Standards in attention measurement
We recently conducted an industry wide study of attitudes for optimizing campaigns to attention based metrics. We’ll release results from the 195 responses throughout the coming weeks but on first review the most eye-opening responses came from the open field question - Please share your final thoughts on using attention metrics in programmatic buying.
“Attention means lots of different things to different people, and can be calculated in a myriad of ways that are not comparable to each other. It needs standardisation, but its a much harder job than viewability”
“No industry standard for attention is a challenge as programmatic buyers have to assess and test several vendors and get under the hood of the tech being used which isn't always easy”
“Attention is next evolution of measuring the engagement of users from the viewability metric we have. However, the lack of consensus on measurement standard and even the definition of attention in the context of digital advertising requires further development and agreement.”
Standards are clearly in demand!
A technical standard is an established norm or requirement for a repeatable technical task which is applied to a common and repeated use of rules, conditions, guidelines or characteristics for products or related processes.
The discussion over a standard for attention measurement isn’t new, members from The Attention Council, IAB Attention Task Force and other initiatives have discussed and debated this at length. It’s clear that attention measurement providers have different methodologies and Olivia Morley from AdWeek did a great job in covering the different types of methodologies in an article last year.
At Impact Media we don’t believe there will ever be a single standard for the way attention is measured, and nor believe there should be - the rapid proliferation of devices and content alongside the different monetization methods of that make it hard for a measurement standard to exist.
However, the lack of a standard should not prevent buyers from optimizing their paid media efforts against it. If you believe advertising works, then the ads need to be seen long enough to create an impact - and that is what our entire business is set up to do.
