What Attention & Time Based Advertising can do for Online € ?

Valuing content based on the amount of time consumers spend with it provides a meaningful and  deeper understanding of consumer engagement, beyond the click.

The current model of using click-based metrics has resulted in the industry justifying the value of metrics, rather than the metrics proving the value of products.

Moving to a measurement framework that incorporates time-based metrics aligns valuation of content and advertising with time and attention – finite and fragmented resources – instead of arbitrary standards, and offers solutions to significant industry challenges, which are highlighted below.

Time-based metrics enforce the need for viewability.

Viewability was a first step in the industry’s attempt to solve this problem by requiring ads actually appear onscreen . Viewability continues to create unrest because publishers are realizing they’re losing a percentage of impressions but not getting paid a higher rate for guaranteeing viewability. However, this is a transition issue, which will get fixed if more brand money enters the marketplace.

Time-based metrics create an inventory constraint that will reintroduce scarcity into the market.

The viewability standard, which requires ads to be viewable in order to be considered measurable, laid the groundwork for limiting inventory. Pricing impressions against time will serve as a finer filter to weed out “false” impressions that a consumer doesn’t see and therefore won’t produce results for marketers. Time cannot be manufactured and provides a zero sum game in which quality ultimately garners repeat attention and loyalty.

Time-based metrics realign pricing with quality and reinvigorate context.

These metrics will naturally divert revenue to higher valued content – the content consumers really want to see and engage with. Content providers can then invest in future content and sell on this value, rather than a placement. For example, there are instances where homepage stories are priced much higher than lower article pages, even though those article pages tend to get more engagement through other channels, like social media

Time-based metrics would effectively re-balance value attribution in such instances from advertising placement to advertising context. The result is that content 4 DIGITAL CONTENT NEXT TIME-BASED MEASUREMENT most valued by consumers will bring in the most revenue, whether it appears on the landing page or hidden deep in the archives.

Time-based metrics provide a better measure of advertising success than click-through rate.

A growing body of evidence suggests a strong correlation between exposure and advertising effectiveness metrics. But this brand boost is further amplified by time spent with the ad. Lastly, with length of exposure by definition serving as a more encompassing metric (e.g. one that captures all users), time is a significantly more accurate and robust metric than direct response, which measures behavior of only a fraction of a percent of users. Brand advertising has been constrained by an ad ecosystem built and optimized to measure clicks and actions rather than exposure and engagement.

Time-based metrics work across platforms.

As a universally-accepted standard, time measurement serves as an easily comparable metric that captures consumption and ad performance across a variety of digital platforms and traditional television. Additionally, for certain types of content, time-based measurement presents an effective solution to the challenge of duplicating cross-platform audiences.

Share Of Attention: Online Advertising’s Newest Time-Based Metric

Viewability, the concept that advertising should be seen to be paid for, has taken the advertising industry by storm. It's interesting to read the conclusions people draw about viewability: It is a currency, it might be a currency, it's not ready to be a currency or will be a currency once standardized.

Most are directionally correct, but trying to classify viewability as a currency is a mistake. First, as a matter of semantics, a currency is what you transact with once a price for an amount of a good is established.

Here’s an easy way to think about it: When you fill up your tank with 50 litters of 95 octane for 70 Euros, neither the litters nor the octane are the currency – they are units of measurement of the good you are purchasing. The 70 Euros is the only currency in this example.

It’s the same with the Euros on your media plan. Litters, the metric of sale, is equivalent to impressions in digital advertising. When people lament about new currencies, they are really referring to new metrics of sale.

The metric of sale’s purpose is to represent the “amount of thing” contained within a single unit of a good. The amount of gasoline in a litter is extremely consistent so it’s a great metric of sale.

Advertising’s “thing” is more nebulous, but at its core the advertising industry is about buying and selling attention, so it makes sense that the metric of sale for advertising should attempt to measure attention. Today display advertising uses the impression, but it does a poor job of yielding a consistent amount of attention. As a result, it’s no wonder that the industry is rushing to anoint new currencies metrics of sale.

