Why attention measurement is everything and nothing

The debate about the importance of attention measurement is rampant. Some see it as the most important thing in advertising since its inception, others see it as a new get-rich-quick scheme for AdTech.

This juxtaposition exists for multiple reasons:

1. contradicting opinions on what attention measurement is
2. contradicting opinions on how attention measurement should be applied
3. contradicting studies on success and role of attention

Everyone is entitled to an opinion and discourse is good, it helps the industry to arrive at better ways of working and ultimately better results for advertisers (I keep saying ‘the market will decide’ in my sales meetings!), but I wanted to use this article to highlight why I think attention measurement is important throughout the end-to-end advertising process. You don’t have to agree – that’s ok!

Planning – how to use attention data pre-campaign

Audiences

Audience planning is a contentious topic. Some professionals say you want to reach everyone in a category on a regular basis (i.e. no point in targeting specific audiences) whilst others still subscribe to hyper targeting at all costs.

From an attention point of view, different audiences have different relationships with ads (for example older audiences spend more time with the ads). This knowledge can be valuable for understanding how audiences think about your brand and product which ultimately dictates the audiences you target in campaigns.

Creative

Depending on your preferred source of research, creative is responsible for c.50%+ of campaign success. With the reduction in hyper targeting, creative is an asset which when optimized can shift the dial on performance.

From an attention point of view, optimizing creative so that the key message or brand is at the optimal point in the attention cycle to impact results (particularly awareness & recall) is an obvious win.

Media

Media selection is important. Long-gone are the days of serving ads on 1,000’s of sites and overlaying a block-list of bad sites. Buyers now should be fine tuning where they are serving ads. This isn’t just from a programmatic perspective but from a ‘cross-channel’ perspective. The user experience with social media, search and open web are all highly varied – this can act as a valuable media planning input.

Activation – how to use attention data during a campaign

Domains

Whilst majority of publishers have standard formats and standard labelling, there’s huge delta’s in how they each perform. For example, say you want to proactively target ‘news’ publishers, the way in which NYTimes.com vs CNN.com build their mobile and desktop content is very different.

Knowing this, means that you can run on good sites/apps that are well suited to your ads being looked at.

Placements

This is a mild passion project of mine. Today, in most DSPs optimization is conducted at domain or sub domain level, however (as mentioned above) the placements perform incredibly differently for users looking at them.

Optimizing in a DSP or SSP to attention metrics can mean ads work much harder.

Optimization

I often think about ‘hierarchy’ vs ‘AI’ for optimization. I.e. can you leverage a DSP settings to be more effective than custom algo’s. The answer in most cases is an unequivocal no. Building models which factor in all variables that contribute to campaign performance, including attention metrics, is the ‘now’ of media optimization.

Measurement – how to use attention data post campaign

Creative, Delivery and Attribution

Measurement isn’t something you do after campaigns, it’s what you do throughout. Leveraging attention metrics to optimize your creative, how you serve ads and more advanced use cases like attribution will give you a much a better read on how your investment is performing.

Summary

Depending on how you prioritize each step in the process will determine which attention measurement provider you work with and how you set relevant KPI’s. It’s very feasible that you should work with multiple in general, but also multiple in a specific part of the process.

The role of AdTech in all of this is to facilitate the ease of application (as always) and it’s been exciting to see how DSPs, SSPs and others have been integrating the datasets of attention providers.

Anyway, this article wasn’t to convince you to think of attention measurement in any specific way, but to show how I think attention measurement can be applied in planning, optimization and measurement.

Short plug - Impact Media specializes in pioneering attention measurement for activation. We make testing and learning with attention measurement easy for agencies and brands, so drop me a note if you’d like to find out more.