Rules Don’t Apply: The Attention Economy and how platforms shape our focus with Dr. Karen Nelson-Field
'The thing that drives our attention is not what you think. You're less in control of your own attention.'
As part of its presence at SXSW Sydney in 2024, The Growth Distillery hosted a series of 10 vodcasts (a podcast with video) hosted by Dan Krigstein and branded Rules Don’t Apply.
The ninth guest in the series was Dr Karen Nelson-Field, a globally recognised authority on the attention economy.
Nelson-Field reveals how platforms dictate what we see, how we think, and where we focus. With over 3 billion data points collected across 17 countries, Karen unpacks the science of attention and the hidden mechanisms shaping our digital interactions.
Discover why not all reach is created equal and how user experience design, immersive formats, and platform engineering control what captures our attention. Karen also shares invaluable insights into the future of marketing, offering guidance on how brands can adapt to these dynamics to drive better results.
From the transformative potential of augmented reality to the surprising truths about attention measurement, this episode is filled with practical takeaways for marketers, innovators, and anyone navigating the rapidly changing digital landscape.
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Krigstein opened the chat by stating that Nelson-Field was an interesting guest to have on the series because while the thematic of the series is 'Rules Don't Apply', she is "fundamentally in the business of writing rules and then re breaking them and writing rules again."
Nelson-Field: It's interesting you say that because my whole agenda since leaving university was to kind of, to your point, deconstruct the rules and re-put them together. So I think you're correct in that way. But there has to be rules with measurement, right? Because iit's supposed to be universal and systematic. So there needs to be rules which we can see in our data, but to your point, you have to break them down. It's first principles thinking.
Krigstein: What are the forces shaping where and who we point our attention to right now?
Nelson-Field: The thing that drives our attention is not what you think. You're less in control of your own attention. The user experience of the platform or the format is what actually forces you to pay attention or not.
