Commentary
Up Next: Attention-Based Media
- by Matt Freeman , January 19, 2009
To date, digital media companies have generally competed with traditional media on the basis of reach.
And in mimicking that model, digital media has underplayed the very magic that makes the digital world special: consumer engagement.
Consumer engagement is the sum of an equation that includes an attentive (and receptive) audience and an attention-grabbing (entertaining, useful, empathetic, etc.) brand experience.
Engagement is the result of a partnership between an audience and a brand.
Digital media is the middleware.
But media's most central role in that supply chain is delivering people's attention. Reach is a means to the end goal of attention. (If you pay to reach a billion people and no one pays attention - what have you bought?)
Which begs the question: Why are media companies primarily evaluated on how many people they reach rather than how much attention they deliver?
To put it another way, especially for brand advertisers - and especially in digital media: why is ATTENTION not the basic currency of media?
Attention can be measured both quantitatively and qualitatively.
In the simplest empirical view, attention is time. It is the amount of consumer time spent with a media company per month, per session, per page, per brand.
For mass brands, quantity matters. Making a meaningful contribution to a brand with more than $1 billion in annual sales obviously requires the attention of many, many consumers.
But attention also has qualitative values.
In their book, "The Attention Economy," Thomas Davenport and John Beck plot attention on a chart with quadrants for Front of Mind, Back of Mind, Voluntary and Captive. Their theory points out that the quality of attention--from most essential/task driven to most relaxed/enjoyment driven--has a significant effect on cognitive receptivity. (They even re-publish Dr. Maslow's famous "Pyramid of Needs" from basic survival to self-actualization as the "Attention Hierarchy" and it works quite well.)
Heavily footnoted Harvard-published studies aside, you can appreciate this on an intuitive level. You are probably more likely to internalize a conversation with a friend when you are playing a casual game together (relaxed mindstate) rather than when you are in the midst of checking the performance of your stock portfolio (abject terror mindstate). On the spectrum of different mindstates, the relaxed consumer tends to be the receptive consumer.
This qualitative nuance is especially pertinent for digital media.
Unlike television where entertainment is the predominant purpose of the medium (and relaxation is the audience correlative), digital media span a broad swath of human activity ranging from managing Web mail inboxes or cruising social networks to debating politics or filing your tax returns.
For brand advertisers, the qualitative side of attention then begs the question--what type of media environments offer the best quality of attention?
If we plotted digital media on the same map mentioned above, we would have clusters of "Utility" based properties (mail/messenger, commerce, social networks) and "Experience" based properties (entertainment, games, virtual worlds).
So the invisible obvious to us was quite simple.
If media companies are valued by reach, but the desired result of that reach for brands is attention, new media companies should be predicated on both reach and attention.
And if consumer brand receptivity correlates most directly with a relaxed mindstate, we should amass attention exclusively through entertaining experiences and enable brands to make their most creative, attention-grabbing contributions to those experiences.
"new media companies should be predicated on both reach and attention."
Right on!
To post some long-winded response as to how many wonderful insights that this post made would be just plain wrong, so I will take from @Brian..."Right on!"
Actually attention measures? In terms of PR, you will never know exactly. When sales increase for the advertiser over a certain period of time, you will have a better chance to measure what you placed and what the ROI is. However, change the season, change the mix, change the message, change the prices of products, change the disposable income availabilities, change the geography, change the trends....you can add more if you like....this is far from as cut and dry as it appears in your article.
I think a key element that needs to be considered is that digital media is perfect for the "ADHD crowd" - everything leads to something else and its hard to stay focused on anything you are doing online for any period of time.
With that being said if you can show us a measurement tool that media planners can and will use that will help drive spendng flows then that could drive an "attention metric".
If you pay to reach a billion people and no one pays attention - what have you bought? Too easy. You've bought broadcast TV.
Far too much money has been spent for far too long, based on a system of anitquated research (read: broadcaster-funded Nielsen ratings). No sane marketer or agency pro will raise their hand and acknowledge they've spent billions for years ONLY on reach. I welcome the concept of attention-measurement but worry about getting buy-in from the people who control the purse strings. They've been on the take for years so why change now?
Great post. A couple of issues though.
1. Time can be used as a surrogate for attention - someone who watches for 60 seconds is 'better value' than someone who watches for 15 seconds, but it is not measuring attention per se.
2. 'Attention' does not always pre-dispose the consumer towards positive brand sentiments. I know I have watched ads (online and offline) for the full duration only because of the sheer stupidity that such a crap ad campaign could have been approved.
3. NEVER underestimate the power of the limbic brain. If you paid to reach a billion people it is impossible for the subconcious brain in all one billion people to not 'register' the ad. Anyone who has worked in psychology or with hypnosis would attest to this. Have a search for the report on the Boddington's beer ad with the dancing bear - and how hypnosis 'unlocked' one respondents TOTAL sub-concious knowledge of the ad (and how he did the bear dance perfectly) while at a conscious level claiming ZERO knowledge of the ad campaign. There is also ample evidence that sub-concious brand images (which traditional research struggles to reveal) are MUCH more powerful than brand statements that respondents rattle off when interviewed - mainly because sub-concious brand images are stored in the non-verbal part of the brain (so why do research businesses still insist on verbal interviewing?!?).
4. Not all impressions are positive ones. Maybe the opening paragraph should read "an impression shouldn't be called an impression if it doesn't make a positive one.
John Grono
GAP Research
Sydney Australia