Why Marketers Are Paying Greater Attention … to Attention

Agency holding companies, marketers, ad-tech and trade organizations are all turning their gaze to attention tracking: which partners do it, how they do it and how they can get more stakeholders to, well, pay attention to it.

It’s a relatively new concept, with inconsistent methodologies. And while innovation has always propelled the $600 billion industry forward, without standardization and oversight, marketers are once again staring down the potential for ad fraud, which has plagued digital advertising since its inception.

“It is 100% necessary for the market to have a shared understanding,” said Marc Guldimann, founder and CEO of media measurement firm Adelaide. “What the ARF [Advertising Research Federation] is doing is incredibly important work to increase transparency around how people are measuring attention.”

What the ARF is doing, specifically, is rolling out the Attention Measurement Validation Initiative. The first of its three phases, surveying companies in the attention-tracking space and fielding one-on-one interviews, is nearly complete.

Scott McDonald, president and CEO of the ARF, who is not affiliated with any single agency or firm, unveiled the initial findings in June at the ARF’s Attention 2023 event. He’s now working on what he calls an “Attention Atlas,” which will illuminate vendor positioning, methods and deliverables so that marketers can make more informed choices when considering new partnerships.

With attention metrics, it’s really important we don’t allow for that gaming.

Marc Guldimann, CEO, Adelaide

“The reason for this higher degree of industry energy around attention measurement is partly because of the loss of behavioral signals,” McDonald said at the June event, referring to Google’s cookie deprecation, Apple’s privacy changes and new laws on the books—all of which have upended how consumers interact with digital advertisers.

The industry needs answers—and objectivity

Research on attention-tracking firms has so far been scant, but it’s building as some organizations scrutinize the ecosystem.

The Attention Council, a trade organization made up of agency leaders and attention-tracking firm executives that aims to advance the tracking space, fielded a survey of ARF members and produced a few additional reports summing up attention’s value to the industry. It continues to hold events on the subject, one of which this reporter participated in.

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’?

The advertising ecosystem has long been rife with fraud, and this is one thing preoccupying Guldimann right now. Although he participated in the ARF research and believes that transparency is paramount, he also warns marketers of the risk that supply-side partners start to game the system. If they learn too much about what UX experiences produce “good” advertising outcomes, they might start to design their sites with results, rather than actual impact, in mind. 

“A metric that says it needs to be 100% on screen for two seconds sets very clear incentives for publishers [that are] not in the best interest of advertisers or users,” Guldimann said. 

One example of this is Google telling website owners which factors contribute to high search rankings. Websites (broadly speaking) began pushing out digital content that ranked higher and ultimately made them more money, never mind whether it was good content or clickbait.

“With attention metrics, it’s really important we don’t allow for that gaming,” Guldimann said. “At Adelaide, we want our metrics to be durable in the long run,” he added.

Marketers may find the new research gives them an advantage. Because the space is as convoluted as it is, more transparency could very well breed the next set of attention-tracking challenges.

McDonald is wrapping up Phase 1 now, with research publication slated for later this month.

This story is part of The New Dynamics of Marketing Innovation special feature.