Dentsu Creates 'Attention' Metric For Media Planning And Buying
- by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, October 19, 2021
The advertising industry has realized that “device metrics,” that were proxies for attention as well as standards like viewability do not necessarily equate to a true “opportunity to see,” according to Joanne Leong, vice president of global media partnerships at dentsu international.
New findings from dentsu international research show that human …
5 comments about "Dentsu Creates 'Attention' Metric For Media Planning And Buying".
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Very interesting, Laurie, and it's good to see an ad agency paying more attention to attentiveness---no pun intended. However, attentiveness is hardly a new concept. As We chronicle in our annual report, "TV Dimensions 2021", the first study of TV audience attentiveness---using cameras that captured eyes-on-screen behavior under real life, at-home, viewing situations took place way back in 1957. Since then there have been quite a few observational studies along these lines and now we have TVision in theU.S. with its 5000 home panel giving us tons of eyes-on-screen data.
There has been a push recently to calculate CPMs based on attentive time spent with ads and, judging by your fine report, it seems that Dentsu buys into this. I think that the core idea that all attentive seconds are of equal value is flawed as it doesn't take into account the way commercials are usually fashioned. Most of them are telling a story---in effect, a sequential sales pitch. In this context if a person "watches" only three seconds of a 30-second commercial these may have virtually no value in terms of registering the brand's name or, more important, getting the basic selling message across. In contrast, watching 10 or 15 seconds of the same commercialmay be just enough to do just that while watching 25-30 seconds is even more effective.
I think that we need more research to develop dwell time effectiveness threshold values to account for getting the story to consumers. It may be that none of the three seconds of exposure in my example, above, has real value while those in a 10-15 viewing sequence have , say, 75% value and those in a 25-30 second attentiveness experience have 100% value. If we can determine what these breaks are----and this will take time and lots of research---we may be able to calculate attentiveness CPMs on a more realistic basis.
Laurie, interestingly, I have been tracking individual sweepstakes by way of total click through entries from the beginning in 2003. Sweepstakes and contests clicks, not views or seconds of attention of the ads are the best of all worlds for the ad agencies and advertisers. The real goal shouldn''t be "seconds" viewing a ad but the click through to the advertiser's page and then to secure contact information and a sale.
The goals are way too low. Why? With online advertising with programmatic, the flaw is the belief that only digital solution that works is programmatic. The idea that a human you writes and create an ad and distributed such as I do with sweepstakes, is repulsive and blocked or strongly suggested to block by some in advertising. However history proves that security and results are the highest when a humans are involved.
The real question for the advertisers is whether you want a unpredicatable programmatic ad placement or, human to directly create, manage and distribute the ad that has far greater security and produces greater results and the same or low cost. So what do you want? a human or a algorithm to do the work?
Vey well said and well documented, Ed!!!
Thanks, Kevin.
Spot on Ed.
Back when TV was king in the 1990s, a quasi-proxy of 'attentiveness' could be derived by dividing the average minute audience into the programme reach.
If the average audience of a programme was 8m and the reach was 10m, then the 'factor' was 0.8. If that was stacked up against a programme that had average audience of 4.5m with the reach of 5m then the 'factor' was 0.9. The chance of your ad being 'seen' was higher.
It wasn't the sharpest tool (be aware that the longer the programme the lower the factor will be) but it was handy and helped with buying efficiency. It wasn't 'attention' per se but it seemed to be a good correlate.