• by Ari Rosenberg , Op-Ed Contributor, May 13, 2005

Did you catch the study published by the United States Government on the "day in the life of America"?

There were some interesting data points that should have a ripple effect on our industry. The study paints a picture of the consumer attention publishing companies claim to deliver with colors of common sense by breaking down how the average American spends their daily allowance of 24 hours.

An excerpt, published by Adage.com, reported that we are sleeping for just over eight hours a day, working for eight, and the third leading activity that occupies our time is "watching the TV."

Apparently, leisure time ranges from 5.6 hours a day for adults with no children, to 4.2 hours for parents, and half of this leisure time is spent watching television. College-educated adults watch 1.4 hours of television a day while not surprisingly, those with a high school diploma but no job watch four hours of television a day, or a whopping 124 hours a month.

In terms of total collected attention, the television medium has plenty to celebrate based on this study. On the other hand, print publishers have to be scratching their heads, as the reported time spent reading paper-based content was significantly lower by comparison.

Teens spend just seven minutes a day, or a mere 3.5 hours a month reading content held in their hands that is not connected to the Internet. Given the number of teen-oriented magazines that claim to own this demographic's attention, don't you think this number is surprisingly low? The reading story does not get much better for young adults. Twenty- to 34-year-olds only read paper-based content 10 minutes a day (five hours a month), while baby boomers are reading 19 minutes a day, or 9.5 hours a month. Who is spending the most time reading paper-based content? Adults 75 years and older spend 72 minutes a day reading (36 hours a month).

This report's focus on how consumers spend their attention with published content reminded me of what a former colleague thought was the future of how advertising should be sold. His name was Ken Keller, and he was a chief technology officer I used to work with who found code much easier to understand than advertising.

For instance, he could not understand why advertisers pay for ads based on distribution figures such as circulation or estimated ratings, because this formula was based on the "potential viewing" of an ad message. "What if a consumer barely notices the ad, or not at all, how is that factored into the price?" Ken would question.

He believed that given today's technology, which can track where consumers focus their eyes, advertising should be sold in increments of time and attention spent viewing an ad.

The pricing foundation would be based on per-second of viewed ads, and the market would establish how much that allotment of time spent would be worth. His idea was both unique and completely warped, given the reality of how media is sold today; I could not understand where he was coming from initially.

Only weeks later did it finally hit me. His idea replaces inventory of space created by mediums and their respective publishers, with inventory of time spent with the ads, generated by consumers and captured by publishers.

Consumers only have 24 hours in a day. According to this recent study, there is only 4.2 to 5.6 hours in each day that thousands of content publishers claim to own. That sounds just as crazy as Ken's idea.

Maybe a guy from the engineering side of the tracks can see the future that those who currently buy and sell media may be missing.