Irina Dzyubinsky, Mediaprobe’s Head of Partnerships for Realeyes’ Attention Leaders series
Earlier this year, Irina Dzyubinsky together with Keith O’Brien from Realeyes explored the evolving landscape of attention measurement in advertising, shedding light on its significance, challenges, and potential impact on both advertisers and publishers.
Here’s our recap of the key takeaways. Watch the full interview on YouTube and read on Realeyes’ blog.
Importance of Attention in Advertising
The conversation starts with an emphasis on the long-standing importance of attention and engagement in advertising. For advertisers and agencies, attention acts as a gateway to engagement; without attention, users are unlikely to engage, remember brands, or take action. Attention metrics offer a solution to reduce advertising waste, enabling advertisers to pinpoint the most engaged audiences and content for more effective ad campaigns.
Benefits for Advertisers and Publishers
Both advertisers and publishers can benefit from attention measurement. Advertisers can create more effective ads that can lead to an action, and prevent wastage of impressions, that is, both monetary resources and the number of impressions needed to reach a certain audience. On the other hand, publishers who can demonstrate that their media is engaging for specific audiences can command higher premiums, promising better outcomes for advertisers.
Attention and Emotion
While attention is commonly measured using eye-tracking, the importance of emotional engagement in the attention debate needs to be noted. Measuring and analyzing emotional impact can provide a deeper understanding of how users engage emotionally with content, which is often missed by eye-tracking alone.
Challenges and the Road to Standardization
What’s acknowledged is the industry’s lack of standardization in defining attention metrics. The industry’s focus on viewability and eye tracking may not cover all the components necessary for a comprehensive understanding of attention. Education and awareness of various solutions in the space are vital to leverage attention effectively. Additionally, understanding use cases, platforms, creative content, context, target audiences, and campaign goals is essential.
Tailoring to Use Cases
Advertisers benefit from more efficient spending when they understand where attention is focused. The attention measurement space is highly competitive, with multiple vendors and solutions available. Therefore, advertisers and marketers must navigate this landscape to find the right metrics and measures for their specific needs. Selecting the right provider depends on the use case, which is unique to each marketing strategy. Creating a standardized toolkit or a body to aggregate metrics and information in a meaningful, reliable, and scientifically sound way is suggested as a potential solution.
Advice for Brand Marketers
A piece of advice for brand marketers is to task their agencies with recommendations for incorporating attention metrics into their marketing strategies. Education and understanding are key, along with embracing AI and data analytics. Advertisers must comprehend what content grabs and retains audience attention from an emotional engagement or emotional impact perspective, and not eye-tracking only, depending on the medium and platform they use.
Publisher Hesitancy
Some publishers are hesitant to guarantee attention because they believe it’s closely tied to the quality of the creative. However, it’s important to consider that a “bad” creative in one context may perform well in another, emphasizing the need to evaluate attention within a specific context.
Considerations and Challenges
Attention varies across different media and platforms, making it necessary to define attention in a use-case-dependent manner. Privacy concerns and increasing regulations add complexity to the use of user data for audience targeting. Additionally, concerns about brand safety and the impact of creative quality on attention are factors to consider.
Future of Attention Measurement in Advertising
Attention metrics are increasingly crucial in the advertising industry, as they offer a pathway to engagement. Depending on the use case, the industry will need to move beyond viewability and guarantee on something more meaningful than mere pixel percentages. Hence, the need for standardization, education, and tailored approaches to attention metrics, all of which will help marketers and advertisers leverage attention effectively and efficiently in their campaigns.
Thanks for the great collab, Realeyes! Read the full interview on their blog or watch Attention Leader 19 – Irina Dzyubinsky.
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