PubMatic and Playground xyz Partner to Solve Scale Woes for Attention-Seeking Marketers

Getting consumers’ attention is about to get easier.

Supply-side platform (SSP) PubMatic and attention vendor Playground xyz have struck a commercial partnership, offering marketers easier access to high-attention ads. It’s the latest in the industry’s lunge toward transacting on attention, a potentially more viable success metric compared with measures like viewability.

“We’re hearing more and more from buyers, through RFPs and larger pieces of business from advertisers or agencies, that [attention] is an increasingly important component,” said Peter Barry, vp of addressability and commerce media at PubMatic. “We’re seeing this as up and to the right in terms of demand and revenue.”

A broader push toward attention should, in theory, realign some of the more broken incentives between consumers, publishers and advertisers that have led to clunky user experience and cluttered webpages, since ads with high attention scores are proving to be more effective both in driving performance and brand objectives.

Plus, inventory that scores high on attention, often found on premium, uncluttered sites, typically emit less carbon. Naturally, transacting on attention leads to brands paying a small premium.

Despite that logic, it’s been a long time coming.

“We are asking clients to completely reconsider how they value media,” said Jonathan Waite, global managing director at Havas Media Group. “It’s a much bigger conversation,” he added, pointing to changes in KPIs and how contracts are written. All clients are at least thinking about attention, he noted. 

Attention-based metrics focus on placement and context, a preference as signal loss increases with the looming deprecation of the third-party cookie. There’s also more movement from trade bodies and industry groups: The Advertising Research Foundation received 40 responses to its request for information to vendors for attention-based solutions, according to sources.

Boosting brand and performance

Using panels collecting eye-tracking data plus predictive models, Playground xyz measures the attention on ads through time spent, applying it to PubMatic’s inventory to create private marketplaces for buyers via its Attention Intelligence Platform (AIP).

This lets demand-side platforms and agencies buy packages of inventory categorized in the top 10% or top 30% for attention, for instance.

While some vendors measure based on proprietary attention scores, Playground xyz uses time spent in the hope that it’s more familiar to ad buyers.

“We’ve found [attention] to be extremely valuable when understanding advertising effectiveness, presenting innovative opportunities to optimize campaigns towards what matters most to our clients: outcomes,” said Amit Maniar, head of solutions and global investment at Omnicom Media Group.

Past campaigns measured by Playground xyz found that campaigns running in marketplaces curated by high attention on average drive 61% more awareness and 65% more unaided recall than non-curated marketplaces. Looking at performance goals, marketplaces with ads driving high attention lead to 389% increase in conversion rate compared with other marketplaces.

In time, advertisers might identify a 3-second ad that drives consideration, whereas a 5-second ad works better at driving awareness, for instance.

While many attention-based advertising solutions offer measurement, this also lets buyers make adjustments to campaigns based on attention.

“Measuring is one part, but optimizing is the goal,” said Playground xyz CEO Rob Hall. “There is strong demand, but we want to make attention actionable.”

That demand is growing. More than 400 global brands have used the vendor’s AIP for managed display campaigns, as well as a standalone measurement and optimization tool on channels like YouTube. The attention platform has been used across more than 8,000 campaigns.

Solving for scale

Despite a flurry of news and partnerships around attention-based ads, this integration sits on PubMatic’s supply-side platform. Being so close to publishers’ supply makes it easier to identify high-attention formats, and increases the scale for buyers. As opposed to integrations with certain DSPs, all buyers working with PubMatic—which has SPO agreements with four of the five agency holding companies—will have access to these high-attention marketplaces.

Over 35% of PubMatic’s total activity in the first quarter of 2023 comes from its SPO efforts, an area it expects to grow.

Agencies welcome the consolidation of pure play providers with well-established ad tech, said Waite, since it reduces complexity and additional ad-tech costs.

Similarly, Phil Tolliday, global head of marketing science at GroupM Nexus, believes the partnership is a sign of the space beginning to address market fragmentation and consistency challenges.

“It’s clear from our consultancy work that there are differences in what attention means to different businesses and verticals,” Tolliday said.

But that fragmentation is enough to put some off.

At least one large CPG advertiser is avoiding all attention-based metrics until industry standards are established, a cautious approach that misses out on early potential gains of bagging high-attention inventory with lower costs, said Waite.