna talk about you've got a new Patreon coming, we've got a book coming out. I would love to, before we make that that transition, you work with brands like Lexis, Unilever, Amazon. What are the things that brands are asking for the most from their partners, from publishers? What's what's the number one ask that you're getting right now?

SPEAKER_01 30:34

I think what they're looking for is clear signal on the consumer and who has real intent. I mean, one of the things I started with Lexus years ago was like, we need to pursue people, multicultural, who have real intent to buy your cars. They know who you are, but do they have intent to buy who you are? How about that?

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 30:49

They know who you are.

SPEAKER_01 30:50

Do they intend to buy your car? And based on the sales volume, most of them are not because your market share percentage is X. It's not that it means you're not successful, it doesn't mean you haven't seen growth. You have to be very real about where you are and where the trajectory is. So if you sell 50,000 cars to Latinos, the trajectories get to 70,000. You're not going to get to 10 million. So you have to frame it in who's our next 5,000, then our next 5,000, then our next 4,000, then our next 3,000, and now we're at 70,000. Those are real numbers. Those are numbers reported to shareholders, to the chairman of the board, to Wall Street, et cetera. So every brand knows their real number. This billions of billion impressions is horse crap. Every brand knows their real numbers because they have an earnings call. And the earnings call is based on revenue tied to units sold and margins made. That is a commitment that we will hit these marks. And those marks still distill down to a number. You don't think Mars knows how many MMs they're gonna sell? It's in the projections by quarter. Those sales equate to a number of people based on the average share of shopping cart. How many people pick up a single bag? Is it one person picking up four bags of MMs? They know these things. That's the real number. The question is, what is the next intent number? People replenishing and then new customers. That is a number. That number might be 3.5 million. It is not a billion impressions. That's waste. Now, if you want to spend that because you got that, great. But the intent number is a smaller number. Brands need to figure out who has real intent for them to get and mitigate waste. One, they have less money to work with. Two, consumers have less disposable income to work with. That's gonna be themed in 2026. I have less money to play with. So I got to hold on to stuff longer, cut things out that weren't premium and luxury to me, and that is subjective to the user. Now I need things like convenience. I need things uh discount like pricing, and I need the things that best identify to me. Those are gonna become very, very real. What that means is a brand is gonna have to say, okay, we need people who got real intent for us, given all the circumstances, economic factors going on. That will be the signal for 2026 and beyond. Look, I've always been there. Again, marketing is the parent company. We're looking for a consumer to transact with. We're not looking for fluff. Look-alike, sure. Look-alike is brilliant as a targeting strategy beyond the core audience. Reach is a fake number. Reach is potential. Potential to reach. There's nothing to do with even care, or they're even paying attention, or they're even gonna buy it. It's just reach. That's it. That's all it meant to be. Here's the potential reach. Why are you trying to run down all 349 million Americans? Retard makes zero of zero sense. People need to get to a very, very clear intent signal, which is a series of signals together. Like the movie, some of its parts of Ben Affleck, Morgan Freeman, bring your storyline. All the things add up to X. Brands need to start synthesizing all the signals, not only get them to face each other, but interlock with each other to tell the story. And that is why it's my point earlier. You need to set up a campaign based on the absence of intelligence, the absence of information, so you can collect it. Remember, you can't go into AI world without data, right? So there are a lot of brands that got no data. They ain't going into AI. They're on the bench. They can't even get off the side. They don't get to play. They can't even get into the stadium. The brands that are sitting on trolls of data or have communications, throughputs, information, data going everywhere, a travel entity, an airline company. They just got to weaponize it, activate it. But there are brands that they're collecting nothing. So it's teaching them nothing. So they have nothing as a set point. And that set point is gonna be data weaponized with AI to get you clearer intense symbols to figure out how you're actually gonna make money for real and stop wasting so much money. And that is, I think, the biggest undercurrent of what people are saying. I mean, yes, people want more engagement over this and that. But at the end of the day, they're trying to, they they thought they've thrown so much at it and gotten so little back for all the things they've thrown at it. Now they need clearer paths. They need to breadcrumb their campaigns and let the breadcrumbs add up to a series of information points that AI can use and can be taught from as a human pursuit at the same time. Anything else you hear, it's just some conjecture, somebody's idea. It's not even necessarily the truth of the conversation they just had in the room with the CMO. That's not the conversation they're having. Sometimes people, platforms and agencies get the conversation that is not of the conversation that they have to have with their boss. That's amazing. I was always about what do you have to contend with? What is your task? And I've had people say, I was just told we got to get on TikTok. Like, all right, let's understand the rules of engagement so we can show up intelligently and tell him you're gonna show up intelligently. That's all they want anyway. Don't come to your friend and say, just scare creator and get out there so I can break the bottom.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 35:38

