Want to Find Out What You/r Really Worth?

I am re-posting Joe Mandese's article from Media Village on my blog here to help encourage enrollment in this fascinating project. Please consider joining.

Ten years ago, Joe Marchese and I collaborated on a special edition of MEDIA magazine exploring a single question:  Was advertising a mistake?  The idea was that the ad model that emerged after World War II was based on a scarcity of media that, increasingly, no longer existed -- and that a new model needed to emerge based on a new form of scarcity: the time and attention people spend with media.

Marchese had just launched an ambitious venture enabling brands to reward consumers that gave them their attention.  Ten years later, Fox acquired Marchese’s venture -- True[x] -- named Marchese head of advertising sales and has already begun shifting from an ad impressions-based model to one based on the quality and duration of time consumers spend with Fox’s shows and the brands that advertise on them.

Marchese helped solve the problem from the industry’s perspective.  I was inspired to try and solve it from the consumer’s point-of-view, and began developing Bid/r, a new marketplace in which consumers trade their own time and attention explicitly and transparently with brands.  With the blessing of Jack Myers, I am inviting you to be a part of the live market trial that will launch in the next few weeks.

Full disclosure:  Jack, Joe Marchese and a Who’s Who list of industry veterans are also angels backing Bid/r’s launch.  They include Dave Morgan, Andrew Susman, Alan Cohen, Russ Zingale, Sarah Faye, Ellen Oppenheim, Debbie Reichig, Mitch Oscar, Charlene Weisler, Dave Thomas, Bruce Dennler, Steve Farella, Mike Lotito and David Verklin.

Bid/r wouldn’t be launching now if it wasn’t for their support.  It won’t get much past that point if we don’t get the support of people like you.  That’s because Bid/r is a people-powered marketplace that depends on people trading something -- their own time and attention -- with others willing to give them something for it: brand marketers.

So what’s in it for you to participate in the market trial?

Well, aside from the goodwill of helping me, my partner Hagen Wenzek, our angels and advisors such as Brian Monahan, Carl Marci, Bob DeSena, Bryan Wiener, Marc Guldimann and Josh Engroff, you’ll help shape a marketplace people have been attempting to crack the code on for as long as people have been talking about the “attention economy.”

Beyond that, you’ll get a “listing” on an exchange controlled 100% by you and five minutes of “inventory” each day to trade with brands offering you explicit values -- samples, swag, content, experiences, even cash -- to trade it with them.

Many of the bids you’ll receive in your “bid feed” will be things you can find in the real world, but over time you’ll see some unique, interesting and valuable bids coming directly from brands targeting users on Bid/r.  These are the trades we’re most excited about testing, because in some cases they will be forms of value exchange that have never been explored between consumers and brands before.

The goal of the market trial is to prove Bid/r’s model -- a direct-to-consumer audience exchange based on people trading themselves like an equity -- works and to refine and improve it over time.
The market trial will last for two months.  Users can only trade up to five minutes of time daily.
We are only accepting 1,000 users for the trial, so please go to www.bid-r.com/installation and list yourself now.

The experience won’t be perfect, but with your help and feedback, Bid/r will become a marketplace based on the value of you.  So sign up and find out what you/r really worth.