Remember permission? Well, that is so last-century! Now, a related concept that's gaining some traction is that of attention marketing. From what I've been reading about it on Corante and elsewhere, it has potentially scary ethics considerations.

"Permission marketing" was about people giving businesses permission to gather and keep their private data in exchange for something, usually information. But that contact information and implied permission-to-contact really is a stand-in idea for attention, which is really what we as marketers are asking for.

Corante Network contributor Shel Holtz had a post awhile back on the ethical implications of attention, in which he said,

"It’s interesting to reflect on the term 'pay attention.' 'Pay' suggests some kind of barter arrangement. When I pay money for something, I expect to get something in return, whether it’s a pack of chewing gum, a new laptop, a novel, whatever. When I pay heed, I also expect something in return, such as information of value. As more and more organizations jockey to attract the attention of key audiences, what are they giving in return? Are they even thinking in terms of an exchange? And what of those organizations that use services like Technorati and PubSub to identify where people are focusing their attention in order to use it to better hone their own messages? Are they employing any ethical guidelines to their application of the information they obtain?"

Shel links to AttentionTrust.org, which is a non-profit set up ostensibly "to advocate on behalf of the people who own the commodity organizations crave." Lots of big-name bloggers have joined this organization, including Corante bloggers. And me, though I wouldn't describe myself as a big-name blogger. Like Shel said in his post, I joined just to see what these folks are up to.

I dug around a little more, only to find that the folks behind Attention Trust are also behind a start-up company called /Root that has software you can use to gather your own clickstream (the electronic tracks of your Internet travels), which as far as I can tell, it intends someday to broker to advertisers. Someday being when the media futures market has been created.

Here's a less-flattering description of Attention Trust from a commenter to this blog post:

"AttentionTrust is attempting to turn consumer activity data into a commoditised product. Its strategy is to lure consumers in with the false consciousness of 'ownership.' However, attention data is only useful to large corporations, plus the arbitrageurs (like Seth) who want to trade attention like futures traders sell pork bellies.”

Another post I found arguing against this idea on ethical grounds had this to say:

"I'm no drinker of the Cluetrain red cordial, but the 'markets are conversations' meme does have some potency. The Internet collapses the gap of understanding between big companies and the everyday J. Sixpacks who buy their products. Buyers can have closer relationships with suppliers by interacting with them directly, rather than through intermediaries. Instead of the highly desirable effect of disintermediation, the roto-Rooters want to stop all this conversation nonsense and put a middleman in between the buyers and sellers."

Another consideration, from Om Malik: What if your cache of clickstream information -- the tracks of your attention -- gets subpoenaed? Says he, "...shouldn’t we be spending our creative and technological energies on building something that offers a semblance of privacy"?

And Corante Network contributor Elizabeth Albrycht asks a related question in a post on the ethics of velocity, which is about how technology moves so fast, people can do things such as toss up photos and videos of other people on the web via Flickr without ever taking the time to get their permission first. "Is the rapid pace of technological change, which often precludes any discussion of social implications, unethical?" is Elizabeth's question. The unsettling answers:

"One answer says we are at the mercy of technological determinism and we might as well give up. The other says it isn't really worth thinking about, and we should just follow current social mores. ... Why oh why can't brilliant technologists, many of whom where sitting in that room, invent something that uses technology to bring ethics into play? "

An ethics that covers how to handle new technologies and the wild new frontier of attention marketing seems even less attainable when we consider the current fairly simplistic state of ethics in some quarters. Exhibit A, courtesy of Corante contributor Olivier Blanchard, is the proposed code of ethics for the advertising industry submitted last August by former Ogilvy executive Shona Seifert to U.S. District Court Judge Richard M. Berman, as part of her amends for her alleged role in overbilling the Office of National Drug Control Policy for advertising services. The last point in her code reads, "Don't break the law."

Finally, here's a last word on ethics from that great philosopher of marketing, Dilbert: