Leveraging Attention Metrics To Improve Brand Outcomes & Reduce Ad-Clutter

How much attention a person pays to a branded message directly impacts how much the message resonates with them and drives actions, but how does an advertiser effectively capture that attention?  How should brands quantify an ad as effectively garnering the attention of a target audience?  Historically brands have used metrics such as clicks, viewability, and reach to prove out success of media campaigns, which are useful for understanding media efficiency and scale, but those metrics leave gaps in understanding the quality and effectiveness of an ad placement and how much attention the consumer(s) paid to an ad and thus the impact a branded message had on a target audience. For example, viewability is useful in understanding that an advertisement was in view on a screen, but it doesn’t tell the brand how many other ads were on the page or about other distracting messaging that is causing clutter.  Clicks can help prove out that the right audiences are being reached, but clicks can also be accidental, and a low number of people exposed to an ad ever click on an ad, so click-thru-rate as a metric can obscure the performance and impact of the majority of ads seen by people.  Reach can tell you how many people you served impressions to and is effective in understanding whether a campaign can scale against a target audience, but doesn’t showcase the quality of the media inventory behind those impressions.  Brands and advertisers therefore need new metrics to understand if their branded messages are driving attention and impact with consumers – metrics that are better aligned with understanding the quality of inventory and the media experience.

New “attention metrics” are providing a window into the quality of an ad placement in digital display, digital video, CTV, social, gaming, and OOH environments to improve the branded ad experience.  The attention metrics take note of media quality indicators such as the size of an ad, the location, whether the ad is surrounded by other brand messaging on a page, and the type of video player to create an attention score that highlights the likelihood an ad is to drive a large impact on a person.  To help visualize this, imagine you are reading news online and you are checking out two different news sources – news source X has 5 or 6 ads in view at a given time in smaller ad sizes while source Y has 1 or 2 ads in view at a given time and the ads are comparatively large.  You may still see the 5 or 6 ads on source X but the individual messages are far less likely to stand out compared to source Y with 1 or 2 large ads.  Attention metrics would therefore score the ads on source Y as more valuable than source X and open up the opportunity to optimize media campaigns based on these insights.  In this way, brands can have higher confidence that their branded messaging is not only reaching the right people through audience targeting, but also ensuring that the messages resonate with consumers and are more likely to drive brand outcomes – including script lift. Case studies from Adelaide prove that attention metrics drive a 44% increased return on ad spend compared to legacy metrics, including for healthcare brands.

Why Attention Metrics Can Help Solve The Dilemma of Ad Clutter

One of the reasons new attention metrics are particularly necessary in digital advertising is people are dealing with information overload in online environments, which is partly driven by an overexposure to ads and too much ad clutter.  This information overload leads consumers to become fatigued and cognitively dissonant, which negatively impacts their ability to make purchase decisions (study link here).  Made-for-advertising sites (MFAs), or sites that have a high ad to content ratio and poor quality content, are a particularly egregious example of content driving information overload as they bombard consumers with ads and create a very low quality experience for brands and consumers alike.  New research from Adalytics found that hundreds of large brands are still serving ads on these sites, and a study from The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) found that 21% of impressions are going to these sites (link here), which are wasted impressions for brands since they are unlikely to drive brand outcomes.  The ads on these pages may be very efficient from a cost standpoint because they manipulate the consumer into seeing as many ads as possible, but are hardly effective in driving an impact.  Attention metrics in turn can help avoid these sites, and other low-quality inventory sources, in order to avoid wasting ad-spend by giving brands better metrics to judge inventory quality.  Therefore by leveraging attention metrics brands can reduce ad-clutter and information overload, improve online experiences for both consumers and brands, and increase peoples’ ability to make quality purchasing decisions.

How To Test Attention Metrics?

Because programmatic advertising deals with thousands of publishers and sites the best first place to start testing attention metrics is across programmatic display, video and CTV inventory to ensure all media placements are serving in high quality environments.  Brands should layer on the attention tags, such as through suppliers like Adelaide or Amplified Intelligence, across their programmatic media to get a baseline of how their media is currently performing in terms of driving attention (ie. attention scores).  Brands should then align the attention scores with their current KPIs to see how higher attention placements are driving better brand outcomes and are therefore having an impact on improving media effectiveness.  Once brands have an accurate assessment as to how attention metrics align to brand outcomes, the next step is to develop attention score benchmarks to judge media quality across publishers and inventory sources for optimization.  Lastly, since brands can use attention metrics to create custom Private Marketplaces (PMPs), brands should create attention based PMPs to only serve ads in space that garner a minimum attention score and thus filter out MFA’s and other poor quality content experiences.  These steps are listed out below as well:

1. Layer on attention tags across programmatic media campaigns
2. Develop an accurate picture of how current media campaigns are driving attention (~ takes around 90 days)
3. Align attention metrics/scores to business KPIs to understand performance
4. Develop attention benchmarks to score impressions and content sources
5. Optimize campaigns to attention metrics/scores
6. Create custom attention based PMPs to ensure high quality media placements and ensure media is only running in high-attention environments