How Attention Metrics Can Avoid Getting Gamed by Bad Actors

Attention metrics—using tactics like eye tracking to measure how long people spend looking at ads—hold a number of promises, including making advertising more performant and less annoying, if adopted by the industry in the right ways. The danger, however, is that they become another arbitrary metric gamed by unscrupulous ad-tech players. “The potential is better for everybody,” said Ed McElvain, executive vice president at MediaHub Worldwide, on stage at Adweek’s NexTech event last week. “Better outcomes for advertisers, publishers can charge for quality, consumers can have fewer, better, more relevant ads.” He added that attention-optimized campaigns also have a lower carbon footprint. The industry has swelled around the adoption of attention metrics over the past five years, spurred by the deprecation of third-party cookies. As the era of reach above all else in digital media cools down—and as viewability becomes a hygiene metric—some publishers and media buyers are using attention to prove ad effectiveness. Audi, Mars, Nespresso Embrace Ad Effectiveness With New Attention Metrics For publishers like Condé Nast, which has experimented with attention for 10 years, sharing this metric with advertisers lets it put data behind the role its content plays in creating inspiration and intent. “Pre-existing metrics like viewability, impressions, reach, last-click attribution, conversion were doing us no favors,” said Deborah Brett, global chief business officer at Condé Nast Digital. “We knew people were coming to Vogue for inspiration on what to purchase, but all the data was showing that every activation was happening on Instagram, Facebook or Google search.” IPG's MediaHub has experimented with attention metrics for five years. For clients like the National Basketball Association, the agency needs to understand which media placements are effective at getting people to tune in to an upcoming game. Attribution for tune-in is tricky, and typically, reports from Nielsen don’t come in quick enough. Attention, however, has been correlated to those outcomes, McElvain said. Deborah Brett (left), global chief business officer, Digital Condé Nast, and Ed McElvain (center), executive vice president, MediaHub Worldwide Attention metrics are used in planning through campaign optimization and benchmarking against rivals at Condé Nast, said Brett, from informing proposals to comparing placements across the 80 different platforms where it runs ads for clients. “I can tell you Vogue is the best environment for that ad,” she added. “If I can’t compare to all other premium publishers in the open web and what it looks like when those things translate into Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, how do you know how it stacks up against one another?” Beyond that, the publisher has discovered how attention metrics can open up new opportunities through contextual advertising. For a beauty brand trying to highlight the technological advancements in its lipstick, Condé Nast found success by advertising on its tech title, Wired. Adding these metrics helps find “non-endemic strategies, unexpected ways to do it premium and contextual, but beyond [what is just] common sense,” said Brett. Going even further, MediaHub is using attention as currency, building custom bidding algorithms and private marketplaces (PMPs) that bid to drive attention after testing and mapping out how much drives conversion. Relatively nascent adoption One danger as attention metrics get more standard is that they are used as a temporary replacement for cookie-based targeting and gamed by bad actors. That could mean publishers leave ads up for the requisite amount of time to get the highest attention, resulting in a screen full of ads that people can’t escape, McElvain cautioned. “We hear all about [made for advertising] outrage—that’s just the most recent way people will gamify a measurement tool or metric,” said Brett. Another issue is decoupling the placement from the creative: A publisher would struggle to meet attention guarantees if the creative is no good. Further industry adoption requires encouraging an appetite to spend more, a willingness for longer testing periods and the ability to let go of proof points that no longer serve a cause, said Brett. While these are basic change management principles, they are hard enough to do across one company, let alone across the whole industry. “People don't dislike ads, they dislike bad ads,” Brett added.

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How Attention Metrics Can Avoid Getting Gamed by Bad Actors

Condé Nast and MediaHub outline how attention metrics can lead to better, cleaner, fewer ads

Lucinda Southern

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Lucinda Southern