Imagine standing in a crowded room, yelling at the top of your lungs, but no one hears you. This episode of Connected by Meta looks at why attention has become such a scarce commodity and what it means for brands. Here Meta’s Director of Marketing Science Andy Ford shares some of the key takeaways.
Has it felt like it’s harder to pay attention these days? Do you check your phone in the middle of a movie, or click out of videos more than five minutes long?
If you do, you’re not alone. Your attention is becoming more and more valuable, and advertisers have definitely picked up on it.
The latest episode of Connected by Meta digs deep into exactly that - what advertisers need to know about attention as a measure of ad effectiveness.
Understanding this new metric is exactly what one of the guests, Dr Karen Nelson-Field, has set out to do. Karen is a pioneer in the attention space - she founded audience measurement company Amplified Intelligence and has been honing technology specifically to understand how people pay attention on different platforms and devices.
As she puts it, attention in a marketing context is the moment that a viewer looks directly at an ad. But there’s also something called passive attention, which is when a viewer is looking around the ad rather than directly at it. This still has an impact as it does build recognition in a consumer’s mind for the moment when passive attention converts into active.
It might surprise you, but Karen’s research also shows that mobile is consistently on top of the formats when it comes to generating attention for brands. When you think about it it makes sense - the mobile is the screen you look at when you’re watching TV or out and about, and in most cases, it’s held closely to the body and the eyes.
But, the unique way each platform works on mobile means marketers need to be more creative and optimise campaigns them if they want to get ahead of the competition. In a lot of cases, this means making sure that the brand appears early, strong and large on a mobile screen.
And the beauty of mobile platforms is that they are constantly evolving and iterating, so are well placed to optimise for attention into the future.
That was something shown in a recent data capture Karen’s company Amplified Intelligence did for Meta, which wanted to understand what kind of attention its own ad products, or surfaces as they call them, were generating.
And this again created some interesting insights. In Stream - ads placed during longer-form content - generates the most active attention with 5.79 seconds[1]. Stories - an ethereal full-screen format - was a close second (both at “brand building” levels in Karen’s view) while In Feed (the ads in your regular newsfeed) also created significant engagement.
And when they took a look at specific platforms, they found that Facebook and Instagram had a blended score of 80% in active attention in 2021, a steep rise from 43% on Facebook mobile in 2017.
There’s a lot to unpack in this and you can see more about it here.
But, while attention is the newest kid on the marketing block, it shouldn’t take all of the…er…attention for campaign planning. Fundamentals of ROI - reach and cost - still apply.
In the podcast I share some tricks and tips about this all-important balance on Connected. It’s clear all marketers and advertisers need to invest real time in understanding how the data is captured from whichever vendors they use.
There’s no point putting all your eggs in one very high attention basket, as the attention will cap out and you won’t get the broad reach and impact you were after. It could be a very expensive way of reaching just a small number of people.
As a rough guide think of it like you would a traditional TV campaign. I’d recommend longer-form content with high attention for advertisers with a harder message to push. But for advertisers with a more simple “reminder” message, a platform with less attention, but higher reach and lower costs.
Coles CMO Lisa Ronson, another guest on Connected, has experienced first-hand the difficulties of aligning hard ROI metrics with capturing attention. She reveals that Coles spent the last 12 months running an in-depth study into customer attention.
Lisa explains they’ve been optimising for attention around their stores as well as in their communications and that it’s not just about getting a message in front of someone - it’s about making sure they receive that message as well.
So there definitely isn’t a one size fits all solution to the fact that getting more eyeballs on your ad is harder than ever. But if there’s one thing I took away from this episode, it’s that it’s not all doom and gloom. Far from it, actually.
The attention you’re after is still there - and if you’ve made it this far in the article, it just proves that you need to be given a reason to stay.
Hear Connected’s full episode on attention on Google, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen.
1 Source: Amplified Intelligence, Meta Mobile Data Collection, Australia, 2021. Blended average attention across News Feed, In-stream and Stories, N=1160
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