Why More Publishers Aren't Transacting on Attention ... Yet

The men's lifestyle publication BroBible would let marketers buy attention-guaranteed ad space in the programmatic open exchange, if only it could. Open web programmatic makes up a majority of the publisher's ad revenue, and its readers are highly engaged, said founder Brandon Wenerd. It can't leverage that, though, since attention metrics aren't biddable on the open exchange. If they were, and more marketers made buying decisions based on attention, BroBible could feasibly charge more for certain inventory. Plus, it could help clean up the ad ecosystem. Last year, buyers wasted a collective $84 billion on fraudulent investments, according to Juniper Research. Transacting on attention could reduce the programmatic scourge of made-for-advertising sites. The industry is coalescing around attention as a better way to measure inventory value than metrics like impressions and viewability, but adoption is slow. Publishers can't sell inventory based on attention on the open exchange until the industry decides which metrics represent attention, an arbitrary concept that measurement vendors calculate differently. Despite its potential benefits to the ecosystem, getting attention metrics into the bidstream is a low priority for marketers—most of them are only beginning to explore attention as a concept. The few publishers already guaranteeing attention do so via direct deals, programmatic direct deals and private marketplace deals (PMPs), which present other execution challenges. "If you're on the supply side, it's a lot of effort and time and potential risk in setting up one deal one way with agency X and one deal another way with agency Y," Demian Brink, executive vice president of media data sciences at Mediahub, told ADWEEK. "It's a logistical nightmare for them and everybody, frankly." Trading and guaranteeing attention Publishers are experimenting with attention guarantees in their direct deals or PMPs. But without wider industry standardization, inking those deals has its challenges. "[We] constantly are running into this friction at an agency level," said Brendan Spain, vice president of advertising, Americas, at the Financial Times, citing buyers who ask for custom deals that redefine measurement proxies on their terms. The Weather Company found that its display ads exceed benchmarks for attention measurement company Adelaide. That led head of product David Olesnevich to offer guarantees to advertisers that certain inventory hits an attention threshold approximately 10% above Adelaide's benchmark. Currently, the publisher's display ads score 26 on Adelaide's attention metric AU (out of 100), 24% better than Adelaide's 21 AU benchmark. "With attention measurement’s rise in value, our guarantee has allowed us to build deeper relationships with clients and agencies. Word tends to travel fast at agencies," Olesnevich said. It's early days, but so far it has met every guarantee. The publisher is one of the first media owners to guarantee attention, and Olesnevich is also seeing encouraging brand perception results. While guarantees are appealing for some publishers to help them prove their ads work and win new business, others don't want to be held accountable for performance. “If the advertiser shows up with creative that sucks, the publisher shouldn't be held accountable for how much attention it gets,” said Marc Guldimann, Adelaide's CEO. “As a publisher, you want to be really careful that you're not taking responsibility or making guarantees based on metrics that are driven by things that are out of [your] control.” Misaligned incentives Aside from a lack of standardization, misaligned industry incentives are another reason trading on attention is slow to take hold. A media agency's compensation may correlate with account size, and demand-side platforms have volume biases. They also often charge advertisers a percentage of total spend. Attention guarantees can go some way to help disrupt that volume-based model, incentivizing advertisers to buy fewer, more effective ads and theoretically reducing wasted ad spend. “As soon as buyers start to value quality over quantity, then you can make more with fewer ads. But you need those buyers to start to say, ‘Hey, I’m willing to pay more for a page with fewer ads,'" said Erez Levin, a former product leader for Google's DV360. Once publishers learn which of their media placements engage viewers the most, they can price their inventory accordingly. But those buyers already looking at attention metrics have an edge, using vendors as a screen to try and only bid on impressions that have the highest propensity to be attentive. "If I'm one of those smart buyers, then I don't really want standardization and currency," said Spain. "I want to keep beating the market by getting that extra attention for cheap." May the Best Attention Metric Win

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Why More Publishers Aren't Transacting on Attention ... Yet

It's an operational nightmare—especially for small publishers

Olivia Morley

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Olivia Morley