OpenBack Optimises Mobile Push Notifications in the Cutthroat Attention Economy With Anna Benn

At what point did it become impossible to ever catch up on every TV series people are saying you should watch? When did a blog post or news article that takes more than five minutes to read become too long? Or a 30-second ad become more than we’re willing to sit through?

In the face of nonstop streaming digital content, the likelihood that we’ll focus our attention on one specific piece of content becomes infinitesimal. Even if an ad or email does make it to our devices, most of us have developed a mental firewall to filter out what we consider irrelevant. With attention as a resource hitting critical levels of scarcity, it has suddenly become one of the most valuable commodities on the market.

Herbert A. Mellon predicted the evolution of such a society in his 1969 essay ‘Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World’:

‘When we speak of an information-rich world, we may expect, analogically, that the wealth of information means a dearth of something else—a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes… the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.’

Once this ‘information overload’ business model becomes monetised, it becomes what we call the Attention Economy.

But the hyper-competitive nature of the Attention Economy goes beyond the simple rules of supply and demand; the Attention Economy by its very nature is a self-cannibalising business model. With most marketing campaigns taking the approach of quantity over quality, they simply add more irrelevant, irritating content to the crush, forcing consumers to further refine their defense mechanism of filtering out the white noise.

In 2013, Microsoft Canada ran a study that determined that the average adult attention span had dwindled to roughly 8 seconds, as opposed to the 12 seconds we had in 2000. In an age of spam filters and ad blockers, it quickly becomes apparent that in order to distinguish themselves, a brand needs to send out a quality, relevant and highly personalised message if it wants to engage with and retain users. But in a hyper-saturated market, this is no longer enough.

Enter Push Notifications

With people spending on average nearly 3 hours per day on their smartphones, it becomes clear that mobile devices are the most efficient medium for a brand to connect to consumers. Push notifications are what enable apps to do this: bite-sized, pop-up messages that appear on your phone’s screen, similar to SMS but coming from the app itself.

Push notifications are a sophisticated, state-of-the-art tool for engaging users in a meaningful, personal way. Access to the data on users’ devices provides apps with useful information to forge a deeper connection with their consumers, all while keeping the user’s convenience a priority.

However, poorly targeted, quantity-over-quality marketing campaigns have driven people to see push notifications as just another annoyance fighting for their attention. Everyone knows the frustration of buying something from Amazon, then getting flooded with suggestions to buy an almost-identical product for months afterwards, or getting pinged at 2 in the morning by a marketer who clearly lives in a different time zone.

Notifications are seen by many as invasive and distracting, and users are making their dissatisfaction known. iOS only has a 40% opt-in rate to push notifications, as opposed to Android’s 74%, in which users are opted in by default and need to take the time to opt out by going into Settings. It looks like iOS is going to evolve in future upgrades towards being more friendly to push notifications, like Android’s OS, but that counts for nothing if apps don’t use push notifications to connect with users in a relevant and ethical way.

Personalisation and Remaining GDPR Compliant

Personalisation and data targeting is a double-edged sword. To grab users’ attention in a hypercompetitive attention economy, apps leverage data from individual devices to provide users content that aligns with their interests, complements their activities and doesn’t disrupt their schedules.

However, in the wake of recent data scandals – most infamously the situation where Cambridge Analytica accessed the data of 87 million Facebook users without their consent and used it to influence political campaigns – people are more savvy about who has access to their personal data and what they do with it. With traditional push notification SDKs, user data is sent to cloud servers, and in some cases will be sold to third-party marketers over which the app itself has no control.

This, obviously, make user data vulnerable to abuse and exploitation, and causes problems when it comes to compliance with GDPR, as well as other regional data privacy regulations.

OpenBack, a start-up that won the ESB Spark of Genius Award at Web Summit in 2016, has done away with the data-privacy blind spot that exists in the push notification SDK by redesigning the entire architecture and building it up again from scratch. The OpenBack model is built without need for data servers, as the app engages with user data entirely on the device itself.

This means the data never changes location, and users retain complete ownership. GDPR compliance – as well as compliance with the US HIPAA and COPPA regulations – is OpenBack’s default setting, implemented at onboarding. The SDK also allows for immediate deletion of an individual user’s data, if requested.

OpenBack’s platform offers 40+ data triggers and 200+ device data points to help compose hyper-personalised notifications that cut through the crush of information and spark a user’s interest. Dynamic notifications are enabled as a way to edit or delete notifications that have already been sent, for example, to amend errors or obsolete news, or to delete an offer that has expired. In this way, the SDK provides a tool to further clear out unnecessary information and free up user bandwidth.

In a digital world where businesses are fighting for scraps of attention, the business model of ‘playing the numbers game’ and flooding users with generic marketing has proved unsustainable, not to mention detrimental to mental health. OpenBack offers a recalibration of this model, putting the user first and giving apps the tools to distil their communications into what is worthwhile, on a user-to-user basis.

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