Attention is advertising’s currency, let’s agree on its value

Back in 2020, Karen Nelson-Field’s seminal work ‘The Attention Economy and How Media Works’ attracted the attention of the marketing industry. Four years on, are we still in love with the method, or are we seeing interest diminish?

In today’s ultra-complex media landscape, capturing viewer attention is mandatory for any effective advertising campaign. While attention is the first box to be checked, much more is needed to ensure the impression achieves the set goal. But what exactly does ‘attention’ mean in the context of advertising, and how can it be accurately measured and utilised to optimise campaigns?

The definition of attention has remained the same since the 1960s ‘Mad Men’ era. But how we measure it has evolved dramatically, from surveys to cameras able to track and understand eye movements.

Most define attention as a conscious human decision to focus on something at the expense of something else. In our case, to focus on ads. Attention has become a big topic at industry events, in columns and in white papers. Sparked by the wider availability of measurement methods for human attention, it is now more widely considered for measuring ad effectiveness.

Definition confusion 

By way of a reminder, in advertising attention refers to the degree to which consumers focus on and engage with an advertisement. Unlike traditional metrics such as reach or impressions, which merely indicate how many people have seen an ad, attention metrics promise to go deeper and measure the quality of these interactions.

Attention results are quantified via various methods, starting from easy-to-get digital platform metrics like time spent viewing an ad, to more robust visual engagement tracked by capturing eye movements, and also deeper cognitive engagement measured via ‘neuromarketing’ scans of the brain in laboratories.

In 2023, the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), a leading industry research body that has been at the forefront of attention research, drove a major industry review to clarify the definitions and standards of attention in advertising. ARF’s extensive work aimed to delineate what various companies in the attention ecosystem offer, providing a clearer picture of how attention is being measured today and valued across the industry. Despite these efforts, which should be applauded, all parties still need to agree on a universally accepted definition of attention akin to established metrics like reach.

A standardised approach to measuring attention across different channels is also needed. Definitions vary widely, from ‘time in view’ and ‘eyes on screen’ to engaged attention captured via facial tracking technology. This lack of standardisation discredits direct comparisons and makes benchmarking performance across different campaigns and media platforms difficult. The quest for a consistent, cross-channel attention metric continues to be a significant challenge for advertisers.

Getting back to the customer

I became a supporter of attention as a metric early in my career because I saw the potential. The adoption of attention metrics is a fundamental shift in focus from traditional internally focused metrics – such as cost per thousand impressions (CPM) or return on investment (ROI) – to an external, customer-centric metric focus. Attention metrics prioritise the viewer of our ads over cost-related considerations. This shift underscores the importance of understanding the viewer’s behaviours upon exposure, rather than merely quantifying the number of exposures.

Drawing from my experience pioneering attention for creative testing, optimising video assets for better attention is a highly impactful approach. The basic premise we started with at Mars was that more attention is always better than less attention.

By accurately measuring attention on a second-by-second basis, advertisers can learn the current baseline of attention response and start making incremental adjustments to the creative, improving each scene’s attention score. Better attention translates into better effectiveness.

Recognising the importance of attention, we embedded behavioural measurement into the pre-testing tool developed by my team – ACE, or Agile Creative Expertise – an internal advertising testing solution that enables a better understanding of customer reactions, better creative constructs with a quantifiable direct impact on sales, and improved creative best practices.

Attention metrics prioritise the viewer of our ads over cost-related considerations.

Several years into our experience measuring attention, we discovered what attracts viewers’ attention, how attention and emotions work hand in hand, and what makes people look away. If attention is crucial, minimising distraction and wasted attention is equally important. Distractions can significantly detract from an ad’s effectiveness, leading to lost impressions. Reducing distractions and maintaining a compelling narrative are critical goals for any successful ad campaign. Finding creative ways to attract attention back to the screen is another way to fix ineffective ads.

Today, attention and distraction are easily measurable human behaviours. Gone are the days when real attention could only be sourced from neurological, in-lab research. AI algorithms running on devices can now analyse camera feeds and pass on attention data instantly.

