We are surrounded by noise, by messages, by life. Technology enables us to be always on and — thanks to the proliferation of smartphones — we carry an ever-expanding stream of advertising notifications with us everywhere we go, and our news feeds expand at an unimaginable rate, every second of every day.
Advertising has always been about turning apathy into attention, but this is becoming increasingly difficult in a world of attention transience and increased distraction.
Attention is scarce and when it comes to attention in advertising, Karen Nelson-Field, founder and CEO at Amplified Intelligence and author of The Attention Economy and How Media Works: Simple Truths for Marketers, says not all platforms are equal.
“Advertising is less about persuasiveness and more about reinforcing a category need at a moment in time. This is not new thinking — it goes back to Andrew Ehrenberg, the father of marketing science. Of all the many hundreds of thousands of data points that we have collected we can see that even with attention, advertising doesn’t always move the needle on sales. That is often to do with the brand not being present early enough in the ad, or the advertising not being distinctive enough, so it is misattributed to a competitor.
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“So, the concept of being able to pinpoint exposure and outcome is not as simple as people think. Moving the needle on sales has a lot to do with competitors, your physical availability, and a lot to do with your branding. There are so many things, it’s complicated.”
Nelson-Field explains that advertising seeks to improve mental availability, which is directly related to market share. “If your mental availability decreases, your market share will likely follow, so a big piece of our work is to understand the impact lower and higher attention platforms have on the capacity to either maintain or grow your mental availability.”
As an authority in this space, she says her job is not to confuse people but rather inform them. “We’re moving into a different phase of measurement, thinking about the different clusters of viewing behaviour that sit underneath each of the different types of attention. People understand that attention is important, they understand that there are different layers of attention, high versus low, active versus passive, however you define it, they understand there’s a difference between the attention collected by humans versus the pixel-modelled kind.”
Attention time unto itself was never the endpoint, she explains. “A three-second ad on one platform can give you different outcomes to a three-second ad on another, because the distribution behind that average varies. What sits behind those averages are different types of viewing behaviour, and these types are predictable not random. Productising and using these shapes of attention can critically predict outcomes to an extremely high order.”
There are different kinds of attention levels. “Passive attention is the most common type of attention paid, because it’s rare to get someone singularly focused on something, to the point of pushing everything else aside. For example, I can see, in my peripheral view, an air-conditioning unit to my right and some Post-it notes to my left. But I couldn’t tell you what the brands are of these products. That is a classic example of passive attention versus active attention where I would look straight at the ad. The products may be advertised right next to me, but I need to look at the ad directly to remember these brands, in part because the advertising is not distinctive.”
Nelson-Field says that every media platform has formats within it that behave differently. “There is a definite disconnect between the performance of each platform and the cost per thousand impressions, or CPMs for short, so direct comparisons are difficult. These costs differ wildly. There was no baseline for performance and until CPMs are standardised we cannot directly compare attention by platform.”
There are some exceptional ones within Facebook and YouTube and then there are other, less-exceptional formats, she says. “It’s the same for all media genres — even television has some lower-performing genres and times of day. The cost of some platform impressions is definitely a problem, and it needs to be realigned, but whether Facebook are too expensive, or TV is too expensive is not for me to say. What I do know is how much attention these formats gain, industry knows what they pay.”
A lot of the measurement issues began when we started, what she refers to as inward-facing measurement. “We stopped measuring humans, or measuring outwards, and started making assumptions about human behaviour by measuring forward. For example, we measure things like time-in-view and the rest of the device-based metadata that sits behind the platform, but fail to connect these to human attention. Pixel-based proxies that don’t model with continuous human data will compound error, and are only a Band-Aid fix.”
Put it this way: to know whether an ad had been served and to what degree pixels were viewable was considered revolutionary for its time, she explains. “But we found out pretty quickly that the defined industry standard for viewability (defined as 50 per cent of pixels on screen and two seconds of time) tells us little about whether a human actually viewed”.
And, she says, “to make matters worse, this error — I call it the viewability attention gap — is completely different on TV, or in cinema or even in a contextually relevant article in a premium publisher site like irishtimes.com. So using inward-facing metrics like this are useless.”
There was some good news for The Irish Times, as Nelson-Field did add that context matters. “We see that if you are actually interested in the content, in that you actively pay attention to the content, then you’re more likely to also see the advertising, whether passively or actively. The problem with the programmatic approach is that it does not often hit quality publishers and even then, in some cases, you’ve got so many banner ads on a page it just it turns you off.”
Quality reach is out there, she maintains. “It’s just harder to find today than ever before amidst the deafening noise that hits us every day.” She also calls out to the industry to “go back to measuring humans if you want to understand human behaviour”. Pretty simple advice, really.
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