Just get me live on TikTok. That's not really what I mean because in three months we're gonna be going back and asking the questions we should have asked on the front end. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 35:46

Yeah, yeah. But here's the thing: some people will show up in things where they feel this energy, but there's less accountability. Like let's go to sports. So sports is why high. It's gonna be some of the most expensive real estate, is probably the number one attention stack. Because when you're in the stadium, it's all about the game. I would probably say it's the number one in terms of interest, the heat on it, uh, the energy, the the fact that everybody enjoys it. It's becoming more important to unplug. But gaming is probably the number one uninterrupted attention stack. So when you start to look at what clients are looking at is they're trying to figure out we got to get back in space, IRL is alive. We need to be there. What's gonna come second is okay, how do we measure all this stuff though? Because typically the event experiential matrix aren't great. Uh, and I think that's what they have to acknowledge as well. And look, there's adjacency to live sports to streaming of sports. I don't want to make it sound like these are disconnected and different pursuits and should be a different line of investment. They are heavily tethered together. The question is if you're there live and activating live, these things are streamed. How is the streaming aspect supporting it and complementing based upon the rules of engagement of attention? Meaning there's certain things you can accomplish at the game, in the arena, that you cannot do on streaming, and vice versa. And again, having the two complement each other in the overall investment strategy. That needs to happen. Some brands do that well, most of them are very poor at it because they're not even connecting the two conversations in terms.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 37:21

I think you've answered all of the questions we outlined here. We're going to talk about the Patreon, we're going to talk about the book. I want to tie off with instead of worrying about identity, we think persona first. Let's really start to understand the personas, who those buyers are. Because if we do, then the attention stack activation actually probably gets a little bit simpler if we can start to think about the personas, where they're spending their time, where they're spending attention. And if we do those two things first, then measurement takes care of itself. It becomes a lot easier to think through practical measurement frameworks that make sense for doing all that.

SPEAKER_01 37:59

Yeah, because persona, the persona, the persona or you are in, like the mode, defines what type of attention the receiver is going to get. And that's all the way down from the energy. Uh, the dynamism, to what degree I'm leaning in with real intent or I'm passively participating, to how I'm going to show up, to what you can extract from me. And I think that is the root of it because that gets you into how I show up in a streaming platform. I don't show up by genre. My persona is not action. My persona is not I'm calm. My personas, I need something intense, I need to detox, you know, I need a I need something thrilling. Well, you you can't the taxonomy is not organized against those moods that track to my persona that I'm sitting in. So it's already a mismatch. But if you understood that and things were organized and I was allowed to discover that way, you would already know how you could get at me. And that's like the big gap in the business.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 39:03

Albert, thank you for that great walk through the attention stack, how to think about these things. I think it's gonna be even more important as we move into 2026. And speaking of 2026, you've got an exciting announcement coming. You've got a book coming, you've got a Patreon coming. Tell us about Patreon. What's what's your mission there? How do folks get involved? When will that be online? Tell us all about it.

SPEAKER_01 39:27

Yeah, I'm gonna push out the Patreon early December. And look, it's very simple. It's titled Confess, because it's just me calling BS on a lot of stuff in marketing. I mean, I've been a marketer by trade. I always tell people I'm an agency guy, I'm a marketing guy. And I'm, again, as I always say, marketing is the parent company. And a lot of it is cutting through the noise and understanding exactly what it is. So confess is very much gonna be about like the truth of what it is. This is what you need to do. This is the state of the state. And part of it is me synthesizing the information, the noise, the mess, the stuff that people make up, the fluff, and saying, here is how you execute in the sandbox. Here's how you should literally think about it. Look, it's not just words of mind. Some of it would be repurposes from you know other intellects and space. Some of it would be looking at some of the best of the best of marketing that I've seen over the years. Some of it would be related to how people create true brand value versus others that don't. So, yeah, I mean, Confess is like just getting to the truth. And again, the idea is that people just don't have time to waste their time. So, what I'm trying to do is give people what I would call like the cash value of their time through Confess. And Patreon is a platform similar to Substack, uh, a few tiers, some of the stuff would be free, and then some of it would be based on, you know, small monthly subscription. But I mean, look, we're in an intellectual arms race largely against the machine, and a lot of it is AI driven. So everyone is gonna have to raise their intellect. And some of the things that I put out on Patreon is you understanding even how you need to program the machines.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 40:52

That's really interesting. It definitely sounds like a place that I will show up. I'm excited for that. But who's it really designed for? Who should uh who should be thinking about joining that Patreon? Is it media buyers? Is it agency execs? Is it all those folks? It's all.

