Attention is not always a good thing. (Just ask Barbra Streisand.)

But attention that is not “good” isn’t automatically “bad,” either, according to Matthew Cottle, ad effectiveness leader at NIQ.

This week at the Advertising Research Foundation’s AUDIENCExSCIENCE event in New York City, Cottle described three distinct types of “attention” that are typically lumped together.

You can track eyes on-screen, for instance, which actually is a binary metric (albeit “on/off” rather than “good/bad”); you can track visual focus based on where the audience’s eyes are fixed at any given moment; and you can track cognitive attention (i.e., how well audiences process what it is they’re looking at).

According to Nielsen’s tests of various branded CTV ad spots, there are only weak correlations between visual focus and cognitive attention, as well as between visual focus and eyes captured. Furthermore, there’s absolutely no correlation between emotional response and visual focus where advertising is concerned.

“Just because I’m seeing something doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily driving a connection,” said Cottle. “And, conversely, just because I’m not looking at something directly doesn’t mean something isn’t getting in.”

Staying on message

OK, so a unit of attention doesn’t serve as a useful indicator of interest or resonance among consumers. So what does?

Well, consistency certainly helps.

After all, advertising is “secondary in most people’s lives,” and attention is often “fleeting, fragmented and harsh,” said David Bassett, chief analytics officer at Lumen Research.

In evaluating their own eye-tracking data in collaboration with Havas Media, Lumen found that aggregate attention time – meaning how much consumers paid attention to the totality of ads served in a campaign – impacted brand lift more meaningfully than the average time spent on individual ad placements.

Similar research from MediaScience and LinkedIn’s B2B Institute found that brand name retention is especially difficult for B2B marketers. In their recent joint study, 81% of brands were “not noticed or correctly identified” by testers and, on average, only achieved 30% to 40% brand recognition.

Relying on color, logo and stock imagery can exacerbate the already existing “sea of sameness,” said B2B Institute Director and Co-founder Ty Heath. To combat this, she recommends that brands think more about underutilized elements that improve recall, like mascot characters and particular sounds or jingles for video.

More importantly, though, you need to give the assets time to stick in people’s minds.

“Good brands wear in, not out,” Heath said. That means “resisting the temptation to shake everything up and really taking stock of the distinctive brand assets that we want to build.”