Buying the right amount of attention to meet your communication objectives
Understanding the true cost of attention across media is a good first step, but is it enough on its own? Should marketers, who have for years mistakenly chased the cheapest CPMs, simply switch gears and chase the cheapest ‘aCPMs’ instead?
We think not.
As we will see in the next section, while more attention is almost always a good thing for advertisers, all attention is worth something, and what it is worth depends on what you are trying to achieve.
If your ads can only work if they receive a certain amount of undivided attention, then it is wise to buy media that will meet this threshold.
After all, you’d never buy a 15-second TV ad spot and then place just the first half of a 30-second ad in it. Instead, you’d either buy the proper amount of time or re-edit the ad to fit the time available.
The same is true of attention: if your ad will be ineffective without significant eyes-on dwell time, then don’t waste your media budget on inventory that routinely fails to deliver the required attention. Not all ads, however, require great chunks of attention. Sometimes, all you need it to do is remind consumers that your brand exists at all for it to have an impact in the market. If all you want to do is make sure that people look at your ads and you don’t care how long they look at them for, then the attention calculus changes dramatically.
And if your attention strategy changes, so too does the cost profile of the media you use.
Let’s consider two very different advertisers, with two very different objectives, who would require two very different attention strategies to achieve their aims.
Advertiser A is a new brand with a complex new product to communicate to the market. Its offer is very motivating, but you do have to understand the details to appreciate the value. For this advertiser, five seconds’ average dwell time across different media is an absolute minimum to achieve their aims. They can therefore use the attention funnel approach to assess the different cost of generating five-second chunks of attention time. This makes TV look like a cost-effective way of delivering against their attention strategy.
By contrast, Advertiser B is a well-established brand with extremely distinctive brand assets that can be recognised very quickly. Its task is simply to trigger and reinforce existing memory structures related to the brand to build mental availability. In this case, the brand managers don’t need to impose a minimum attention time threshold on their media buy at all. Suddenly, TV no longer seems like such a bargain. Social media is a much more cost-effective option for this advertiser.
Of course, there are some media that allow you to apply both strategies simultaneously. Facebook allows advertisers to buy on the basis of ‘Watch’ (where you only pay if the ad is viewed for a relatively long time, and so is closer to the strategy of Advertiser A) and ‘Reach’ (where you pay for mere exposure, which is closer to the approach of Advertiser B).
Indeed, for most campaigns, there will be a variety of tasks to achieve, often simultaneously. Success will depend on a little of strategy A, a dash of strategy B with a dollop of strategies C, D, and E thrown in for good measure. Finally, there appears to be a law of diminishing returns: adding a second or third second of eyes-on dwell time can be more valuable than adding the 102nd or 103rd.
The better you understand your communication task and the amount of attention required to get the job done, the more likely you will be to develop the optimal attention strategy. Cost efficiency or communication efficacy? Understanding the true cost of attention will help you answer this age-old question.
