• by J. Walker Smith , Op-Ed Contributor, 3 hours ago

The one thing we marketers want more than anything else is people’s time.

We have all kinds of metrics to track it. Indeed, it’s the thing we track most, more so than spending and usage.

We want people to like, follow, share and comment. We want people to notice, remember, recommend and come back. We want people to browse, linger, engage and research. We want to be top-of-mind, in the consideration set and one of the recommendations from AI. We want attention. We want love. We want fans. All of which is to say, we want time.

Everything about marketing is about capturing as much of people’s time as possible. More than money, we want people’s time. As much as we can get.

It’s all based on our informal theory that the more time we get, the more money people will spend. More time means more likely to buy and more likely to spend a lot. I suspect there’s some truth in that, though perhaps not as much as we tell ourselves. Especially not these days.

People want time back in their lives. Time is more important to people than ever. It wasn’t all that long ago that people wanted more energy for all the things crowding into their lives. That’s changed. Now, people want less of everything that takes time away.

This puts marketers in conflict with consumers. We are trying to grab more of what consumers are keeping for themselves. This is one of the central tensions of today’s marketplace.

Obviously, time has always been a key currency in the marketplace. Efficiency is a core proposition for many products and services. We name them as such -- fast-food or quick-service, convenience stores, same-day delivery, buying with one click, concierge services, line-sitters, express lanes, self-service, DIY. And so forth.

Time has always had value. But the marketplace for time in the past has been driven almost entirely by efficiency at the point of engagement. That’s still a factor and it is a big part of the conflict now at hand. But there’s more to it these days.

There’s a famous scene in Season 4, Episode 7 of AMC’s Mad Men in which Peggy Olson complains to her boss Don Draper that he never tells her thanks. To which Don replies in exasperation, “That’s what the money is for!”

It’s a telling line, both as a sensible rebuke but also as a clueless rejoinder. It’s true that the money is the thanks, but money doesn’t always carry the emotional currency that many people, like Peggy, are also looking for.

This scene is analogous to the current marketplace for time. As marketers, we think the reward people get for the time they spend with us is the benefit of the product or service we deliver. That’s a fair exchange for us. We need do nothing more than hold up our end of the bargain, for which the exchange is the whole ball of wax. Money and time are rewarded by the product.

In years past, consumers were happily in league with marketers. But that was a period in which consumers didn’t value time as much as they do today, or in the same ways. Increasingly, consumers are like Peggy—they want more than the old exchange of value.

Consumers want rewards for time spent, not just transactions completed. Consumers want value for their time as it’s being spent, rather than value only if, and when, a transaction is completed. 

This means no patience with delays, of course. But it also means no more trade-offs, compromises or good-enough. It means the experience of watching, browsing, shopping and transacting should be just as enjoyable as the experience of using, consuming, operating or employing. There should be value in the process, not only in the outcome.

It is this "process time," so to speak, that we marketers want.

In the past, consumers have been willing to spend that time without any expectation of reward for that time. It’s sort of been the cost of doing business for consumers. In the balance of things, not too bad but certainly not rewarded.

That has changed. Consumers want value for any time spent, even if it doesn’t end in a transaction. We continue to focus mostly on the value in the transaction, without fully appreciating commanding the kind of engagement we want requires value for consumers in the process of involvement, wherever it leads. Failing to deliver value for time spent is a new cause of leakage in awareness and consideration.

Again, this is not new per se. The creative era of advertising put top priority on entertaining people -- prospects in the pipeline for sure, but everyone. We have been in a different era for a long time, one in which the emphasis has been on highly targeted, real-time conversion. Less about entertaining and more about nudges and influence.

As we have thought more deeply over the years about branding and buying, we have put more emphasis on brand fundamentals and point-in-time promotions. This has been a big debate about spending on brand-building versus spending on immediate, measurable performance. The consumer is part of both ideas, but secondary to brands or offers. And we know this because, time and again, we’ve had to remind ourselves of marketing’s first principle, consumer-centricity.

When consumers aren’t first, time becomes a metric not a locus of value. But we are now circling back to this, not only because consumers are insisting on value for their time but because AI searches are contextual. We ask AI to help us with a dinner party not to tell us things to buy. This reframes shopping as something related to lifestyles rather something strictly tied to brands on a shopping list. It sounds subtle, but it’s not. AI is teaching consumers to think differently. Lifestyles not brands are going to come out on top.

One of the biggest lessons we learned during the pandemic is the value of time. There was no avoiding this. Everybody had their routines turned upside-down. And we learned things like time spent commuting is not fairly compensated by the money. Commuting is under-valued, under-rewarded process time for work. The work is valued, but not the process to get to and from work. With that realization forced upon us, we couldn’t help but change our expectations about time spent doing anything, especially engaging with marketing.

So, when you put the lessons of AI together with the lessons of the pandemic and the broader desire of people to be rewarded for giving up their valuable time you have a perfect storm for marketers. Which will swamp us if we don’t deliver value for every moment consumers are engaged with us. It’s no longer just the transaction that matters most. It’s time.