#1 - Attention Weekly
Four things that caught our eye this week in the world of digital advertising attention
Welcome to the first edition of Attention Weekly, a weekly newsletter showcasing four things we are thinking about at Impact Media.
Let’s jump straight into it.
1 - The future of ads
On January 31st the IAB Tech Lab's report released their Gap analysis of Google’s Privacy Sandbox API’s.
They found that the Privacy Sandbox breaks real-time bidding & doesn't support a number of use cases that third party cookies do currently. There’s some great coverage from Allison Schiff on AdExchanger here
Google's response to the IAB Tech Lab's critique of their API was released a week or so ago:
Google feels the Tech Lab misses the mark in many instances & that the APIs are not supposed to directly replace third-party cookies, by their very nature of being more private they could not deliver a like for like feature set. There’s a really good article from Andrew Byrd on Ad Monsters here
So who is right? Well actually we think both sides have valid points.
Ultimately though Alex Cone of Google hits the nail on the head when he says the Sandbox will require hard work and effort from all sides of the ecosystem to get up and running, but once this work (which we are sure at times will be painful) is done, Chrome users will have more privacy and advertisers will still be able to deliver relevant ads to them.
Personally we’re looking forward to Google & The Tech Lab working closely together to make the transition as seamless as possible and are excited to actively be participating in the tests. At Impact we will focus on putting ads in front of the right audiences, in high quality environments and importantly measuring whether these ads are actually seen. We feel this approach when supported by privacy preserving measurement where appropriate will continue to deliver strong results whilst being more respectful to user privacy.
2 - 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.
3 - Why MFA is challenging to stamp out
Made for advertising sites have been in the trade press for a while now & there was an interesting article from Kayleigh Barber on the subject in Digiday this week, that looks at why MFA sites are so hard to stamp out.
The article highlights what insiders have known for a while, the key objective differences between MFA sites vs traditional publishers are high levels of paid traffic, frequent ad refreshes and high ad densities. The challenge is these are not always immediately apparent when a buyer visits a site organically as opposed to a click on a paid ad.
Because of this clever obfuscation & because MFA sites tend to be brand safe,highly viewable & fraud free, these sites often slip under the radar of many media buyers.
Whilst there are a number of AdTech solutions that help buyers reduce the risk of buying this inventory, the only true way of avoiding it is using a well researched & selective inclusion list that prioritizes high quality professionally created content.
At Impact we find that prioritizing high quality content, where ad density is low is the best approach to delivering attention, and of course this coupled with our innovative charging model means that your adverts get attention for all the right reasons.
4 - Large global advertiser released attention based case study
This headline really grabbed our attention (excuse the pun, it is our first newsletter and we’re excited!) - Haleon Says Attention Is A Good Measure Of Media Quality, But It’s Too Soon To Make It A Buying Standard.
It was awesome to see the work of a big global advertiser and their partners (Publicis,
Adelaide and Cint) shared with the industry. There were so many good excerpts and we’ve pulled out our top 4 below - go and read the whole article to get the entire context.
1 - The results of Haleon’s recent test of Adelaide’s attention scoring solution within Amazon’s DSP – which saw higher ad recall and purchase intent for inventory with good vs. low attention scores – could strengthen the case that low-attention inventory isn’t worth buying.
Low attention ads are the bottom feeder scum of the internet and are never worth buying if the campaign goals are set up correctly (and surely that should include ‘ad was seen’). At Impact we are constantly asked ‘does your only charging for ads that are seen method work?’ and we always say ‘it depends on how you’re measuring us’.
2 - According to Cint, CTV media with a high attention score drove a 37% lift in favorability, 19% higher ad recall and 9% higher purchase intent compared to inventory with low attention scores.
Hoorah, it works.
3 - “We were able to quantify the amount of money that was currently being spent on media that was below those floors,” he said, “and there were double- or triple-digit thousands of dollars that could potentially be reinvested into placements that had a higher AU.”
When taking a step back and thinking about quality, surely ads being looked at will serve a part in that framework. When re-engineering the quality equation, there will definitely be significant savings for buyers from removal of wastage, which can either be bottom line savings or money to deploy into better quality media.
4 - Attention-based buying can also lead to diminishing returns at the highest levels of attention. For example, the highest-scoring CTV inventory is scarce and often carries very high CPMs, so the performance boost provided isn’t always enough to justify the trade-off… Besides, attention measurement vendors are not currently integrated across all DSPs, he added.
We were really pleased to see this point called out. Quality averages are one thing, but cost efficiency is critical to maximizing investment. In our own tests, we see the CPMs for ads that are seen for 1 second vary by up to 100x (i.e. between $2 to $200) - so if you were just measuring ads that gained 1 second of attention after the fact and not proactively optimizing towards it, you will be paying over the odds in a very substantial way.
That’s it for the first edition of Attention Weekly - thank you for making it this far. We hope you enjoyed our concise perspectives on digital advertising attention. We have plenty more upcoming, including podcasts, video interviews, news and opinion.