Commentary
The Short Attention Spans Of Trade Associations
- by Joe Mandese @mp_joemandese, September 25, 2024
The Attention Council, a quasi trade association formed by the burgeoning attention metrics supply chain five years ago, is being folded into the 15-year-old Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM), which itself was folded into the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) six years ago.
The moves don't just signal a consolidation of media-measurement trade groups, but are part of a broader shift giving more influence from the supply side.
It has been years since the ARF abandoned its original charter of serving advertisers and agencies explicitly. It was originally founded as a joint-venture of the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4As) and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) in 1936 with a mission of improving "the practice of advertising, marketing and media research in pursuit of more effective marketing and advertising communications."
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In recent decades, the ARF's agenda -- and its sources of funding -- have increasingly come from either big media platforms (especially digital ones) or big advertising and media measurement suppliers.
The consolidation of industry trade associations likely makes sense, because the needs of the advertising and media industry have evolved since their formations.
The Marketing Science Institute was also folded into the ARF in 2020, and the ANA and others have also folded various adjunct trade groups under its umbrella.
While that makes administrative, cost efficiency and possibly agenda sense, it all comes down to who the trade orgs actually serve, and increasingly it is a digital media or digital media measurement supply chain first, not the demand side.
I mean, if I can invoke two crucial insights produced by the ANA's groundbreaking 2023 transparency studies once again, they are the fact that the ANA identified "information asymmetry" and "misaligned incentives" as the two most vexing issues confronting the ad industry as it relates to media-buying and planning overall.
And I would argue that is especially true of the research, data and information that is the basis for planning and buying media too. You know -- "currencies," audience measurement, media effectiveness, ROAS, etc., etc., etc. -- all the things the ARF has and continues to focus on. It just answers to a different authority now: the supply side.
The reason I'm winding this point up is because I have observed -- and written numerous columns about -- how media/media currency suppliers are increasingly influencing what advertisers use as their inputs.
I'm not saying they are necessarily bad inputs or inaccurate inputs, but I think it's important to understand the agenda of the forces pushing for those inputs.
Maybe they're not garbage in/garbage out, but my sense it that they increasingly are misaligned incentives in/misaligned incentives out.
Wow -- I just coined yet another new ad industry acronym: MIIMIO.
Don't get me wrong -- I've got nothing against attention metrics. I've been covering them as long as I've been covering advertising and media. One of the first stories I ever wrote as a cub reporter for Adweek in 1983 was a symposium at Columbia University focusing on it, which launched a new measurement platform, "Television Audience Assessment," to do exactly that. Ultimately, it failed to gain industry support, but other proxies for media audience attention came and went.
Remember Nielsen's "quad clusters? Or Innerscope's "In Context" work for Turner Broadcasting? Or various attempts during the ARF's neuromarketing research push nearly a decade ago?
I'm not surprised by the current push to try and standardize and currency-ize new forms of attention metrics, especially ones that have evolved from digital media suppliers. MOAT successfully championed the concept of using heuristics to do that with websites and digital advertising, and to me, anyway, that's all its modern day successor Adelaide is doing too, except that instead of independent media measurement, it's making a market out of its so-called "AUs" (attention units, which if not traded as explicit inventory, are now a proxy currency for many agencies trading media.
You can hear about that from a session I moderated at MediaPost's Media Planning & Buying Summit in Austin last week (see below). And if you want to know more about the data shown above, which was presented by Wpromote's Sid Gowda, it explains it will.
And I applaud the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Media Rating Council (MRC) collaboration to try and create some standards for measuring the attention of media audiences, I just think that in the end, it's going to be a subjective, value-added judgement call. Not a measurement currency.
I'm a fan of the ways Havas and others have been using Lumen Research's panel data to factor the weights and values of attention indices in their media mix. But those are adjustments based on intelligence and wisdom, not misaligned incentives.
It's possible that CIMM will do a better job of aligning those incentives, if for no better reason than swapping the management of the Attention Council from the suppliers -- Adelaide, Amplified Intelligence, Avocet, Lumen and TVision -- that founded it, to what should be a more media-neutral entity.
