From what could be seen to what is seen - and for how long
The data that both Lumen and TVision collect can be conceptualised as a funnel, which is a somewhat simplified form of the ARF’s Model for Evaluating Media methodology.
Attention is thought to flow from top to bottom; from what people could see (whether it is technically viewable or not) to what people do, in fact, look at, and for how long they actually look at it.
At the top of the funnel is what people could see: was the ad served on the screen? After all, you can’t look at something that isn’t there. We count the ad as being on the screen even if only one pixel is viewable for less than a second.
Next, it’s worth thinking about which ads are technically viewable, according to the Media Ratings Council (MRC) standards. A digital display ad is deemed to be viewable if at least 50% of the pixels of the ad are available to be seen for one second or more, or two seconds-plus for digital video advertising. According to BARB – the audience ratings organisation for TV in the UK – someone has to be in the room and ‘available to view the ad’, without a minimum time requirement.
However, it’s important that we appreciate that ‘technical viewability’ is a man-made standard. It defines a minimum threshold: if your ad doesn’t achieve this level of viewability, then it doesn’t count (and, under certain trading deals, you don’t have to pay for it). And because it’s man-made, it’s a bit arbitrary: why 50% of the pixels and not 37%, say? Why two seconds of video time and not 3.1 seconds? Or 10% of the run time? Or something else entirely? We have included it in the following charts for reference purposes, but as we will see, ‘technical viewability’ has only a tangential connection with actual viewing.
Next, we come to actual attention itself: not just the opportunity to see an ad, but actual viewing. Lumen defines an ad as viewed if it receives a single eye fixation on the pixels of the ad. ‘Fixations’ can be variously defined and are in their own way almost as arbitrary as viewability standards. The way we define fixations assumes that they occur 3-4 times a second.
Crucially, this means that people can look at ads even if they are not technically viewable by MRC standards. For instance, only 49% of the pixels might be peaking up ‘over the fold’ – not enough to be technically viewable, but sometimes enough to get looked at. Or the whole ad might be on the screen, but not for the requisite two seconds; it might get looked at even if it doesn’t count as a viewable ad, technically speaking. And, equally crucially, it means that many ads that are fully viewable according to the MRC don’t actually get viewed. Your ad may have been technically viewable, but people may have politely declined the ‘opportunity to see’ it.
But seeing the ad at all is only half the story. The next important piece of information is how long people look at the ads for: the eyes-on dwell time.
This does not need to be continuous. You can look at the first two seconds of an ad, look away, and then look at the last two seconds and we will record the attention as being four seconds in total.
The data from the panels is all collected on an individual basis, but reported as mean scores. Ads of a certain type or format, or on a certain platform or domain, will have a greater or lesser chance of being viewed, and their dwell time is averaged. There is considerable variance in how long ads are engaged with. Some people will merely glance at an ad, while others will invest a lot of time in the same ad. But for simplicity’s sake, we take a mean.
Finally, we can create a composite metric that combines both the average likelihood that someone will view a particular type of ad and the average time that they spend looking at the ad. We call it ‘attentive seconds per thousand impressions’.
Without considering imponderables like fraudulent or non-human traffic ads in our calculations for now, let’s imagine 1,000 impressions served to a screen. Of these thousand ads, how many get looked at – whether they are technically viewable or not? And what is their average eyes-on dwell time? If you multiply one number by the other, you get the average aggregate attention produced by 1,000 ad impressions served to a screen – a unit of analysis that is consistent across TV, mobile, and desktop advertising. At the end of the attention funnel we have a single unit to measure and quantify attention – the essence of advertising.
