Inside Dentsu Media’s 5-Year Endeavor to Measure Attention 

Assume a consumer, watching TV, turns to Instagram during a commercial break and spots an interesting ad on their feed. In that moment, two advertisers paid to capture the consumer’s attention, but only one succeeded.

“Turns out people are very good at ignoring advertising,” said Mike Follet, managing director at eye-tracking firm Lumen Research. “Just because something’s viewable, does not mean it gets viewed.”

It’s all but impossible for brands to understand how much money they’ve lost to consumer’s waning attention and competing content. Marketers begrudgingly use the metrics available to them—reach, frequency, viewability and impressions—to gauge their ads’ effectiveness.

Some industry players are seeking different ways to determine if ads actually resonate with audiences. Five years ago, Dentsu established its Attention Economy research practice, partnering with eye-tracking research firms and fielding research studies with partners and clients to find answers.

The holding company’s attention-tracking algorithm that’s built into Dentsu’s M1 platform now informs some clients’ media plans. The trouble is industry-wide attention research remains scant. The media ecosystem has yet to even agree on a definition for attention, let alone embrace a particular method for tracking and categorizing it. Now five years into its research, Dentsu leaders told Adweek they want to engage with other holding companies and trade organizations to establish a standard, industry-accepted, set of attention metrics. But questions about how Dentsu will do that and what it will take to get competitors on board are still abound.

“We have to shift from codifying attention to connecting the industry. If, for no other reason, so we all can have a universal approach that is driven by the buyers, not the sellers,” Doug Rozen, CEO of Dentsu Media Americas, told Adweek.

A better way to measure

Lacking standardization, industry players face a formidable challenge and are implementing what Joanne Leong, senior vice president of global partnerships at Dentsu, described as an “arbitrage strategy.” That won’t work forever. For marketers to truly accept attention metrics, it must become standard for platforms to guarantee marketers that their ads will receive an agreed-upon amount of attention. Some are already doing this on a one-off basis, but this approach is far from normal.

Embracing new metrics will also require marketers to shift conversations away from conversations about how to get the cheapest reach, and instead ask, “What are the best media environments that can deliver better outcomes, and what are the attention requirements in order to do so?” according to Leong.

Dentsu’s research raises questions about to what extent agencies are responsible for managing media research. With a multiyear investment in attention, the holding company surpasses most others, but the fruits of its labors are still largely to be seen and depend on the ecosystem’s buy in. The bright spot is that Dentsu clients, including Kroger and Intel in the U.S., are now activating media based on the holding company’s research.

“Having tools that can provide insights on where and with what our audience engages allows us to make more intelligent decisions with our spend,” Carolyn Henry, vice president and general manager of Americas marketing at Intel Corporation, wrote in a statement to Adweek.

Kroger is constantly searching for a better way to understand how its ads resonate with consumers, citing concern with existing media metrics that just “aren’t cutting it” for the brand. Viewability, the brand’s director of media services, Kay Vizon, told Adweek, “was a nice advancement, but it still fell short of our expectations.”

During a pilot with Dentsu, Kroger simultaneously ran an attention-informed media campaign and a legacy media campaign, and found the attention-informed campaign yielded high-completion of its videos than the “business as usual” campaign. Another test, which had limited scale, yielded more mixed results. “We feel like that is part of why we should be doing these pilots,” Vizon said.

Research hinges on partnerships

There’s an extent to which holding companies are at the mercy of the broader ecosystem. Attention research can take months, is costly and doesn’t guarantee any company immediate ROI. But, partners are engaging with Dentsu. It works with over 30 entities to execute its research, including A+E, Frameplay, Meta, Snap, Spotify, Teads and Yahoo. The holding company’s database is loaded with findings from the studies it’s conducted with partners, many who’ve gleaned insights from Dentsu research that bolster their own business cases and help them sell more ad space to brands.

Dentu’s industry partners have guaranteed attention-based performance results—A&E Networks was the first to do it.

The network’s ongoing research centers on proving that TV ads still matter, shedding light on which commercials viewers engage with. A&E saw engagement lift 4% higher than it anticipated once it began using attention research insights to inform where it placed clients’ spots. Before, it inserted spots randomly across its media portfolio.

“We believe strongly that the way we had been solely guaranteeing our impressions previously was not a sustainable model,” Roseann Montenes, head of strategic audience and currency solutions, A+E Networks wrote in a statement to Adweek.

Ad platform Teads now reports attention metrics for Dentsu Media clients that run live campaigns on its site. “This is providing not only a benchmark for clients on how they perform on attention metrics but also creating opportunities to optimize campaigns for attention, which is really exciting as more attention means more impact and effectiveness for the brand,” said Caroline Hugonenc, global senior vice president of research and insights at Teads, in a statement shared with Adweek.

Gaming platform Frameplay was enthusiastic to discover that in-game advertising performed as well as in-feed advertising.

Meta signed onto the research in 2019 and since then established attention averages across its placements, which it applies to its media activation tests. The platforms wants to understand if an attention-optimized campaign delivers better results for brands that buy ad space on Meta’s platforms. The research uncovered that that shorter video ads drive higher recall in less time than longer ads.

Snap, for its part, wanted to understand how its Snapchatter audience interacted with augmented reality on its platform. With Dentsu, the platform ran numerous studies across it video and AR formats. It validated a hypothesis that Snapchat campaigns combining traditional video content with AR are more memorable for consumers.

Establishing an industry standard

Some media agencies have their own deep investments in attention measurement. Omnicom Media Group agency OMD, partners with Lumen competitor Amplified Intelligence to conduct its own research. Like Dentsu, OMD ingests attention data into its proprietary software platform, Omni, and uses that data to inform its planning decisions. It’s unclear to what extent research techniques are consistent across Dentsu and Omnicom, or any other agencies developing an understanding of attention.

“The concept of ‘attention’ as a KPI is far from strictly defined,” said Mariam Dilawari, agency partner of Meta, in a statement shared with Adweek.

Measurement techniques also raise questions for Dilawari, who wonders, for example, if eye gaze captured through cell phone’s front camera should be compared directly with eye gaze captured through the TV set-top box.

And then there’s the question of creative and to what extend attention metrics should be used to evaluate an ad’s creative impact.

“When we know how much the quality of a creative can influence how long someone enjoys the ad experience, attention metrics most likely can be used for certain use cases with large brand outcome benefits. Figuring out which ones are key,” Dilawari said.