Measuring The Attention Pathway

Disentangling the impact of creative and media on outcomes is challenging. Adelaide has developed The Attention Pathway model to help measure how media and creative work in tandem to capture attention and drive outcomes. 

Consumers experience creative and media seamlessly, but our model divides it into three distinct phases: get noticed, hold attention, and impact memory. This article will describe each of them and offer starting points for their measurement.

Step 1: Get Noticed

Consumers are exposed to several thousands of ads a day across hundreds of placements and platforms. On the web, which has experienced the most dramatic impression inflation, only 4% of ads are looked at for more than 2 seconds according to Lumen Research. The once common act of noticing an ad is becoming an anomaly.

Using eye-tracking, researchers have determined which attributes of media placements are crucial to attracting attention—things like duration of viewability, placement size, the surrounding page geometry, and how many other ads are on the page. 

In the wild, creative plays a large role in attracting attention. Thus creative introduces considerable noise into attention metrics, and should be hold constant when measuring media quality.

Similarly, audience can have an impact on how well a creative performs. An ad featuring Travis Scott for McDonald's may attract the focus of a younger audience, without a glance from anyone over the age of 35.

Annoying or distracting creative or formats can disingenuously attract consumer attention. This type of negative attention creates hurdles further down the pathway, however.

How to measure: Look for aspects of media like clutter and format that are predictive of attention. Control for audience and creative by holding them constant, media quality shouldn’t be compared across different creatives or audiences. Finally, improve measurement by checking how predictive of outcomes the model is.

Step 2: Hold Attention

Once someone notices an ad, it needs to hold attention — mostly by being interesting. Relevance matters, aesthetics matter, plus a whole host of intangibles that creative directors and researchers don't always agree on. Whatever the tactic, the goal is to keep consumers zeroed in on the ad.

In the case of holding attention, one of the most promising but also misunderstood attention metrics is duration, sometimes known as "time-in-view." Confusion arises from the fact that just because an ad is "in-view" doesn't mean someone is looking at it.

Duration can be a strong signal of active attention, especially if the consumer controls that duration. Skippable video ads or full-page display are good examples of such "politely interruptive" ad experiences. 

In other scenarios, though, duration loses much of this strength. It's much harder to attribute attention when an ad is merely in-view. Measurements like page clutter, position, and modeled eye-tracking can work in concert with duration data to help distinguish attention from distraction. 

How to measure: For large ads in politely interruptive experiences, duration is a good measure of creative quality. Smaller placements require nuance to understand creative's ability to hold attention. 

When assessing creative quality, it's wise to use placement attention metrics to normalize the media's impact.

Step 3: Impact Memory

The final step in the process involves using the attention captured and retained in the first two phases to impact memory.

While attention is fundamental to setting the stage for impact, at this point attention metrics are no longer a proxy for success. Advertisers should rely on more traditional measures of success like sentiment analysis and incremental sales lift.

However, attention metrics arm advertisers with an important new tool to disentangle the impact of media and creative quality on that lift. By holding media quality constant marketers can glean richer creative and audience insights and a more precise understanding of why things are working. 

How to Measure: Incremental lift of outcomes is the best way to measure the impact of advertising. To measure the impact of any one aspect, normalize for quality of media and creative, using the methods above.