• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, June 12, 2023

GumGum will begin to optimize campaigns based on attention measurement and signals in the third quarter, Pete Wallace, general manager at GumGum in the UK, told Data & Programmatic Insider.

“Increased levels of attention means that you are increasing other types of metrics,” he said. “If we take attention and have that as the central metric and things we optimize for, we should start to see increases in all the other metrics.”

Brand uplift, message recall, purchase intent, and brand affinity are some of the metrics that will benefit, he said. Attention signals combined with brand signals show a clear correlation to increase purchase and outcomes.  

Successful campaigns such as the one conducted with pizza icon Domino’s helped to prove this theory. Domino’s wanted to determine whether context could play a key role in cutting through a competitive advertising landscape for its 50%-off campaign across the UK market with a goal to sell more pizzas.

The company, in partnership with Havas, called on GumGum’s contextual expertise combined with Playground xyz’s Attention Intelligence Platform (AIP), which the company acquired, to support the challenge.

The company wanted to determine whether tapping attention signals could more effectively optimize an approach to create consumer awareness and increase pizza sales.

"It enabled technology to do its thing to drive the best possible results,” said Wallace.

Typically, he said, the marketers want to put consumers in stereotypes, from gaming to general food content. Sometimes it means putting consumers in categories based on time of day, the time when people are more respective to buying a takeaway pizza.

This model aims to construct clear attention-based categories based on real-time signals.

The campaign, which ran from late September 2022 through mid-November 2022, generated more than 89 days of additional attention in overall lift. Key performance indicators (KPIs) rose 17% -- up 40% in the clickthrough rate -- with between 135% and 398% in return on ad spend (ROAS).

The ROAS was determined by post impression of a specific window and online orders for users exposed to the Domino’s ads.

“For a long time, the industry has been measuring the wrong data,” Wallace said. “Many advertisers still plan media based on the clickthrough rate. I struggle to fathom there are so many instances where people deem success based on the performance of one-percent of media. It suggests you don’t need to understand the other ninety-nine percent.”