Olivia Morley at AdWeek has written a balanced overview of the state of attention measurement …
“Why do we have standards in a lot of other parts of our media ecosystem, but in this place it’s acceptable not to have standards?” Doug Rozen, CEO of Dentsu Media Americas, wondered.
For the past five years, Rozen’s holding company has been studying consumer attention in partnership with a few attention-tracking firms to prove that ads optimized for attention perform better.
Large agency holding companies like Rozen’s are pursuing similar research, hoping that the results will lead to better campaign ROI. In some cases, sell-side partners are already treating attention as its own currency—even guaranteeing buys with attention metrics.
Theoretically, these efforts help marketers realize more investment value. Marketers hope optimizing ad placements to garner optimal attention will increase conversions, or at least generate more brand salience.
But frustratingly for Rozen and other agency leaders with a vested interest in attention tracking, the industry has yet to standardize attention metrics. If a media buyer wants a sell-side publisher to guarantee a certain amount of attention per media buy, the buyer and seller must both agree on what KPI best represents attention.
In the absence of a standardized metric, agencies and sellers are defining attention on their own terms. Many disagree about what the most accurate attention KPIs are, if KPIs should be used to guarantee media buys and if an industry body could or should enforce any standardized metric.
Full story here.
