Marketing the war of attention as a digital service

Fake news over Hamas hospital bombing blaming Israel for a self-inflicted demerge by the terrorists themselves, and the several hours it took Israel to counter with the truth and real evidence, made me think about the parallels of marketing a comercial service and “marketing a war”.

Touching people in modern digital world requires understanding that you’re competing in time dimension not only in features and price space. Because complex products tend to grow a feature list that is not easily grasped by the client’s bounded rationality (That’s why we pay Gartner or others that provide Comparision services). And pricing schemes are very dependent on usage, which is never easy to predict before actual implementation.

So, how do you manage the war for attention?
In the software industry as well as in interdisciplinary industries there are three slogans that are often used:

1) Be Agile so you get value early to the market.
2) Do Concurrent Engineering so to reduce the intra-team communication times, by doing design work in parallel.
4) And finally Automate, so you get a QUICK pipeline to the market.

In war like in peacetime one has to apply those principles:
1) Concurrency is already performed by joint forces where operators with different skills are working together in united task forces involving armor, infantry and air support (and even legal counsel at some level).
2) Agility means you have to subdivide the military operations on the timeline and output to media data that is collected from the field, naturally, when it’s not hindering your operations. In times where each soldier or officer is carrying a body camera and drones are picturing everything, the data is there.
3) RPA – or Robotic Process Automation is the missing piece right now in the media war pipeline, and this is the cause of the delays we see when providing factual evidence-based information to the public. Decision automation in Realtime on video data steams is not science fiction, there are tools like Apache Kafka that do just that for years. Yet, there is always a man in the middle. Because automation is not trusted enough by the authorities, and mostly because the data is controlled by the intelligence organizations using C3I (Command, Control, Consultation and Intelligence) systems which by nature are not designed to distribute data.

This pipeline should recognize media events and trends in Realtime and match them to intelligence events. Where there is a match provide data and evidence that support that event and output it to various channels.

Maybe next war?