In this privacy-safe research environment, testing budgets are the only blockers to brands’ better understanding of attention response patterns for every ad they utilise.

Measuring attention patterns at scale enables brands to develop various predictive attention models. This will get us close to a future in which attention data is as easy to source as view-through and click-through rates inside each ad-account. We are almost there.

Attention and media planning

Similarly, in the media planning space, various measurement solutions are available to understand attention norms at channel level. Brands use attention both in the planning phase and as an outcome KPI.

Companies like AB InBev and Haleon have openly spoken about their progress in adopting attention metrics as part of their media planning and activation processes. The goal of those studies was to prove that attention drives incremental business outcomes, and improved ways of working in programmatic media.

When it comes to planning, advanced advertisers will still rely on business impact metrics like sales and ROI to make media channel trade-offs. Attention metrics will be used to validate existing input from planning tools or provide more sophistication to programmatic algorithms. This is not small feat; it could make attention a potential candidate for the elusive ‘quality of reach’ measure that the advertising world badly needed for years.

Even the less sophisticated advertisers will benefit from embedding attention measurements for media. Here, the opportunity is to replace anecdotal data, such as their children’s app usage stats, with attention to make media channel planning decisions. Attention is an indicator of potential performance for these advertisers, and when combined with CPM, it provides a robust framework for building effective media plans.

Attention 3.0

The future of attention in advertising lies in what I call ‘Attention 3.0’ – a phase in which creative and media effectiveness signals are available in real-time, enabling programmatic algorithms to transact on attention units and optimise campaigns dynamically.

Several technologies have come together to allow this. The increasingly robust measurement of attention signals across all platforms enables more confidence in what we do, which, in turn, could enable the creation of attention-predictive models. The rise of video generation capabilities in genAI solutions now provides the speed to implement any creative changes instantly.

The future of attention is here, it’s just not evenly distributed. Many advertisers have tested the waters by experimenting with this, riding the wave of interest in attention measurement and planning. To achieve a solution embraced by the entire industry, magic needs to happen. Brands, agencies, martech and platforms must get on the same page on three things.

Attention’s the problem, creativity’s the answer – as ever

First, measure the attention that matters. All involved parties must converge and have confidence that the attention metrics accurately reflect consumer behaviours. In the race to adopt attention metrics, we can get blinded by metrics like time in view or view-through rate, easy to source from platform ad accounts. These are, at best, proxy attention metrics that need validation with real consumer behaviours on a case by case  basis, platform by platform and, ultimately, across platforms.

It’s not an easy mountain to climb, but success will unlock opportunity.

Before attention, however, reach and frequency measurement need fixing. Effective measurement of reach and frequency across media channels is still on the wish list for advertisers in 2024. The WFA’s Halo initiative, along with the local deployments Aquila and Origin, provide a great foundation currently in pilot mode. Advertisers, national associations, research partners and platforms are working closely to turn this into a solution in 2025. I doubt we will agree on a standard metric for attention while we can’t accurately measure reach and frequency across all platforms.

Finally, perfect alignment of incentives. For the Attention 3.0 dream to become reality, brands, publishers, agencies and measurement companies need an incentive. Setting a common standard to define and measure attention is the first step in starting this conversation. Establishing a unique way to measure attention across walled gardens and other programmatic marketing companies will give more confidence to advertisers to invest more wisely in media. I strongly believe that optimising on a metric that is a direct reflection of consumer behaviour will enable advertisers to deploy their budgets more precisely, agencies to improve added benefits to their clients, and platforms to fight their boxing match using the same gloves.

Despite the perceived hurdles, I remain optimistic for Attention 3.0. In the words of Bill Gates, with technology we tend to overestimate the short-term impact and underestimate the long-term benefits. Attention measurement is no exception.

Sorin Patilinet is senior director for global effectiveness at Mars. You can follow his posts as “The Marketing Engineer” on Linkedin here where he writes about effectiveness.