• by Joe Mandese , 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."

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.