Attention to advertising is a finite, rare, and valuable commodity. But how much of it is there in the world? And how much of it goes to advertising?
One way of estimating this is to apply Lumen and TVision’s attention models to media exposure data. We are lucky in the UK to have the IPA Touchpoints, one of the most robust, single-source media exposure surveys in the world, and it provides exactly this data.
Since 2005, the IPA has interviewed 6,000 respondents aged 15+ living in the UK about all their media habits. We can use Touchpoint’s data to estimate the total exposure time people have with advertising across different media. We can then apply Lumen’s and TVision’s models to estimate how much of that exposure time is actually spent looking at advertising.
The Touchpoint data suggest that UK citizens spend around five hours a day with commercial media of one type or another. Within that time, they are exposed to around 90 minutes of advertising spending just 9.5 minutes actually looking at it.
When you add in data for OOH, email, and direct mail, the total rises slightly. The basic shape is the same.
Yes, people do watch a lot of TV, yet only 9% of that time is given over to advertising. Only 43% of those ads are looked at, each for an average of 13.8 seconds. This means that while people spend around two hours a day watching commercial TV, and 11 minutes in the presence of ad, they only spend around three minutes actually looking at TV ads each day.
By contrast, people spend less time on social media than they do with TV. But 27% of their feed is advertising and they are much less likely to ignore the ads. Does this mean that Facebook is a better media than TV? Not so fast: when they do look at the ads, it is often for much less time than they do on the box. As a result, people spend around two minutes a day engaging with ads on social media.
(SOURCE: IPA TOUCHPOINTS DATA COMBINED WITH ATTENTION DATA FROM LUMEN AND TVISION. % ASSUME 16 HOUR WAKING DAY)
Or take newspaper advertising. Five out of every six newspaper pages carry advertising. Lumen’s research into press advertising suggests that people find press advertising very hard to miss, and on average tend to give it slightly more attention than social media advertising. As a result, while people only spend 20 minutes a day reading newspapers, 90 seconds are spent looking at the advertising in the press.
So how much attention in total do we spend with ads?
If you assume a 16 hour day, or 960 minutes of total attention, around 1% of our total attention goes to the advertising listed here.
Some people might find this data dizzying: there’s so much attention in the world and so little of it goes to advertising.
Others might find it humiliating: how dare you highlight how insignificant advertising really is.
Others still might find it demoralising: what’s the point of working so hard fighting for such crumbs of attention?
We find it invigorating. This is how the world is, not how some of us would wish it to be. Now we know how much attention advertising really generates we can really do something about it.
This perspective also helps us understand the insights that recent (and not so recent) writers have highlighted about how advertising works:
Understanding the reality (and paucity) of attention to advertising in general helps explain why advertising is such a weak force – though one in which drips of attention calcify into durable memories, like stalactites.
Understanding the cumulative impact of attention helps explain how long-term branding primes the mind to accept short term messaging.
Understanding the distracted nature of our attention helps explain why simple, visual emotional advertising is so much more effective than wordy, rational alternatives.
Understanding how advertising needs to earn attention explains why the pedlar needs to sing.
Advertising works. But it doesn’t work in the way we think it works. Until now, we’ve never known how our customers actually see our work. Now that we can see clearly, we can act accordingly.
WHAT YOU CAN DO NEXT
Attention Audit
At the end of a campaign or trading period, we take impression level data for both digital and traditional campaigns and apply Lumen’s predictive model of attention to estimate the amount of attention your campaign actually generated. We then combine this data with cost information to generate a ‘cost of attention’ analysis to help you understand which parts of your media mix are most ‘attentionally cost effective’.
Attention reporting
At the start of a campaign, we apply the LAMP (Lumen Attention Measurement Platform) tag to your digital advertising campaigns. The LAMP tag collects viewability information for every impression you serve, and then uses the information obtained to predict how likely the ad is to be viewed, and how long it is likely to be viewed for. The data is then combined with cost information to give you estimates of the ‘cost of attention’ for your live campaigns, allowing you to optimise your campaigns in real time.
Attention activation
The Lumen attention predictions can be used to inform real time bidding strategies as a custom algorithm within a DSP. The LAMP plug in allows you to ‘target attention’ programmatically, and see how this drives increases in sales and brand uplift.
FURTHER READING
Basic introductions to attention R. L. Gregory Eye and Brain Elizabeth Styles Attention, Memory and Perception
Attention models Daniel Kahneman Attention and Effort Natalie Lavie Perceptual Load and selective attention R.L. Gregory Perceptions as hypotheses Ann Triesmann & Garry Gelade The Feature Integration Theory of attention
Metaphors of attention Maurice Merleau-Ponty The world of perception Diego Fernandez Duque & Mark Johnson Attention metaphors: how metaphors guide the cognitive psychology of attention
Attention economics Rick Bagozzi Marketing as Exchange Georg Franck The economy of attention Yves Citton The ecology of attention Tim Wu The Attention Merchants Faris Yakob Paid Attention David Evans The economics of attention markets
