• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 4, 2024

Tools that provide transparent metrics have been difficult to come by, as the industry retires browser cookies that have been around for 30 years, but Integral Ad Science (IAS) on Thursday released a new "quality" attention metric for general availability.

One early adopter, Omnicom's OMD, is "excited" about that, Associate Director of Planning and Optimization Jack Lieber tells Media Daily Newsvia email.

“We have been able to use this data to measure the difference in attention across publishers, exchanges, and different inventory sources and formats,” Lieber says.

It also has helped the agency understand what users “gravitate toward” online and how that corresponds to actions that site visitors take, how an advertiser “resonates” with consumers and how that can be attributed to business results.

The IAS metric, dubbed "quality attention," integrates media quality and eye tracking with machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to gain better measurement and detailed reporting, IAS also is working on building capabilities for programmatic optimization of campaigns based on attention in real-time.

The idea is to build a link between attention and proven business results. The optimization tool is expected to launch later this year.

Cookie deprecation has forced advertisers to find other ways to measure performance. Too much content across the web and social platforms has made it difficult for advertisers to stand out from competitors.

Yannis Dosios, Chief Commercial Officer at IAS, says AI has helped advance the company's measurement and create a better view of a campaign that combines attention and performance.

“A big focus has been on associating high attention with proven results,” Dosios said.

The technology is being trained on data consisting of billions of impressions and millions of conversion events, which is helping to create a better model for predicting results.

IAS sees, when comparing high-attention to low-attention impressions, up to a 137% lift in conversion rates -- up to 91% higher brand consideration, and up to 166% higher purchase intent.

Online attention metrics relies on visibility, the situation, and interaction.

Combined, the three signals can predict whether an impression leads to positive results such as return on ad spend.

AI is used to determine the score of each. IAS also has a tool that can estimate the cost of the impression and determine the return on investment (ROI).