Interrupting gracefully

As we’ve seen, in an information-rich world, attention is a precious commodity. One reason Google is successful is that it has positioned itself as an exchange between money and attention — more attention gives you a better ranking, which means more money; paid ads buy you more attention.

That means that in order to survive, you have to get someone’s attention. And for that, you need to be good at interrupting. You need to build graceful interruption into everything you build.

Interruption happens in three timeframes: before, during, and after someone realizes they have a need. Each is a specific use case for marketers.

When the customer’s already satisfying the need

Google has parsed something that’s already underway for a user — in this case, a coming hotel reservation — and made it easy to adjust that reservation. By parsing your email, they’ve added value, and made themselves the default tool for managing travel.

For another example, consider a commuter walking past a bus stop. If a travel application knew what time the next bus was coming, where you live, what meetings are in your calendar, and where you’re usually headed, it could notify you about how long you’d have to wait — and perhaps convince you to buy a bus ticket.

At the moment of the question

The perfect form of interruption is answering a question. When someone asks something, if you respond, it’s not an interruption at all — it’s a response.

Search engines are ideally positioned to do this. When I ask for something, they can respond. But they need to strike a balance between value (giving me the right answer) and filthy lucre (giving me the answer from which they will gain the most.) They’re walking a fine line.

Before they know they need an answer

Amazon experiments a lot. One of the things they’re working on is shipping you things before you know you need them. Predictive models mean we can anticipate a customer’s needs and respond to them before they’re manifested.

Phone carriers know this. They invest heavily in technology to predict customers who are about to churn. But sometimes, prediction can go too far, as the much-cited example of Target anticipating a customer’s pregnancy before she’d told her family has demonstrated.

The field of predictive science is blossoming. There’s a resurgence of interest in data science, along with a torrent of data exhaust we can analyze and digital, one-to-one channels we can use to test things quickly.

This is one reason why companies like Apple are so interested in biosensing. The more you can discover ambiently about your market — its location, its mood, its preferences, its health, the weather, its budget — the better you can anticipate its needs.

Benford’s Law, a variant on Clarke’s Law, says that “Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.” Tomorrow’s smartest companies will figure out how to interrupt gracefully — not too creepy, with the right mix of value and commerce — and it’ll seem magical, like a prosthetic brain upgrade rather than a marketing pitch.

So what should you do?

When you’re creating new marketing campaigns, or designing new products, ask yourself three questions:

• How can I gracefully interrupt something already in progress?
• How do I become the place my target market goes to ask questions?
• How do I anticipate needs without being creepy, based on my customers’ data exhaust?

This is more than a set of marketing techniques. As we come to rely on the devices and feeds around us, they will supplant many of our existing senses, much as we forgot our friends’ numbers when we got mobile phones. It’s a fundamental shift in the way brands and customers interact. Just as cycle time trumps scale, so interruption beats promotion.