Attention Is the New Currency for Brand Advertising

Brand marketers are shifting their focus away from
traditional digital metrics like the click and toward new
metrics such as attention.
How did we get here? Virtually every year there has been
some sort of innovation: new ad sizes, formats,
functionality, targeting and re-targeting techniques and
programmatic buying methodologies. We have seen
quite a transformation from the day the first 468x60
banner ad was put on a website and the user was
encouraged to click.
While the innovations in general have been tremendous,
we have actually seen a surprising lack of innovation
around ad measurement. Direct response advertisers
use “the click” as a proxy for success, but brand
advertisers have never really had a true success metric
to call their own, and finding the right metric for brands
has actually proven a fairly hard problem to solve.
How should we go about finding the right success metric
for brands? As a starting point, branding by definition is
about creating an ongoing connection with a consumer,
so that if and when they are in the market for your
category of products, they consistently put you at the
top of their consideration list.
Related: How 'Micro Marketing' Can Create Macro
Results for Your Brand
Does brand advertising work by showing an ad once and
getting an instant response? Of course not. Branding is
about storytelling. It’s about an idea and trust. The
connection that brand advertising creates takes time.
We don’t feel trust with a brand the moment we see a
single ad or hear about a brand. The relationship has to
be built over time and with consistent and repetitive
positive experiences.
That special connection, that trust, creates what Warren
Buffett calls an “enduring moat” for the brand. For the
best brands, that moat is almost unbreachable. That’s a
long way of saying there’s no shortcut to brand building.
Most branded products are still bought
offline
A major challenge for brand marketers is that most
brand-influenced products still generate the majority of
their sales offline . When was the last time you bought a
Coca-Cola or a Pepsi beverage online? How about a box
of cereal? Or a car? How about a million-dollar
consulting contract for your business?
There are exceptions, of course, but when you look at
the numbers, the staggering conclusion is that most
purchase behavior is still happening offline. According to
the U.S. Department of Commerce , of the $1.17 trillion
spent in the U.S. in retail in the second quarter of 2014,
only 6.4 percent was ecommerce.
On the other hand, as most of us know and experience,
we now spend more time online than we do in any other
individual medium, including TV. Our lives are becoming
digital.
So how should a marketer effectively and efficiently
leverage digital for brand building?
Viewability is a good start
The currency of digital advertising for the last 20 years
has been premised on the idea that an “impression”
means an ad was served in front of a person who had a
chance to see and be impacted by that ad. It turns out
though, that premise may not be exactly true.
More than half of all display, mobile and video
advertising bought on the Internet today is not physically
viewable. In other words, the person who was intended
to see the ad not only didn’t see it, they never even had
it on their screen. How can we expect to measure and
drive success if the ads are not even there? We can’t.
Related: Did 2014's Marketing Predictions Come True?
(Infographic)
Viewability is a critical first step to success, because,
said simply, if your ad wasn’t there, not much else
matters. This is part of the reason why buying viewable
impressions has become such a hot topic lately. There is
not a single brand marketer who wants to buy an
impression that was impossible to see. The transition
that we are currently undertaking in the industry, from
transacting on a served impression to a viewable one,
will be painful for some and beneficial for others. It is
absolutely necessary though.
Attention, the new currency
Will viewability solve all of our problems? Does buying a
viewable impression mean that the ad will be effective?
Relative to buying a non-viewable impression it certainly
is better, but ultimately it simply means the ad was there
and the person had a chance to see it, not that they
actually saw it or were impacted by it.
We need to know not just whether the ad showed up, but
whether the person was paying attention. That attention
is the most important and most scarce resource that
exists. It is what we all have a very limited amount of
and what marketers value most.
Also, the way we pay attention has changed in recent
times. How often do you sit and spend focused time on
one site, never flipping between tabs? For most of us,
it’s pretty rare. Whenever we are doing one thing, we are
also doing another. That means our attention is
fragmented and often unfocused.
So how do we go about measuring and ultimately getting
attention? First, we have to define it. Second, we have to
ask new questions and seek to discover metrics that
may help us uncover attention.
Attention metrics
Attention literally means “notice taken of someone or
something.” In the metrics world, starting with “was the
ad there” makes for a logical first step (viewability).
After I know the ad is there though, I might ask how long
it was there (in-view time) and how long the person was
on the page (active page dwell time). Maybe I want to
know whether the person interacted with the ad
(universal interaction). How long did that interaction last
(universal interaction time)? Did they hover over the ad
(hover)? Did they touch it on a mobile device (universal
touch)? Did they do anything else that tells me they are
paying attention (perhaps metrics like scroll rate, scroll
depth and scroll velocity can be informative)?
All of these “attention metrics” serve the purpose of
giving the marketer a better understanding of the
environment in which the ad was displayed. Armed with
that information the marketer can make smarter
decisions. They can buy inventory with more attention.
They can optimize campaigns toward attention signals.
They can even transact on attention.
The big innovation for 2015 will be attention. Many of
the world’s biggest marketers are already doing it and
more will follow, and for those that don’t, they are losing
out on the new attention economy for digital advertising.