I just wonder how neutral CIMM, the ARF, and the U.S. JIC actually are when it comes to media incentives these days.
As long as I have your attention, one last note about attention metrics that I alluded to on my panel last week: I think you're going to see a groundswell of industry -- and regulatory -- discussion surrounding the ethics of the practice. And I think this would be a good time to get out in front of it.
One bright note in CIMM's announcement Tuesday is that it plans to address ethics as one of the components its "Attention Working Group" is working on:
- Quality: Promotion of attention metrics as measures of media quality.
- Ethics: Examination and discussion of the ethical considerations of attention measurement.
- Research: Presentation of leading research on attention metrics and their impact on brand outcomes.
- Education: Instruction on, and lobbying for, the use of attention metrics within the industry.
- Currency: Exploration of an attention-based currency for the purpose of media buying and selling.
It should be No. 1.
Joe Mandese is the Editor in Chief of MediaPost. You can reach Joe at joe@mediapost.com.
Joe, as you know, I've been saying for some time now that the ad time sellers are firmly in control---as they do mst of the funding for the "audience" research---so I agree with you. The solution, however, will not be easy---if it is even attepmted. Why? Because of advertiser indifference. Yet it's their ad dollars that are being sought after --and spent.
What amazes me is the lack of understanding by the media sellers of how advertisers---CMOs and brand managers---really think. The sellers believe that big numbers help sell their medium---but they are wrong---just ask the magazine folks. For years they relied on big pass-along"readership" numbers to compete with TV ---yet their share of ad dollars slowly declined. So they started to cut rates--but now advertisers could buy all the GRPs they needed by using fewer pages---so what did the bigger numbers get the magazines?
The same point applies to TV---but there's a difference. Unlike print media, the typical branding advertiser who spends heavily on "TV" believes that this method of communication is the only way to get their ad messages across effectively. So they are sold on TV. If TV had attentiveness measurements---which the sellers have effectively banned as a standard metric, though it's allowed as an add-on metric in selected cases---advertisers would see that their true reach and frequencies in TV--ads actually viewed-----are much smaller than the current, inflated, audience stats indicate. How would they respond?---by dropping TV in favor or radio or print mediea? Not likely. More likely they would spend more in TV to get what they thought they were getting---or closer to it. So smaller but more relevant ad viewing numbers in this case would probably stimulate ad spend, not diminish it---in my ever humble opinion, of course.
Joe, a question regarding that tablle in your post. If I am reading it correctly, CTV commercials are twice as cost efficient as "TV" commercials---I assume this means linear TV---in reaching viewers attentively. Since TVision is reporting no difference in normative ad attentiveness ratios between the two platforms the only way this can be true is if CTV CPMs were half those of linear TV. Which as an overall average isn't true per our observations. Have I missed something?
@Ed Papazian: In terms of seconds viewed per ad dollar spent, but that's likely due to a lower clutter environment and forced viewing on most CTV platforms.
Did Wpromote use real person's based actual exposure data, i.e., Eyes/Ears-On measurement perhaps Lumen or TVision data for each of their reported "viewed" graphs; or, so called "viewable impressions" data which ONLY represents device-based content-rendered-counts. The latter would provide very different graphs and conclusions versus the former. As you are aware our industry has a nasty habit of using terms that would not stand up to scrutiny or have become nebulous, i.e., "impressions"!
Tony, in this case it wouldn't matter as you would get approximately the same result if the calculations were based on set usage or "viewing". My problem is this. I know that CTV CPMs for traditional TV advertisers in the upfront were negotiated down to the point where they came very close to linear TV CPMs---lower than broadcast TV but higher than cable., Also TVision reports about the same degree of commercial attentiveness and dwell time for CTV and linear. So the only way CTV could top linear by a huge margin in attentive seconds per commercial is if its CPM was much lower. It looks like a per commercial stat which applies regardless of the ad clutter differences.