Attention’s growing development in digital media
Author: Peter Angelis, Integral Ad Science | Member IAB SEA+India AdTech & Innovation Regional Council
We live in an age where consumers are bombarded with ads 24/7, and brands are shouting to be heard. Online campaign goals are evolving with performance and CPA no longer being seen as the primary goal. Brand identity campaigns have become increasingly important, and that means focusing on creating content that helps and engages consumers rather than just selling to them. However, how can brands quantify the impact without performance and sales attribution?
One prevailing thought is measuring and understanding consumer Attention. This idea has grown significantly in the industry over the last 12 months, with many companies developing solutions and significant trade press coverage. Still, despite the surge in popularity, there isn't a consensus on the definition. It is also important to consider the context the industry finds itself in, challenges such as cookie deprecation & content over-saturation playing a role:
Cookie deprecation
Third-party cookies will soon become obsolete. As browser cookies and mobile device IDs deprecate due to industry changes, advertisers, platforms, and publishers look for alternative metrics that can act as a proxy.
Content over-saturation
Consumers have more choices in platforms and content to consume online than ever. This, coupled with the rise in short-form video consumption, has markedly affected online Attention spans.
Cross vertical competition
For most brands across many verticals, there’s a lot of competition. New brands emerge daily, fighting to break through the masses and reach their target audience.
Creative & Copy Advancements
Advancements in digital ad units allow brands to be more creative with their ad copy and design. A/B testing is an option, but the high cost of this strategy can be a deterrent for marketers, making it challenging to know that messages and creative are breaking through the noise.
These challenges have led marketers to look beyond what they have always done. The industry is changing. Therefore, marketers need to adapt to these changes to stay up-to-date and engage their target audience, ultimately driving business outcomes.
Attention Journey
Global marketers have been optimising viewability for many years. Viewability provides the opportunity for your ad to be seen. If it can’t be seen, how can it make an impact? This dates back to 2014 when the MRC set the industry benchmark for viewability, stating that an ad needs to be 50% in view for 2 seconds for display or 2 seconds for video to be counted as viewable.
Today, brands and agencies around the globe want more than just 50% viewability - they want engagement and Attention. Attention is a hot topic, but no standard metric exists to compare across formats. Along with Attention, we have recently seen the introduction of panel-based eye-tracking solutions where marketers can measure an individual's eye focus to see if they are fixing their Attention on an ad.
So while we know that Attention is a hot topic for marketers, where are we on this journey today? A number of companies have come out with Attention solutions. However, the challenge we see is that many marketers need help with choosing how to measure and determine the greatest impact on their brand for driving outcomes. Many marketers began to test and learn using Attention insights, which are generally still in the early stages.
Some notable examples of testing and research done over the years included Dentsu establishing its Attention Economy research practice and pilot, with Kroger finding the Attention-informed campaign yielded higher completion of its videos than the “business as usual” campaign. Meta signed onto the Dentsu research in 2019 and established Attention averages across its placements.
Lumen and Digital Turbine created a mobile gaming test environment in the form of a word puzzle game that test subjects were exposed to for five minutes. The respondents could scroll, click, and type when using the game. The study was carried out in the UK with 150 respondents who play the word puzzle game.
Ads from various brands were shown to those who requested a clue to solving the word puzzle game, and the research showed that 98% of gamers viewed the Digital Turbine ad unit. Once consumer Attention was gained, the average watch time for an ad reached 22 seconds. This has led Lumen to conclude that the ads would generate a global total of 21,828 seconds of Attention compared to 17,160 seconds of the equivalent gaming norm.
Finally in 2022 OMD Worldwide, Yahoo and Amplified Intelligence, published their Attention in Context study that explored the dynamics of slower-scroll, highly immersive environments for driving Attention in mobile advertising. Encompassing more than 128,000 ads served to 4,400 respondents in four countries (US, Canada, US, Australia), Attention in Context was one of the largest mobile-web Attention studies conducted to-date. Some of the findings looked at Attention differing significantly by age group and format and video length being some of the more significant factors in garnering Attention.
IAS Journey and Approach
IAS has chosen to take a thoughtful approach to Attention. The fact there is work being done by the industry towards developing consensus on Attention, the IAB’s leadership summit on Attention metrics is proof we want to make sure that we are collaboratively working towards this goal.
We have dedicated a lot of resources, digging into Attention and learning what the data has to say to allow us to measure the impact of various Attention and engagement metrics on business outcomes. Over the last 18 months, we have conducted several studies and uncovered some key themes to note as marketers go through their Attention journey.
Study 1: Visibility - Our hypothesis was media quality (viewability, brand safety etc.) are correlated with campaign performance and Attention. This particular insight focuses on the effects of time-in-view, which at the time shows a sizable lift in “conversions” for impressions with a time-in-view over 15 seconds.
Study 2: Context - A study was conducted in partnership with TobiiPro, a measurement company with eye-tracking technology expertise. A key insight from this study was that eye fixation was 3% higher on ad units placed near contextually relevant content.
Study 3: Interaction - Partnering with Lumen we looked across more than 400 campaigns that revealed a multiple signal approach makes sense when considering Attention. Among the insights, we learned that important signals can change depending on the circumstance. In this case, we found that quality and situation signals were most important for the display ads, while interaction signals were most important for the video ads. From our research, we see out that three key media signals can predict if an impression is likely to lead to Attention and results, and these are now incorporated into our model:
Visibility: Being the starting point for measuring Attention. If an ad isn’t meeting basic viewability standards, it will be impossible to achieve optimal time-in-view or metrics needed to gauge Attention.
Situation: Describes the environment in which impressions are served, which includes measuring the number of ads on a page, the percent share of voice an ad has on a page relative to other content, and the relevance of the Ad.
Interaction: Indicators of consumer activity in the presence of ads. These signals help identify preference and measure activity like scrolling and where the consumer’s gaze and focus is on the page.
In addition to the research noted above, once our Attention POV and framework were solidified, we conducted additional studies to test the relationship between our definition of Attention and measurable business results. This IAS research found a 198% average lift in the conversion rate when comparing high Attention impressions with low Attention impressions, demonstrating that optimising for Attention does drive conversion lift.
Conclusion
Recently IAS announced our next-generation Quality Attention measurement to equip marketers with as much information as possible to make informed decisions around Attention. As Attention is still its initial stages of industry acceptance and has yet to come to standardisation, there are a some key ideas marketers can take away when planning to leverage Attention: Without visibility there is no potential for Attention; ad format will guide the most relevant metrics to consider; and context is important for maximising Attention.
