No Shiny Objects Here
I’ve had an interest in marketing, sales and influence, and interpersonal communication as far back as I can remember. I used to love going door to door growing up in the 1980s for my elementary school fund raisers, selling chocolate bars or Christmas wrapping paper. Sales fascinates me. To this day, I enjoy watching the occasional infomercial as it never ceases to amaze me how crafty and well thought out these ads are, to grab a consumer’s attention and inspire them to pick up the phone, give their credit card number, and order the latest cookware, rotisserie over or vacuum cleaner. Everywhere we turn, someone is trying to sell us something, and Wall Street is no different. What’s the latest flashy investment product they are talking about on Fox News or CNBC this month? It’s anyone’s guess because it changes so often. Who can keep up? But it all comes back to marketing.
The deck is stacked against you as an average investor. Most everything that you’re going to see when you turn on the news or visit your favorite social media app is good ole sensationalism, same as media and marketing have always done. The more things change, the more they stay the same. We are being bombarded by things that are designed to grab our attention by using fear or greed to hook us in and fight to keep our attention.
Whether it’s television, videos, or online, any content that we are consuming, whether it be investment-related or anything else for that matter, is all about attention. That’s our most valuable commodity today. It used to be time, but I’d take that a step further today and say it’s really attention. We have never had access to more information and the speed of accessing that information, ever before as a human race. I’ve heard people say there is more technology in an iPhone12 than in the entire space program, including the shuttle herself, when we first put a man on the moon. Moore’s Law stated that the speed and capability of computer chips doubles every two years, so it ain’t slowing down anytime soon.
As a result of this firehose of information coming at us at the speed which it does, we have lost touch with the ability to breathe and think and just be still. They say that the average person today has the attention span of a goldfish, seriously. It’s literally a couple of seconds, two or three seconds, or something like that. Thanks, Facebook. The game is they try to grab your attention with a fun or scary headline, something that stirs an emotional response when you see it, with the goal that you become “click bate.” Remember, these companies make money when you watch, click, like, and stay engaged. And everything is recorded. The data is then stored, sold, repackaged and used against you in the future to sell you more stuff. With Wall Street, they love to use phrases that make you think the world is coming to an end. “There’s carnage in the streets” is a fun one that I see in the Wall Street Journal anytime the market pulls back 5%, or “Worst start to the year for the S&P 500 in 40 years.” It’s like, wait, it’s only January, guys. They’re constantly trying to capture that two to three seconds of attention from you. Like many things in life, awareness is key, and if you remember that most everything you see today on digital or social media is designed to monetize your attention span and ultimately sell you something, then you have at least a fighting chance of staying one step ahead of the game.