The right question to ask is: “Is viewability the right way to measure attention?” Or, more specifically: “Does viewability give me enough information about how much attention is paid to an ad to transact on it?”

Time In View

The answer is that it’s getting close, but viewability doesn't have the granularity required to be the pricing metric for a transaction in its own right. Instead, a derivative of viewability – time in view – has been cast into the spotlight as the savior of display advertising.

For example, there might be six viewable ads on a slideshow page where you spent three seconds, as well as one viewable ad on an article page where you spent four minutes reading. If today's MRC standard for viewability were the measure of attention, all of those ads would be considered the same. Granted, viewability is an improvement over the vanilla impression metric, which has been widely used since the inception of the banner ad.

There are a couple of products trying to increase the resolution of viewability metrics by selling display ads based on seconds of viewability, also known as time in view. Buys are made with typical adjacent banner sizes in bucketed time increments.

Buying banners on a time-in-view metric solves for the value delta between two ads that were on screen for different amounts of time. It’s also an amazingly useful tool when measuring the impact of media but doesn't address share of attention. There could still be eight ads in view at the same time, not to mention the attention paid to the content that the reader is there to consume in the first place. Without quantifying the amount of attention paid, it’s hard to transact on time in view.

Share Of Attention

A simpler, albeit potentially less accurate, way to measure attention is to use interruptive ads. If an ad is interruptive, it captures 100% of attention paid to the medium while it’s in view. Interruption has worked for TV, radio, print, video, social feed and even Snapchat ads.

They aren’t perfect. There’s a very reasonable backlash against ads that break experiences in the name of capturing attention or driving performance at the expense of experience. Some interstitial ads have tiny close buttons, while others split the page and move content around. Others, like most pre-roll ads, force audiences to spend time with ads.

But the best interruptive ads, which I call “politely interruptive,” are built with an understanding of their environment and give readers control of how long they want to spend with the content. The amount of time an individual chooses to spend with a message may offer the granularity and specificity required to be a metric of sale.

20 years ago, the digital direct-response advertising was revolutionized by the creation of a more accurate metric of sale: the click. Since more accurate metrics of sale mean less risk borne by the advertiser, direct-response advertisers have been able to deploy a disproportionate amount of capital digitally since then.

Now, measuring share of attention down to the cost per second could do for digital brand advertisers what CPC did for the direct-response industry: revolutionize it by removing buy-side risk.

Source: http://adexchanger.com/data-driven-thinking/share-of-attention-advertisings-newest-time-based-metric/

Welcome Friends

"Attention" - the New Currency for Online Brand Advertising

Brand marketers are shifting their focus away from traditional digital metrics like the click or impression toward new metrics such as attention, time spend, exposure time of an ad."

How did we get here? Virtually every year there has been some sort of innovation: new ad sizes, formats, functionality, targeting and re-targeting techniques, programmatic buying methodologies and many more. We have seen quite a transformation from the day the first 468x60 banner ad was put on a website and the user was encouraged to click.

While the innovations in general have been tremendous, we have actually seen a surprising lack of innovation around ad measurement. Direct response advertisers use “the click” as a proxy for success, but brand advertisers have never really had a true success metric to call their own, and finding the right metric for brands has actually proven a fairly hard problem to solve.

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How should we go about finding the right success metric for brands? As a starting point, branding by definition is about creating an ongoing connection with a consumer, so that if and when they are in the market for your category of products, they consistently put you at the top of their consideration list.

Does brand advertising work by showing an ad once and getting an instant response? Of course not. Branding is about storytelling. It’s about an idea and trust. The connection that brand advertising creates takes time.

We don’t feel trust with a brand the moment we see a single ad or hear about a brand. The relationship has to be built over time and with consistent and repetitive positive experiences.

