Third Generation Measurement

Impact media thinks about attention as the third generation of impression measurement.

Attention matters in advertising because without it, advertising cannot have an impact. The ad industry has talked about viewability for over a decade now, but it might surprise you to hear that viewability & attention are not the same thing. 

In advertising, viewability measurement checks whether there is the opportunity for an advert to be seen, attention measurement assesses whether the ad was likely to have been seen. 

The two are closely correlated because without the opportunity to be seen there can be no attention but research consistently shows that only 30% of viewable ads are actually seen, so if your campaign delivered 10m impressions and had 70% viewability then around 2.1m impressions that you paid for would be seen:

Given the opportunity here to drive efficiencies It is perhaps unsurprising then that a recent report from DoubleVerify found that the majority of advertisers are turning to attention based metrics to make sense of campaign performance:

This makes sense because if we take the example given previously of a buyer purchasing 10m impressions at a CPM $5 then $39.5K of their $50K budget is wasted. 

But it’s not just finding marketing efficiencies that make Attention such an important thing to focus on, recent research from Lumen & Teads has shown the correlation between attention and brand outcomes very clearly, it was found that to generate significant lift in ad recall and unaided brand awareness an exposure just of 1/10th of a second (100ms) was required. 

We have already talked about the limitations of viewability as a predictor of attention so it might not surprise you to hear that it’s also not a fantastic predictor of brand recall & lift. 

Research shows that attentive seconds are a much better predictor of ad recall than viewability time, in fact you might be surprised to hear that at 3 seconds each recall is typically 50% higher for attentive seconds. 

Attention & the changes in preference & intent it drives is what matters in advertising and is why Impact Media charges on an Attentive CPM (aCPM) rather than for impressions that were served or impressions that might have been seen. If you would like to find out more, please contact us here.