Of the 23 tracking firms the ARF evaluated, 14 indicated they focus on both media and creative measurement, five on media only and four on creative only. Those focusing on creative measurement indicated they’d been doing it for an average of 18 years, whereas the average number of years spent on media measurement was just six.
“We did find that no two [tracking firms] are identical,” McDonald told Adweek, although his initial research groups them broadly into categories.
Many founders launched tracking companies specifically to measure attention; startups like Adelaide, Lumen, Playground xyz and Realeyes were built by scientists, researchers and media experts. Then there are large firms like Kantar, which also built attention measurement functions. But despite their size and expertise, they can be seen as outliers with broad functions.
The startups, according to McDonald’s research, are mostly privately owned, explaining why much of their business operations remain opaque. According to the ARF study, 71% are data scientists, 13% are neuroscientists and 79% of employees are focused on quantitative work.
Half of the firms use eye-tracking tools, according to the ARF survey, and nearly half (46%) rely on surveys that ask consumers to self-report how well they remember ads.
The creative versus media mix
Sixty-seven percent of tracking firms regard creative as a very important attention driver, compared to the 54% that said the same about media. The implication, of course, is that most believe media alone can’t garner consumer attention, and that advertisers and marketers must consider creative outputs alongside media placement strategy.
McDonald said that poses a challenge. To avoid muddying research results, tracking firms often put controls in place when testing creative and media. For example, if a researcher is studying how media channel placement impacts attention, they would consider elements like the size of the ad on the page, placement on the page or the ad’s time on the page relative to successful outcomes. They would have to use the same creative imagery every time to prevent creative from influencing research outcomes.
“What we’re trying to do is understand first whether these given methodologies, when applied to test the creative, converge and give the same result [as the media tests], and whether that result aligns with the perceived success or disappointment of the client,” McDonald said.
Clients increasingly want to work with agency partners that understand the attention economy and its players. SharkNinja hadn’t considered planning media around attention before awarding business to Dentsu Media’s Carat in March. Dentsu’s attention research helped sway Ashley Eckerlin, senior vice president of commercial strategy, planning and analytics at SharkNinja, to select the agency. Carat found that advertising on Twitch could generate a good return for the brand, despite it being more expensive.
“When you overlay attention, it changes it completely, and it changes how you think about [Twitch] specifically,” Eckerlin told Adweek.
Could the sell side ‘game the system’?