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May 2, 20223 min read

Attention! It's the new metric


One of the biggest questions advertisers have is, “how do we know our ads were actually seen?”


Currently, there is no way of truly verifying this. Until we can track eye movement, scan neural activity, and even ask someone if they saw our ad in real-time, we can’t be 100% certain. So, there is a chance that a large amount of our marketing dollars are wasted on ads that are not even noticed.



The Old Solution: Viewability

The best measure of success we have had for a while now is viewability. Viewability goes only as far as to ensure that at least 50% of our ads were in view for at least 2 consecutive seconds. This means that our ad was visible to our audience, but does not necessarily mean that they actually saw it. It is the opportunity for our ad to be seen as opposed to actually being seen.



The New Solution: Attention

More than just potentially seeing our ad, we want to know that our audience actually paid attention to it and absorbed our marketing message. According to research done by Teads and Dentsu, attention is 3x more likely to predict an outcome than viewability. According to Playground XYZ, attention is 7.5x stronger at driving awareness and 5.9x stronger at driving recall than viewability.


It is clear that we needed to find a way to measure and optimise for attention, and the industry has responded. Media tech companies like Playground XYZ and Teads have proprietary solutions that allow us to buy digital ad spaces with the objective of maximising attention, while verification tools like DoubleVerify and Oracle MOAT offer attention measurement solutions.



How do we optimise for Attention?

The research on attention economy and methodologies for attention optimisation boil attention down to 5 key factors,

  1. Creative: The impact of creative on attention and recall cannot be understated. According to the study by Teads and Dentsu, a good creative performs 17% better at driving recall than a poor creative. It is thus crucial that we make creative work harder for us by understanding our audience's preference and making frequent creative optimisations.

  2. Contextual Relevance: Our product and message must be relevant to the context in which our ad appears. The greater the relevance, the higher the attention. An example of this is placing an ad for health insurance next to an article talking about rising healthcare costs.

  3. Environment: Some environments garner greater attention than others. For example, users may be more focused on a news article page than they might be scrolling through a social media platform speedily. Playground XYZ’s attention optimisation model applies this logic to determine which ad spaces are likely to garner greater attention for your ad. Some of the factors considered in Playground XYZ’s predictive model include content type, page length, placement, format, scroll speed, advertiser vertical and more.

  4. Time in View: The longer our ads are in view, the greater the opportunity for our ads to be seen. This works in combination with the environment, which also factors in the quality of content. Content that induces slower scroll speeds gives the ad greater screen time, and results in higher attention spans for it.

  5. User Choice: The more voluntarily someone sees and engages with an ad, the higher the attention and recall. So, it might be best to avoid pop-ups or forced ad views.


These factors work in combination, and ensuring best practice on all five will give us a better chance of driving greater attention for our ads.



Attention Measurement

Exact measurement methodologies may vary across various publishers and verification tools, but they generally use a combination of probabilistic and deterministic data.


Prior research is done to establish a benchmark for the various factors that contribute to attention. Once the campaign is live, metrics such as dwell time, in view time, interaction rate, and interaction time are measured in real-time and compared against the benchmark.


It is definitely important to assess the measurement methodology used by your publisher or ad platform so that you are aware of and are comfortable with the logic and accuracy of reporting that you receive.



Final thoughts

Maximising and optimising for attention is a step in the right direction for the industry. That said, it is important to know that attention is not the end. There is still a need to substantiate the result with additional data such as research and surveys to see if there has been a lift in awareness, or verifying that attention had a positive correlation with brand favourability or sales. It is always important to use a combination of data to form a more holistic and accurate understanding of campaign performance.



Resources:


Playground XYZ: https://playground.xyz/





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