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Effectiveness measurement in the advertising industry continues to advance rapidly, but we keep asking ourselves the same question:
¿where is my ad best viewed?
Today’s average consumer navigates between apps, websites and social channels at high speed. In addition, they often jump from one device to another, or use multiple devices simultaneously. Despite good quality advertising campaigns, consumers’ attention is easily diverted. In addition, only one in five people remember a brand after seeing an ad.
According to Lumen Research (a company specialized in attention measurement), only 30% of ads are seen. In order to be seen, advertisers usually optimize their “viewability”, but visibility does not guarantee the audiences’ attention, it just means that their ads appear on a website. There is no way to know if a “viewable” ad has been seen.
What if you could optimize campaigns based on actual viewing time, rather than “viewability”?
Some media platforms are already leaving behind old metrics to understand the quality of impact, reaching the next level: attention generated by our campaign.
This is where companies that have started to implement attention measurement are helping advertisers to optimize their creativity based on users’ attention, achieving a much higher engagement rate. Optimizing campaigns based on attention analytics can generate better results throughout the marketing funnel. Attention is a metric that prioritizes the relationship between the consumer and the ad, rather than the platform with the ad.
Experts point out that 2023 will be a year of change in the traditional CPM buying model to aCPM quality buying model that only counts impressions that reach a quality threshold in digital media determined by the buyer. In this way, the ROAS of campaigns can be properly measured.
This refers to the time a person spends looking at an ad. It differs from viewability in that it disregards the idea that an ad has been seen because it is in plain sight. Until now, viewability has been one of the most popular metrics among advertisers to measure the quality of impact. It measures whether an ad had the chance to be seen. This system has rewarded formats with short durations and small formats that are less effective from an attention standpoint.
How is attention measured?
In order to track the user’s gaze as it moves across the screen, eye-tracking cameras are now used so you can understand how ads are truly viewed across all channels, platforms and devices.
Technical Data to Make Attention Measurement Possible, by Lumen Research:
- Biometric data from fully authorized eye-tracking panels enabled by webcam software for desktop and mobile devices.
- Psychographic survey data that validates brand recall, purchase intent and more.
- Proxy data such as scroll speed, ad density, impressions, view rate, view time.
Seconds of attention will become THE CURRENCY
The ability to measure ad attention is highly desirable and a valuable tool to demonstrate that ads are not only seen, but more importantly, that there is a direct relationship between time spent looking at the ad and brand recollection, and thus consumer action. One of the most important metrics used to measure attention span is “seconds of attention per 1,000 impressions”.
The most recent Touchpoints IPA data reveal that while people spend an average of 5 hours consuming content and are exposed to 84 minutes of advertising per day, they only engage with ads for 9 minutes.
Lumen measures visual attention across all media, applying the same viewability and visibility standards to everything. This constant approach allows us to rate formats and media against each other, using ‘seconds of attention’ as the only currency.
factors influencing attention span
It is important that the content is high-quality and visible. Quality content can generate higher engagement and in turn, make ads visible for more than 12 seconds. The difference in creative quality can impact brand recall by up to 17 percentage points. In addition, in A/B tests, ads whose creativity had been optimized after attention analysis generated 49% more average attention seconds than the original versions of the ads. Ads placed in a context relevant to the user generated an increase per 1,000 seconds in attention of 13%.
Sidebars have been found to attract more attention than headers. Assets on the left attract more attention than creatives on the right, creatives with video attract more attention than creatives without video, and vertical videos attract more attention than horizontal videos.
To dive deeper into these topic, Teads together with Havas Media Group presented their findings from “Project Trinity” in 2022 where they analyzed more than 15 factors such as editorial content design and context, ad formats and saturation or reader demographics across some of the major media outlets. In this study, they used eye-tracking and behavioral data collected from over 2000 panelists in the US and UK by Lumen Research from 2018. They measured attention taking into account a user’s dwell time per screen and scroll speed. After comparing the categories of each site, the analysis found that news, science and sports websites generated higher user interactions.
In the Mexican market at Teads Visión México 2022, we learned a few months ago that capturing the user’s attention in such a saturated environment can be a challenge.
Looking at the future, this event established four key factors to work on:
-Media quality
-Creativity
-Relevance
-Consumer experience
STUDIES ON ATTENTION
Teads, in partnership with Dentsu, conducted the global “Attention Economy” study and used Lumen Research’s LAMP software to measure the attention of Heineken Brazil’s campaign as an official sponsor of the “Rock in Rio” music festival. This was the first time a brand used the predictive method worldwide and it has become a success story. This campaign had a view-through rate twice as high (66%) and an APM five times higher than the industry average. This was reflected in the campaign’s recall rate compared to the sponsoring brands analyzed. In Chile, Teads and Initiative teamed up to conduct the first global multi-platform study involving a real-time campaign for Dove.
In the Teads Attention study with Lumen, the Dove Chile campaign received 3.5 times higher average attention seconds on Teads compared to social media platforms.
In short, what does attention bring us?
Attention measurement campaigns offer a different perspective on how advertising engages with audiences and what factors motivate users to pay attention and take action after being exposed to an ad. This new form of measurement and optimization gives advertisers the opportunity to learn what works best for them and thanks to technology. It also helps us obtain data from ad creativity to the formats and domains in which their ads have appeared allowing them to create a history based on human behavior.
