Despite all of digital advertising’s sophisticated targeting capabilities, brands have to face an unfortunate reality: Just because you can hyper-target consumers and serve ads where they’re most likely to see them doesn’t guarantee people will pay attention.
In an effort to prove that an ad placement can, in fact, attract attention from potential customers, more brands are using attention metrics to measure the value of their media.
Heineken, for example, has been ramping up its investment in digital advertising for the past few years, according to Fernanda Saboya, director of consumer connections at Heineken Brazil. And with that increased investment, the alcoholic beverage brand is under more pressure to measure the value of its digital ads.
With that in mind, Heineken conducted its first experiment with attention metrics as part of its sponsorship of Brazil’s Rock in Rio 2022 music festival.
Attention partners
Viewability metrics can be used to measure the degree to which a digital ad is visible on screen. But for many brands, like Heineken, viewability just doesn’t go far enough in proving the real value of an ad.
“We see attention as an evolution, a next step, versus viewability,” Saboya said. “Measuring attention is important for us to understand how we are evolving our media and creative investments.”
Heineken designed the Rock in Rio campaign with its agency, Dentsu, which has become a major promoter of attention metrics as part of its Attention Economy initiative. The Attention Economy is Dentsu’s effort to convince the advertising industry to adopt attention metrics as a trading currency and a basis for measurement and media planning.
The experiment involved inventory Heineken purchased through Teads, a media platform that operates its own SSP. (Teads is a close partner of Dentsu and participates in the Attention Economy initiative. Teads also launched its own program dedicated to promoting and improving attention metrics last year.)
Teads assigned an attention score to the digital inventory Heineken purchased through its SSP, which included display and video ads on publisher websites. It used a methodology developed by Lumen Research called the Lumen Attention Measurement Platform (LAMP), which is a predictive model trained via real-world eye-tracking panels.
In addition to measuring what types of onscreen content attracted the most attention from panel participants, the model also takes other attention signals into consideration, including page geometry, ad format and positioning, how much space an ad takes up on the page, percent of pixels in view, the user’s page scroll speed and the number of competing ads on screen.
The LAMP model then combines these additional attention signals with seed data derived from the eye-tracking panels to determine an ad’s attention score, as in how much attention a consumer is likely to pay to the ad.
Attention and optimization
Heineken found that its Rock in Rio ad placements exceeded Lumen’s APM (attention per 1,000 impressions, measured in seconds) benchmark for digital campaigns by five times. Heineken also had the highest level of brand recall among Rock in Rio’s sponsors.
Dentsu used past attention studies to inform the design of this campaign, which is likely what helped Heineken generate such a high average APM.
Teads also used the LAMP attention scores to optimize certain aspects of the campaign in real time, said Cau Stefani, an insights and research manager for Teads Latin America.
For example, when Teads ran its midcampaign analysis, it found that Heineken’s ads attracted a high degree of attention when placed alongside political news coverage of Brazil’s presidential election, Stefani said. Teads shared this insight with Dentsu and suggested increasing campaign spend on political content.
But midflight optimization was not a major focus of this campaign, Saboya said.
“We wanted to understand which creatives and ad formats work best,” she said, “so it was not the goal to optimize during the campaign but [rather] to have data for other campaigns to come.”
Attention scores could eventually become a targeting parameter that determines what media inventory Heineken buys in the future, Saboya added.
For example, media buyers can use a DSP plugin developed by Lumen to only purchase ad inventory with high LAMP attention scores.
But Heineken wants to do more experimentation with attention metrics and see wider adoption among its buy-side and sell-side partners before it fully commits to using attention score as a targeting signal, Saboya said.
