• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 28, 2023

Emodo, a wholly owned subsidiary of Ericsson, has released findings from a study that highlights the need to optimize creative formats in ad slots that maximize attention, engagement, and recall. 

The data suggests that the single most important factor in driving attention -- which measures the average time spent on an advertisement -- and memorability, which measures brand and advertising recall in advertising, is virtually ignored in today's attention metrics.

Challenges stem from key performance indicators such as viewability and clicks being inadequate at identifying whether an ad is making an impact on the end viewer. Regulatory changes and the deprecation of cookies have posed challenges for brands in using traditional attribution tools.

Privacy-friendly attention metrics are becoming the industry’s new “performance currency” to measure audience connections.

Emodo -- in collaboration with Persuasion Art, a thought leadership agency -- now uses Creative Attention Effectiveness methodology, which enables advertisers to measure both the relative and combined influence of media and creative on Attention and Memorability metrics.

The strategy uses eye-tracking technology. Key findings from the first nine tests with more than 1,200 participants found it drives stronger attention and memorability. The average Attention, time spent, rose 6%, and Memorability, brand recall and ad recall, rose of 25% and 17%, respectively, on average across all tests.

Emodo also tested four specific site categories: Gaming, News, Weather, and Productivity. Dynamic ads performed better on all Attention and Memorability metrics on all. The News category experienced the highest lifts in brand recall, 61.8%, and ad recall, 56.4%, for animated ads vs. identical ads without the effects.

Optimizing of creative formats and sites resulted in 71% lift in brand recall, 51% lift in ad recall, and 34% increase in average time spent, whereas lifts have been much smaller when optimizing either creative format or site alone.

Attention Metrics is viewed as being more predictive of lower-funnel metrics. Emodo’s initial studies show a strong correlation of .6 between Attention and Brand Recall, but the nature of that relationship varies depending on the optimization lever.

For example, the research shows that optimizing to a creative format that performs better on attention leads to a 29% higher brand recall, whereas optimizing ad opportunity based on attention drives only a 2% increase in Brand Recall.