The most valuable commodity in global capitalism is a renewable resource. Yet it’s being so intensively exploited that corporations are in danger of running out even as they pour hundreds of billions of dollars into finding it.
That commodity is your attention. This year it’s estimated global capitalism is spending nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars trying to buy it — and closer to $800 billion if you include sports sponsorship.
In the analog era, the exploitation of attention was crude and mostly ineffective — but simple. There were only a few TV channels, a handful of radio stations and a couple of newspapers. They were the only way you could spray advertising over the whole population. You saturated everyone and hoped that the 5% of people who might actually shift brands to your product based on your ads over your competitors’ ads saw them. It was wasted on everyone else. The saying went “I know half my advertising budget is wasted but I don’t know which half.” The figure was more like 90% or more for most products.
The internet fixed that. No need to spray ads everywhere — Google, Facebook and the myriad of data brokers that fed off your online activity worked how to target advertising by demographic niches and product interest. Except, at the same time the competition for our attention exploded because the amount of information we were subjected to every day increased by orders of magnitude.
Even the most targeted ad has to compete with major social platforms, streaming services, tailored news feeds, gaming and the emergence of audiences themselves as content generators for attention. The only choice was for advertising to work its way into every possible source of competition for your attention in the hope of grabbing a fraction of your time.
That’s why life in the 21st century is existence in both a physical and virtual space where you are relentlessly bombarded with attempts to colonise your thinking with brands.
Sports sponsorship is a small subset of advertising. Like analog advertising, most of it is wasted because it’s sprayed over a wide area — what consumers will only ever see is a logo on a jersey or a commercial broadcast commentator incessantly namechecking a source of money. There’s a hilarious “analysis” from creepy global consultant McKinsey that says sports sponsorship is really effective — but only if you spend money on “activation”. That is, you have to advertise the fact that you’re sponsoring a sport. In other words, if you advertise the fact that you’re advertising, you might get some benefit from it.
What’s interesting about sponsorship is that it has long attracted industries with problematic reputations. Cigarette advertising dominated both cricket (Gideon Haigh recalls the disgusting moment cricketer Greg Matthews was fined in the ’80s for daring to question tobacco sponsorship) and rugby league for years. Beer companies were also big AFL and league sponsors — the now-forgotten mid-week league competition in the ’70s and ’80s revelled in names such as “the Tooth Cup” and “the KB Cup”. Then came fast food and soft drink sponsors; these days it’s the pernicious betting and fossil fuel industries.
To the extent that you might once have smoked while watching sport, or had a beer or six, or had a burger, or can now waste some money on a flutter while watching, such sin industries are all things vaguely related to sports viewing, whether healthy or not. Santos and Woodside, or Hancock Prospecting with its iron ore and coal interests, or fossil fuel power giant Alinta Energy, are not after sales but normalisation and reputation laundering.
That’s how it was for tobacco companies, another toxic industry that found the regulatory net closing in in the 1980s, despite the whingeing from sports bodies and commentators about who would replace such lucrative sources of money (I can still recall the sainted Richie Benaud using Channel Nine to defend Benson and Hedges against “people in Canberra” trying to limit tobacco sponsorship).
The standard tactic employed by defenders of such sponsorship — often found in the ranks of sports commentators as much as anywhere else — is that politics should be kept out of sport. Putting aside that elite sports are more business than athletic endeavour, the operation of the attention economy — the desperate attempt to colonise the last uncluttered parts of our outward-facing selves — is inherently political. Moreover, the political reaction from those whose attention sponsors crave is intrinsic to the entire exercise. Don’t go trying to buy attention and then complain when you get more than you wanted — unless you think consumers are just empty, passive vessels ready to absorb your propaganda.
Politics is exactly why Santos, Woodside, Hancock and Alinta, along with other fossil fuel sponsors, are spending their money engaging in the political act of trying to normalise themselves when it is clear to anyone not in receipt of their generous contributions (whether politician or sporting administrator) that they are a fundamental contributor to an accelerating climate disaster.
No one is pure in the attention economy. But the actions of the climate culprits, like those of big tobacco before them, are particularly dirty.
