Once in a while, this column veers into realms that rarely appear in radio trade press publications, but if you read through, you may find a nugget that helps in your day-to-day professional life.
This time, the topic is “attention” or, in 2025, the lack thereof. My spark was a recent commentary in The Economist, one of my favorite publications. The Finance and Economics section has a column named “Free Exchange,” and the magazine (they refer to themselves as a “newspaper”) does not use bylines, but the column has a dedicated author.
The September 13 column was headlined “Can You Make It To The End of This Column?” and discussed “attention” as an economic good, much like capital and labor. The author cited the writings of a number of economists, including a couple of Nobel Prize winners. Taking time from your busy schedule to consider the thoughts of noted economists was probably something you didn’t think about when you started work this morning, but attention is something every radio station vies for each and every minute.
Two economists from Carnegie Mellon University and MIT (while neither school is known for their athletics, both have student-run FM stations!) defined “attention” as “the selective allocation of a scarce, rivalrous mental resource to an information processing task.” Putting that into English means that your listeners (or potential listeners) have only a limited amount of attention, and it can go pretty much anywhere at pretty much any time.
The Free Exchange commentary began with a discussion of “brainrot.” This is what most social media does to your brain, and I’ll bet we’ve all experienced it. Scrolling through Facebook or TikTok for an extended period of time is an obvious example. The stuff we’re seeing is not all that interesting, but it’s not dull enough to put the phone down and move on to something more rewarding. As noted in the article, “It also offers a way to waste hours of your life.”
How do we deal with “brainrot” and the theft of our attention? First, let’s understand the landscape. The definition of “attention” offered above uses the word “scarce,” a favorite term of economists. Much FCC regulation, as noted in earlier columns, is based on the notion of “scarcity” because we can only have so many broadcast radio and television operations before the spectrum would have nothing but noise and static.
The FCC was set up by the Communications Act of 1934, subsequently updated by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. By 1996, I was way ahead of the tech curve with my 1200 baud modem. Social media? That was well into the future. Yet, the FCC continues to operate in a world of scarcity because of spectrum limitations. It’s an outdated way of approaching the attention problem.
You can see that same thought process in President Trump’s pronouncements about the major broadcast networks and his interest in revoking the licenses they hold. If the major networks and their affiliates disappeared tomorrow, the entities would move online, where most of the viewing is headed.
But I digress, which is part of the attention problem. We 2025 humans don’t focus well, and while it’s easy to blame social media or other options on our smartphones — and that may be true — it is the reality.
How do we create more attention to our programming? Remember, attention doesn’t just help our programming but our advertisers as well. Some decades ago, I was the operations manager of an “easy listening” station back when that format, also known as “beautiful music,” was viable. The game was something like TikTok. The flow, including the spots, was designed to lull you into listening longer. Nothing on-air would ever jump out, which meant the occasional argument with a car dealer or another advertiser who wanted to “stand out.”
The Economist writer could offer only simple suggestions: social norms such as how libraries are kept quiet so users can read in peace, potential regulation, and finally, “putting your phone far, far away.” Good luck with that last one!
While economists argue over how to define and value attention, our problem is standing out enough to create attention for our medium and doing it with very limited budgets, if any. The good news is that our industry has never lost its creativity, but we need to act on it. We have to be better than brainrot.
Let’s meet again next week.
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