SPEAKER_01 41:08

Here's the thing the CMO is everybody's boss because the CMO cuts a check to a media company, cuts a check to an agency, and he manages the brand team. I I don't people are lost on that. So you have to know what the CMO has to contend with because that has everything about which you need to deliver. And CMO's getting very busy on things called AI. I'll get to that in a second. So when you look at it, media people need to better understand marketing and its charter, its promise to a brand, to the organization. Agencies need to stop acting like they're the Pampa company, and marketing is a parent company because you need to put a better frame about advertising activation in the marketplace. And look, for brand marketers, some of them just didn't grow up in marketing. They're new to the discipline. So look, it's a series of things. It'll punch out things related to CTV, digital audio, uh brand building, uh measurement is a huge one. I'm gonna demystify. I think we've created so much jargon around every single topic, we can't get to the it of the it. And a lot of it is very binary in terms of how to think about it, approach it, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, I mean, look, when I look at it, the idea of the Patreon community confess is me just confessing this is what it is. Or do something very similar to it, essentially. Uh, and look, but I'm a guy who turns through a series of white papers every single day, I'm on webinars every single week. I mean, I'm synthesizing while I'm a tactitioner at the same time. And I think that's the thing. You want to look at people who are intelligent agents in the sandbox who are tacticians at the same time while consuming and exposed to information at the same time. I will always tell people I have an unfair view of the marketplace because I see it from the platform side, I see it from the agency side, I see it from the brand side, so from the research side. So you synthesize it all together and like, okay, the truth ain't that difficult. The question is, do you want to stare in the eye?

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 42:57

And as if you weren't busy enough, you keep a very full schedule. You're speaking. I see you speaking all the time. You're running teams, you're advising the world's biggest brands, you've made time for us here. On top of all that, launching a community, and you've got a new book coming out.

SPEAKER_01 43:14

Yeah, 100%, man. I mean, look, I think people over the years, because we're ahead of people in the journey, have kind of asked how we did it. My wife and I did it. Or they're looking for and looking for advice. And I'm like, I think it the notion kind of hit me. I'm like, we're the algorithm. My wife would always say, my wife would always say, I need to be the loudest voice in our daughter's ears. Louder than social media, louder than their friends, louder than anything in experience. A lot of parents aren't louder than the noise around their children. So it was like, yeah, the algorithm. We we have the algorithm. We have to be the algorithm, the parenting. The same way that algorithmically we're manipulating social media, that Mac's Doom Scroll. We have to be the algorithm. So cerebral, frontal, cortex, okay, that. Thinking part. This is when I talk to you about parents are programming 5,000 business rules between birth to tolerate. Let's say age five. 5,000. Don't touch the stoke. Don't jump off this. Don't jump off that. Don't hit your sister. Pull your pants down when you pee. I mean, think about it. Don't watch the step. Do this. I mean, 5,000 business rules are programmed. We are algorithmically programming our children. There are people who've taken their hands off the wheel. I don't know who they're giving it to. Maybe Jesus, but I didn't see Jesus grab it. And what I'm saying is in this book, titled Be the Algorithm, parents have to stay with being the algorithm. And look, you know, the definition of in my mind is, you know, it's very like binary terms in terms of being uncompromising. It's work. And I think that's the thing I want people to understand. Do you think you can run down Usain Bolt from behind? No one could run down Usain Bolt from behind. He aged out. So the problem is in parenting, development of an individual doesn't age out. It just keeps running faster and faster. You cannot run down bad or division parenting from behind any faster than you can run down Usain Bolt. You need to be the algorithm so you are out front and out in front of the development. Because there'll be a lot of things coming at them. Then you got to slow things into the frame. Introduce other parents and their kids slowly. Because we don't know those people. And they're not our brand. You got to treat the household like it's your brand. The other thing is you got to slow roll social media. Matter of fact, abort social media until they're in their teens. Why? You didn't have it. You didn't die. Kids can say what they want. It's like, yeah, but are you going to die? Like Leslie Chow said, but did you die?

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 45:31

But did you die?

SPEAKER_01 45:33

Keeping moving. Right. We're going to go to the playground. We're going to do something physical. Let's do card night. Let's do putt-putt golf in the house. The idea, the human brain, hasn't changed in 10,000 years. It can't compute the social media engine. It's overwhelming. It's why kids have anxiety. It's why they have depression and suicidal because of what it is feeding them and overfeeding them that they cannot process. So you have to look at that and you have to protect their development. The only way you're going to do it is you have to be the algorithm. I used to tell people, my wife and I were like offensive defensive coordinators. There's no coach. Some days I can't stop them.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 46:07

Right. They're just on the field. You're just hoping that, hey, did we do enough in practice? Do they memorize the play?

SPEAKER_01 46:14

Yeah, you got to put up 55 points. We're going to win 55 to 52, like it's Pax Mahomes, Texas Tech. It's gunslaying on it. Good throwback. Some days, can't you put no points on the board? You're like, you know what? It's going to be old school Alabama. We're going to win 10-6.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 46:26

We're going to run it up the middle and we're just going to grind it out.

SPEAKER_01 46:30

Right. And some days everything clicks on all cylinders, and it's like the old Oregon days that just put up 70 points and it's 70 to 14. It looked easy. And that is, yeah, that is the idea of offensive defense coordinator. What do coordinators do? They game plan. They make halftime adjustments. They're constantly huddling it up. Parenting is about constantly making adjustments and constantly huddling up. After every kid tantrum, after every uh grading period, after every sports performance gone good or bad, you got a game plan. And that's what we did. We were constantly hutting up, huddling up like coordinators. And I say there's no coach, there's no ruler, but sometimes one leads while the other follows, and vice versa. And that is very much the balance of the algorithm. So the book we'll get into a series of brass tacks chapters using, yes, sports analogy and other things that are very easy identifiable with. You can almost punch through it fast. You're going to start it in audio form, but it's a blueprint about what it means to just be uncompromising and be the algorithm.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 47:30

I love that. And I think it's great thematically, especially for folks like us who live and breathe marketing and advertising. We think about it professionally all day, every day, but maybe we don't apply that same, you know, intense, disciplined uh methodology to to our personal lives. I think that that's a fun way to translate some of what we do professionally into the personal. So looking forward to that. When would when would you expect that to uh to hit the airwaves, as it were, and then maybe the bookshelves?

SPEAKER_01 48:04

Uh probably not early 2026. All right, we'll keep an eye out. Uh yeah, yeah, yeah. But I do have yet one other thing. Like as you said, I wasn't busy on the Oh yeah, what you got?

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 48:13

Hit it, hit us. You got us with the the the tried and true from wait, there's more. Get us, Billy Mays.

SPEAKER_01 48:21

There is more. I mean, I think after keynoting coming up next week, the Fora's AI, Elevate AI Summit, I'm gonna launch another Patreon community dedicated to AI. It's gonna be Albert.ai is uh the the hook. And the whole idea is that getting into unpacking AI, again, how to think about it, how to bring it into the frame, how to think about upskilling. And it'll reference, call out some talk tracks, some panels. Uh, it'll also have some blurbs, some quotes. I'll even look at different tools, I'll throw out resources for upskilling. But the bottom line is people got to get real serious about starting to take up agency in an AI-powered world. And the whole idea is again, this is me synthesizing newsletters, white papers. I'm on probably four hours of webinars a week on AI across a series of domains from how to use AI to increase your valuation to how to think about the development of AI agents to how to get into governance, IP compliance, change management. I mean, it's it is going to be explosive. As I tell people, it's like it's gonna be like Y2K AI, except you don't get by the 20th, December 31st, you actually have probably 18 months as a window before the real separation happens. So Albert.ai on Patreon will be very much about just starting to unpack it at a high rate of speed. And for anyone, you know, tuning and following, it's gonna be a clearer signal to it all. Very cool.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 49:45

Albert, I can't thank you enough for being here, for sharing as much as you have. If folks want to connect with you, if they want to learn more, where should they go?

SPEAKER_01 49:53

Uh, just find me on Link Tick. That is like the easiest thing to do, other than you know, the eventual Patreons.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 49:59

We'll link to all of that because by the time this comes out, Patreon's going to be live. So we'll make sure that that's easy to find. It's linked close by. Folks can get in touch, join up, and stay in the know. Albert. Yes, sir. Thanks for being here. If you found this conversation to be helpful, please share it with a colleague, share it with a client, start a conversation today. We'll see y'all next time.