The impression economy is finally faltering, with some wise folks calling it “
the biggest mistake” our industry ever made. Video has it’s own problems with the “view” as
highlighted by Rob Norman.
Neither views nor impressions reflect how much attention is captured by
an ad, causing media buyers to clamor for better metrics.
The most promising new metric for measuring media is time, thanks, in large part, to its relationship with attention.
The Financial Times has over a dozen clients paying them on a cost per hour metric and leads a working group of over 30 publishers and technology companies developing time-based media
solutions.
The hottest publishing platform on the web, Medium, is pricing branded content distribution based on time spent with content.
Moat just raised $50 million to drive
adoption of it’s time and attention measurement stack and other companies like Webspectator and Instinctive are offering media products sold by the second.
Parsec’s own
time-based platform has seen double-digit growth every month since launching last fall, and is being leveraged by agencies working with brands like BMW, Discover, Colgate and Dell to buy media on cost
per second basis.
Agencies from every holding company have run campaigns on Parsec’s platform.
Research is proving the value of time spent with advertising. A recent IPG
Media Lab study found a 2.5x increase in recall as exposure times increased. Universal McCann will be presenting results of their work for BMW in New York City next week.
Thanks to
the right mixture of technology and market conditions, the attention economy, whose arrival was heralded by Wired 20 years
ago, is starting to take shape. The resulting focus on time and attention will better value both the quality of media and the creative running on it.