Today’s interview is with Walter Flaat, dentsu Canada’s Chief Data Officer. We talk about a new whitepaper that they’ve just published on the Attention Economy, what drives attention (engagement), what brands should be doing in order to be able to deliver a more thoughtful, empathetic and inclusive experience and what are the implications for experience and digital professionals and leaders.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – CX in the age of AI: A leading outsourcer’s perspective – Interview with Cathy Jooste and John Samuel of CGS – and is number 480 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at CGS for sponsoring my podcast for the coming month.

Now, CGS is a company you might not have heard of.

But, they have been delivering brand-building and customer experiences for 40 years for global brands that you will definitely have heard of.

Over that time, they have developed deep expertise in both outsourcing and technology, so you should definitely pay attention to what they have to say.

They’ve recently put together a free ebook and video that I’d like to point you to. It’s called The Transformative Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT and has been authored by CGS’ Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, John Samuel (one of our interviewees today). It’s a really comprehensive guide and is designed to deliver insights, summarize research, and inspire creative problem-solving.

Follow this link to check out the free ebook and video.

Here are the highlights of my conversation with Walter:

• The whitepaper is called: Attracting Attention & The Power of Compassion: Attention Economy – A dentsu study for Canada.
• Of all of the advertising put in front of people, three out of every five pieces will be digital.
• There is a common myth that people have attention spans shorter than goldfish. Yet, movies are getting longer, marathon gaming sessions are normal and to do a Netflix binge over a weekend is common place.
• The whitepaper aimed to unpack what is going on with attention and engagement.
• We know that people have substantial attention capability or as we call it attentional control, which is concentration.
• But, the question is what triggers it and how can we make sure that it’s triggered in a positive way and not in a negative way?
• It turns out that if you ask a machine that in itself has no ethics to gain someone’s attention, they’re just gonna make you mad.
• There is a fine balance to be struck between ethics and the commercial interests of brands.
• The best use of data is for companies and consumers to better understand and help each other.
• When we talk about attention, in a broader cx sort of sense, we’re actually talking about engagement.
• Everything starts with attention and then you have a shot at getting some engagement.
• Attention is not something that you can claim. If you claim attention, you’ve got your eight seconds, right? Attention is something that is given. You can almost see it as a form of generosity from the person that you’re trying to get their attention from. And, to get to that level of generosity, you need to resonate with them. You need to be useful. You need to do it in a fair way.
• Brands need to resonate with people by showing compassion and providing the right value as well as the products and services that actually serve a purpose and add value.
• One thing that we did learn in the study is that the amount of attention that people have available gets influenced by how they feel about themselves and the world that they live in and how they are treated.
• For example, when we think about things like inclusivity, diversity and representation it’s important to realize that if people feel less part of society, if they don’t feel accepted, if they feel more threats to their psychology, their attentional space goes way down because they get into a kind of survival mode.
• You have to make sure that people matter and then show them that they matter.
• There’s not one gold standard example yet simply because our data and tech landscape is too messy for anyone to actually get to the perfect experience.
• When it comes to gen AI….the way I’m starting to look at it more and more is that these big tech players, they’re building a power tool, almost like a chainsaw, and they are absolutely responsible for making sure that this chainsaw is reliable and safe. But, put a chainsaw in people’s hands and you’re gonna get very different outcomes. There’s a lot of user responsibility in all of this for marketers, advertisers and individual people.
• What you do with that chainsaw is gonna be super important and I think there’s not enough focus on that personal responsibility yet.
• If all of your data is from Silicon Valley then you’re not gonna have great representation of the whole world.
• We’ve done a lot of experiments with how individual people can actually resolve some of those issues. The most interesting outcome was that the more you aware you are of your biases, the better your prompts and the better your output is going to be.
• I think too often we get bogged down into journeys. There’s nothing wrong with journeys in principle, but there’s only two ways to make them. Either you have a smart designer designing how the world should work or you have a smart analytics person designing or analyzing data about journeys and coming up with this ball of looping, interjecting, knotted up journeys that don’t really work practically.
• Walter’s Punk CX word(s): Don’t be a spaghetti monster.
• Walter’s Punk XL brand idea: Waste and harm reduction need to be a focus of organizations.

About Walter

Walter Flaat has over a decade of experience at dentsu Canada, an integrated network of agencies with expertise in creativity, media and CXM, in various data-related roles from software developer, data management platform and CRM to name a few. As chief data officer, Walter leads the company’s data strategy for its Canadian clients. He has a unique breadth of experience that allows him to interpret data and leverage it to help both dentsu and its clients to achieve their business objectives and create impactful and innovative campaigns.

Check out the new whitepaper, dentsu Canada’s work, say Hi to them on X (formerly known as Twitter) @DentsuCanada and @WalterFlaat respectively and feel free to connect with Walter on LinkedIn here.

Credit: Image by Tuan Hung Nguyen from Pixabay