Can I have your attention?
Because your attention is becoming an actual currency for ad deals.
That’s the pitch for the attention measurement provider Adelaide, which, on Tuesday, announced that pre-bid targeting using its proprietary attention metric, called AU, is now live in Amazon DSP. Advertisers can target high- and medium-attention ad inventory while filtering out low-attention placements.
In addition, Amazon DSP is integrating Adelaide’s AU Quality Floor, a feature that avoids less appealing impressions since it excludes inventory with an AU score in the bottom 10%. The Quality Floor feature also defaults to excluding inventory from publishers designated as made-for-advertising (MFA) sites, per supply chain quality measurement vendor Jounce Media.
While the AU Quality Floor is exclusive to Amazon DSP, AU-based pre-bid targeting is also available in other DSPs, including The Trade Desk, Viant, Yahoo DSP, Adobe Advertising DSP and Equativ. With the addition of Amazon DSP, “we are continuing our mission to make AU available everywhere,” Adelaide CEO Marc Guldimann told AdExchanger.
Although attention metrics have reached a tipping point in terms of DSP adoption, some brands, including Nestlé, are still in the early phases of testing attention as a currency for ad deals. For now, the brand is still determining whether attention is a valid proxy signal for media quality and high-lifetime value (LTV) audiences, said Benjamin Lichtman, head of performance marketing analytics and insights at Nestlé Health Science.
“If those audiences prove to bring in higher-quality traffic and LTV, and make measurable halo impacts across other channels or substantially cut down waste,” Lichtman said, “then they become really important and could be layered into other types of targeting.”
Tying attention to performance
Amazon DSP represents an opportunity to connect attention metrics to sales and other performance metrics. Because, perhaps you’ve heard, Amazon is also a major online retailer. And it often touts closed-loop sales attribution as a differentiator for its DSP.
Adelaide’s AU scoring can be applied for CTV inventory, as well as online video and display inventory on desktop and mobile. Adelaide plans to add AU scoring for audio at a later date.
As part of the new integration, Guldimann said, Adelaide spent the past several months measuring attention across Amazon’s owned and operated properties.
“We did a lot of work with them early on to measure Thursday Night Football and bring aspects that are unique to live sports into the methodology,” he said. For instance, Adelaide measured the degree to which the live score of a game affects the average level of attention a viewer pays to ads during the game. Unsurprisingly, he joked, audiences are much more engaged during tight games than blowouts, even when it comes to the ad breaks.
But having the data to back up intuition can be invaluable, even when it seems obvious.
Nestlé’s marketing strategy emphasizes omnichannel buying, said Lichtman, so the company is intrigued by the ability to pinpoint high-attention inventory across a variety of channels. He added that the bulk of his team’s ad budgets are dedicated for online video and TV, and programmatic is “a substantial portion of our marketing mix.”
Plus, Lichtman said, Nestlé often runs campaigns across Amazon’s ecommerce network that are activated via the Amazon Advertising self-serve platform, formerly known as Amazon Marketing Services. He said he’s excited to see whether this Adelaide integration allows for the creation of new targetable high-attention and high-LTV audiences tailored to different brands within Amazon’s self-serve interface.
He also said that attention scoring could be a way for Nestlé to hold open web publishers accountable when it buys inventory programmatically. Although, he added, it won’t be the company’s only measure of publisher quality.
For example, Lichtman said, when it comes to brand awareness campaigns, it makes sense to use attention as a proxy for publisher quality alongside other metrics. But, for performance campaigns, KPIs like conversions still carry the most weight.
However, he added, Nestlé might consider a combination of quality metrics, including attention, “to help us identify why a publisher is underperforming or overperforming.”
Pre-bid testing
The “pre-bid” part of the equation is also critical for Adelaide. It doesn’t refer to the Prebid Org of header-bidding notoriety; it provides an attention score that can be incorporated into a live bid, rather than used to measure a campaign that already ran.
One reason for the lag in adoption of attention metrics is how hard it can be to test the system apples to apples with metrics that are applied during the moment of targeting and bid-making.
Nestlé, for one, waited for pre-bid attention targeting to become viable before it started testing, Lichtman said.
Post-bid measurement is like “calling the game on Monday,” he said. That approach is too slow in the modern marketing world.
“We are heavily focused on growth and reacting quickly in market environments [and to] seasonality,” Lichtman said. “We are always looking for ways to have the quickest response.”
Now, according to Lichtman, agencies using the Amazon DSP can more easily compare attention metrics to other targeting strategies. And wide adoption among DSPs is particularly important for a large brand portfolio like Nestlé, he added, because each brand works with a number of agency partners that have their own preferred buying platforms.
But have attention metrics reached the point of adoption where they can be used as a currency for all ad buys? Not quite.
Adelaide sees more work to be done, especially on the publisher side, Guldimann said. The company is ramping up its outreach to publishers to help them understand why ad placements get scored a certain way. That way, he said, publishers can have more informed pricing discussions with brands and agencies for both programmatic and direct deals.
Meanwhile, Nestlé sees attention as another proxy for media quality, rather than the sole determining factor for how much ad inventory should cost.
“The currency, at the end of the day, is the customer,” Lichtman said, meaning that the brand targets whatever metrics can identify potential buyers. “But we’re always going to look at a compilation of metrics to make a decision.”
