by Martin Vinter Managing Director, Ebiquity Media
For more than ten years now, the sheer scale and volume of media available to advertisers has been proliferating. Digital technologies and platforms mean that consumer choice about how, where, and when they consume media content has exploded and so fragmented.
It is no longer possible to reach mass audiences at scale simply by running a TV ad campaign. As a result, many now characterise modern marketing as an attention economy, a multimedia competition for consumer eyeballs. The locus of control has also shifted away from media owners, with the growing ability of consumers to block and skip ads or subscribe to content delivered in ad-free environments.
In his book To Sell Is Human, the American business writer Dan Pink says that we are all “in the moving business” – the business of persuading others to take action.
In marketing communications, brands are looking to identify and target customers with commercial messages that trigger a response.
The challenge facing advertisers in the increasingly-digital marketing ecosystem is capturing and holding consumers’ attention: if they aren’t attracted to and don’t attend to an ad, there’s no way they can be persuaded to do anything.
And yet until recently, the role of attention rarely featured in how advertising impact was measured. For too long, the industry has been focused on performance metrics like impressions or CPM.
Thankfully, this has started to change. Advertisers, their agencies, and their analytics partners are all motivated by a shared desire to ensure that brands’ marketing investments deliver optimal return. The importance of both channel-discrete and holistic ad investment attention paid to advertising is gaining momentum across the industry.
At last this is helping to move attention from an impractical nice-to-have to a core component of marketing analytics that is both tangible and actionable.
At Ebiquity, we are world leaders in media investment analysis. We have partnered with Lumen Research, the undisputed experts in measuring consumer attention in digital advertising. Together we are now publishing this state-of-the-art report on how to include meaningful measures of attention in advertising effectiveness models.
In the report, Lumen’s founder and MD Mike Follett shows how, for the first time, we are bringing together Ebiquity cost data, Lumen data on attention to digital advertising, and TVision data on attention to TV, to create a new, composite metric.
By combining the average likelihood that someone will view a particular type of ad and the average time they spend looking at the ad, we’ve created the first true advertising attention currency: attentive seconds per thousand impressions.
As attention differs across different media, this allows us to compare the cost and impact of different media, including TV, digital video, and digital display.
This new measure is an important and practical development in meaningful cross media measurement.
We’re not claiming – quite yet – that it’s the definitive answer to this complex problem. But by factoring in whether and for how long consumers pay active attention to the ads served to them, we are making progress on a path towards comparative media measurement that’s truly fit-for-purpose.
We trust you find this report and this new metric a helpful contribution in this rapidly-evolving debate.
Martin Vinter, MD Ebiquity Media
Mike Follett, MD Lumen Research
