We may be in an attention economy but not all attention is equal.
Few people know its various values better than Mike Follett, chief executive and co-founder of attention technology company Lumen Research.
Lumen, whose products are an integral part of many media buying systems, made its name developing behavioural techniques such as eye tracking, to work out the difference between what people can see in an ad, and what they actually look at.
“In advertising we talk about OTS – opportunity to see – and the clue is in the title,” he says.
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It uses eye-tracking software online, or via cameras on TVs.
“We pay people money to download our software or install the cameras, so they all know they’re part of the eye-tracking test,” Follett explains.
“We then collect that data to see patterns in it.”
It uses predictive modelling to see how much attention any given ad will most likely get, on any given medium.
Some of what it discerns may seem obvious – for example, that big ads get more attention than little ones.
But the real value lies in allowing brands and buyers to work out exactly what they are paying for, reducing waste. “By working out that media A gets more attention than media B, you can use it to go and buy the good stuff, and avoid buying the crap that might not get any attention at all,” says Follett.
Comparing like with like
Lumen’s tools enable advertisers to use one metric across all media, with visual attention data providing a common currency.
If a single impression of TV gets 15 seconds and a single impression on Facebook gets three, “that’s okay, as long as Facebook is five times cheaper than TV,” Follett explains.
“Suddenly you can use this data to compare media and talk in the same language across all of them.”
Unfortunately, perhaps the biggest lesson Lumen’s research has taught Follett is that “people are very good at ignoring advertising”.
“There is a big difference between a viewable impression and a viewed impression in any media, whether it’s a newspaper ad or online. Indeed, pretty much the only medium that can absolutely guarantee you’ll pay attention is cinema, and that’s because they lock you in a black box and tell you to put your phone away.”
Another lesson is that when people look at ads, they don’t stare, they glance. This fact is particularly disconcerting for creatives, which Follett was himself, before co-founding Lumen.
“When you make ads, you’re paid to be interested in them. Your mortgage depends on reading all five bullet points. But you know what? Other people have less skin in the game. So they’ll just glance at an ad for one or two seconds, rather than looking at the whole thing,” he says.
The message for his former creative colleagues is clear: don’t go putting in all five bullet points, “because that’s not how it works”.
“It’s important to keep things simple, perhaps earning people’s attention with something funny or witty, rather than demanding it with a great block of text that will probably get ignored.”
Lumen’s success pretty much puts to bed the old Ehrenberg/Jones debate about whether advertising is a weak or a strong force. “There is no debate. It’s a weak force. The attention data puts that to rest because people don’t pay much attention at all,” says Follett.
Unfortunately, that’s not something you’ll hear many agencies tell their clients. But knowledge, in this case of attention data, is power.
Indeed, it has given rise to no less than a Copernican revolution. “Previously we thought about advertising in the old way, where we assume that everyone is paying attention. But that’s a bit ‘flat Earth’, or ‘Earth-centric’. In fact, we should have a heliocentric, consumer-centric way of thinking, where we revolve around the consumer rather than them revolving around us,” says Follett.
The eyes have it, as do the ears
Attention tracking isn’t only about eyeballs. Lumen tracks attention in radio too, or, at least, infers it.
Here it recruits people to listen to the radio while doing tasks, such as driving or washing up. It then comes back later with a questionnaire, to assess attention time and memory.
It tests social platforms and TV in the same way, to gain a broader understanding of how much attention radio gets versus alternatives.
Such work has revealed how effective radio is. Whereas online platforms might get a fraction of a second in terms of attention, people spend much longer paying attention to radio ads, making it much better value.
Again, knowing the true cost per second of attention makes it easier to see value across all media.
“We found that, sure, TV is more expensive than other media, but you get so much attention that in fact it’s a real attention bargain. Whereas, perhaps, a banner ad on a website is the other way around – you get small amounts of attention so, relative to the price you are paying, it’s a really expensive way of buying attention.”
TV and radio “deliver significant slugs of attention – five, 10 or 15 seconds, which can really impact memory and behaviour”.
In Ireland, radio advertising has been found by Lumen Research to offer particular value, particularly when it features localised content and accents. “That tells you something about the importance of ‘creative’, and about creative that responds to local needs and is designed for a particular audience,” says Follett.
It’s why relying on that big international ad, made by that big agency in the US or UK, rather than local creatives, might actually be a false economy. “While there is a saving in production, there is also a decline in attention. So, at the end of the day, how much have you really saved?”
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