That special connection, that trust, creates what Warren Buffett calls an “enduring moat” for the brand. For the best brands, that moat is almost unbreachable. That’s a long way of saying there’s no shortcut to brand building.

Most branded products are still bought offline

A major challenge for brand marketers is that most brand-influenced products still generate the majority of their sales offline.

When was the last time you bought a Coca-Cola or a Pepsi beverage online? How about a box of cereal? Or a car? How about a washing powder or your favorite chocolate bar?

There are exceptions, of course, but when you look at the numbers, the staggering conclusion is that most purchase behavior is still happening offline.

More than 95% or even more purchases is still happening offline.

On the other hand, as most of us know and experience, we now spend more time online than we do in any other individual medium, including TV. Our lives are becoming digital.

So how should a marketer effectively and efficiently leverage digital for brand building?

Viewability is a good start

The currency of digital advertising for the last 20 years has been premised on the idea that an “impression” means an ad was served in front of a person who had a chance to see and be impacted by that ad. It turns out though, that premise may not be exactly true.

More than half of all display, mobile and video advertising bought on the Internet today is not physically viewable. In other words, the person who was intended to see the ad not only didn’t see it, they never even had it on their screen. How can we expect to measure and drive success if the ads are not even there? We can’t.

Viewability is a critical first step to success, because, said simply, if your ad wasn’t there, not much else matters.

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This is part of the reason why buying viewable impressions has become such a hot topic lately. There is not a single brand marketer who wants to buy an impression that was impossible to see. The transition that we are currently undertaking in the industry, from transacting on a served impression to a viewable one, will be painful for some and beneficial for others. It is absolutely necessary though.

Attention, the new currency

Will viewability solve all of our problems? Does buying a viewable impression mean that the ad will be effective? Relative to buying a non-viewable impression it certainly is better, but ultimately it simply means the ad was there and the person had a chance to see it, not that they actually saw it or were impacted by it.

We need to know not just whether the ad showed up, but whether the person was paying attention. That attention is the most important and most scarce resource that exists. It is what we all have a very limited amount of and what marketers value most.

Also, the way we pay attention has changed in recent times. How often do you sit and spend focused time on one site, never flipping between tabs? For most of us, it’s pretty rare. Whenever we are doing one thing, we are also doing another. That means our attention is fragmented and often unfocused.

So how do we go about measuring and ultimately getting attention? First, we have to define it. Second, we have to ask new questions and seek to discover metrics that may help us uncover attention.

Attention metrics

Attention literally means “notice taken of someone or something.” In the metrics world, starting with “was the ad there” makes for a logical first step (viewability).

After I know the ad is there though, I might ask how long it was there (in-view time) and how long the person was on the page (active page dwell time). Maybe I want to know whether the person interacted with the ad (universal interaction). How long did that interaction last (universal interaction time)? Did they do anything else that tells me they are paying attention?

All of these “attention metrics” serve the purpose of giving the marketer a better understanding of the environment in which the ad was displayed. Armed with that information the marketer can make smarter decisions. They can buy inventory with more attention. They can optimize campaigns toward attention signals. They can even transact on attention.

The big innovation for next years will be attention. Many of the world’s biggest marketers are already doing it and more will follow, and for those that don’t, they are losing out on the new attention economy for digital advertising.

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Welcome Friends

Online advertising is changing. Advertisers are switching on to the fact that the internet can be used to build brands and not just to deliver direct response. Because of this growth in brand advertising online, we want to understand more about the ways that advertisers are using online to achieve their brand objectives – both in terms of raising awareness for new brands and changing perceptions of existing ones.

Many say that online advertising doesn't work for brand marketers, but many of us still believe that display online advertising is a powerful channel that can build brand, it's awareness and brings potentional customer to final act - purchase.

This is the reason why this Group was launched.

Let's find solutions how to give the best to the advertisers.

You are welcome to JOIN a Group:

ABA - Attention Based Online Advertising

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