The triple jeopardy of attention – Some lessons for public sector communication

Communication experts and marketers in the public sector often face the challenge of creating and launching campaigns with limited resources and/or scattered budgets. At the same time public sector campaigns need to compete with multi-million campaigns of international brands for the attention of potentially interested audiences.

This is why it is essential to take the right decisions to reach and attract the attention of your audiences effectively.

However it can be difficult to find the right guidance that can truly inspire and improve your work. There are many opinions out there and some marketers have the tendency to listen to those who scream the loudest or have just found the latest trick to improve performances on social media. Often they are the same people who advocate short-term tactics that go to the detriment of brand attention and brand memorization.

Marketing evergreens and basics

This is why it is important to listen to trusted voices. This can be done by turning to great marketing classics like Byron Sharp ’s “How Brands Grow” or participating in high-level marketing courses like Mark Ritson ’s Mini-MBA .?

In recent years, I have found great inspiration for my daily work in the works of these marketing experts and researches:?

• Peter Field and Les Binet with their legendary book? “The Long and the Short of It”
• Karen Nelson-Field PhD and her research in “The Attention Economy and How Media Works”
• Orlando Wood with his two complementary books “Lemon” and “Look out”.?

I have always felt that there was a strong connection between these authors. You can imagine my excitement when I discovered that three of my favorite marketing authors - Peter Field, Karen Nelson-Field and Orlando Wood - presented a joint session titled “The Triple Jeopardy of Attention” at this year's International Festival of Creativity in Cannes (you can watch the full session here – it is just 45 minutes long).

Although they did not add anything particularly new to their previous researches, combining their perspectives in a single presentation can be a true eye-opener for marketers who still do not believe that a paradigm shift is needed.?

We will cover this in more details, but at different levels (budget, media, creative) the authors insist on the need to shift from advertising short-termism to advertising able to build attention and create mental availability.?

A brand’s mental availability refers to the probability that a person will notice, recognize and/or think of a brand (normally in buying situations). It is based on the quality and quantity of memory connections related to the brand.?

In this context, advertising has the objective to generate active attention from people by creating positive feelings and association with the brand (those memory connections mentioned above). Mental availability cannot be built without active attention, it is a sort of precondition.

Clearly attention alone won’t build mental availability. Indeed, the creatives used in an ad, the brand size (the space occupied in the ad), the frequency (how often the brand appears in an ad) and entry time (the moment at which a brand appears in an ad) all improve ad performances significantly.?

A small recap of how marketing communication works. / From: Les Binet's “How advertising works”

The triple jeopardy of attention

Let’s come back to our authors. In their Cannes session, they addressed the issues caused by marketing short-termism from an attention perspective. As we have mentioned above, without attention there cannot be mental availability and consequently no brand interest or brand growth.

The authors identified three types of threats that today are negatively affecting advertising attention:?

1. Marketing budgets are increasingly allocated to types of advertising that are not intended to create broad attention (Peter Field);
2. Marketers use advertising platforms that do not necessarily build attention (Karen Nelson-Field);?
3. Creative advertising is less and less able to gain broad strong attention (Orlando Wood).?

Let’s deep-dive into each of them.?

First threat presented by Peter Field – Marketing budgets are increasingly allocated to types of advertising that are not intended to create broad attention

In the last 10 years, there has been excessive spending on short-term advertising (mainly sales activations) that does not create attention and hence does not build mental availability.?

Indeed, not all advertising creates mental availability. For example, digital platforms have a weaker and less certain impact on mental availability.

Moreover, this has a direct impact on the Excess Share of Voice (eSOV) system as identified by John Philip Jones. Put simply, your Share of Voice needs to be higher than your Share of Market if your brand wants to grow. The difference between Share of Voice and Share of Market is called Excess Share of Voice (eSOV). This is an “easy” way to plan the growth of a company. However, it supposes that advertising investments (SOV) create broad attention. If these advertising investments do not generate attention and subsequently mental availability, the purely financial measures of SOV are increasingly unreliable.?

Increasingly unreliable SOV measures / From the presentation “The Triple Jeopardy of Attention”

Second threat presented by Karen Nelson-Field - Marketers use advertising platforms that do not necessarily build attention

In parallel to the first threat, marketers have been using advertising platforms that do not deliver in terms of attention and mental availability.?

According to Nelson-Field’s studies, 70% of digital ads that we buy using MRC metrics (viewability standards) get zero attention from actual people (!!!).?

However, this viewability gap is not equal across platforms and formats. This differs greatly by platform and format.??

If we look at the MRC viewability standards, pre-roll platforms perform better than in-feed platforms both for % of viewable impressions (even when the threshold is raised to above 50% on screen) and for viewable seconds (even when the threshold is above 2 sec.).

However, both types of platforms (pre-roll and in-feed) suffer enormously if the threshold for viewable seconds is brought above 5 sec. This is why these online platforms push for short videos which are normally less effective.?

It is also important to notice that each platform and format has their own attention elasticity – the limits of how much attention an ad can receive. This is not a question of creative assets used on the platforms – the same creative asset performs worse or better in line with the overall platform attention performance. This means media placement dominates the creative.?

Third threat presented by Orlando Wood – Creative advertising is less and less able to gain broad, strong attention?

In parallel to the other 3 threats, advertisers have created brand advertising that hardly builds mental availability.?

By conducting research inspired by psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, Wood showed how our brain hemispheres work in very different ways.

The right hemisphere is “in charge” of the broad vigilant attention with which we first analyze the world around us. The left hemisphere focuses much more on a narrow-beam attention that focuses more on factual and abstract facts and objects.

Recently and in parallel to the first two threats, it seems that advertising has been highly affected by narrow-beam attention features and characteristics.?

This has had a direct effect on attention and effectiveness since campaigns with right brain characteristics are more effective and memorable and build better memorization.

How Left brain and right brain see the world / From: Orlando Wood's “Lemon: How the Advertising Brain Turned Sour”

Conclusions

From the three threats mentioned above we can draw valuable lessons for people who work in communication in the public sector like myself.?

Very often in the public sector there is a tendency to look at the private sector as a place for innovation and inspiration. However, it is important to focus on those learnings that are actually based on marketing research.?

Here below are the three main take-aways for the public sector:??

1. Do not invest exclusively in short-term activations and digital media?

In their 2013 publication ("The Long and the Short of it: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies") Peter Field and Les Binet clearly showed how the most effective campaigns are those that combine both long-term goals (brand building) and short term goals (activations). They suggest that brands should spend around 60%-70% of their budget in brand building activities and media formats able to support the brand.?

If you want to know more about this topic I highly recommend? this Mark Ritson’s talk on the 10 key factors driving advertising effectiveness .?

2. Choose your media platforms carefully

As said above, pre-roll platforms (e.g. YouTube) are better than in-feed platforms (e.g. Facebook and Instagram) both for % of viewable impressions and for viewable seconds.??

However, attention is not endless, not even for larger screens and not skippable formats (ex. TVs). There is a sweet spot (10 sec. mark) where attention declines. To sum it up, when the pixels go up, the attention goes up. Although, after 10 seconds watch time the attention declines again.

3. Develop creatives that speak to the right brain

Do not let yourself dragged by bad standards in the private sector. Choose those creative characteristics that are becoming less common but are certainly more effective (see below).?

Creative characteristics associated with the left and right brain hemispheres?/ From: Orlando Wood's “Look out”