Measuring Levels of Attention: 90% Right or 100% Wrong?

A couple of weeks ago The Cog Blog reported on Dentsu work now we have a study from Ebiquity Both use UK data from Lumen Ebiquity and US data from TVision Further work from Karen NelsonField the person who perhaps more than any other started this ball rolling way back when has been done in Germany Austria Switzerland Australia and the US much of it shared with the asi community via podcasts and their annual conferenceThe Dentsu work seemed to involve several vendors including Facebook in its planning and implementation I suspect and Dentsu can easily correct me by commenting that the bulk of the cost was borne by these sales organizations too Whether that matters in terms of the findings and how they39re presented is up to users to decideThe Ebiquity work was I believe independent of any vendor or indeed agency involvementRegardless we are now getting to the stage where there is much public information and data swilling around much of it consistent from Lumen TVision and Karen NelsonField39s Amplified IntelligenceDiscussions around attention to advertising or rather lack of attention are hardly new I recall a study from the early 198039s although quotstudyquotamp160may imply a certain rigour that wasn39t there involving JWT39s then Creative Director Allen Thomas calculating how many ads he was exposed to over a typical day and how many he remembered at the end of the daySeveral thousand and about four were if I remember correctly his conclusionWith apologies to the late great Allen we now have a rather more technically robust researchy way of getting to much the same findingsThe fact is as we39ve always known people have quotopportunities to seequotamp160a shedload of messages and remember very fewI also remember the great Mike Yershon telling me that in the first break of the first episode of a new series was the greatest builder of attention you could find in large part because of the number of light commercial TV viewers attracted to something newOne debate at the time cantered around whether it was better to be in a program environment of great viewer involvement on the basis that nobody left the room during the commercial break for fear of missing something or whether that was hogwash as the break offered the only viable opportunity to do something else for a few minutesIf you believed the latter then a lessinvolving editorial context appealed as you just stayed put and did whatever the olddays equivalent of fiddling with your phone was picking up a copy of The Radio TimesWhat we now have is the technical wherewithal to start to answer several questions like this and their modern equivalentsIs there a platform effect does Facebook per se deliver a lessattentiongrabbing environment than YouTube Is there a difference between different elements of FB Yes according to DentsuDoes comedy attract and hold attention more than drama Does this apply to ad copy Does it correlate with pretest findingsDo stars attract and hold attention more than mere mortals and if so what sort of starsWhat about pure audio Or audio consumed as one element of a video message hearing an ad whilst not in the room for instanceHow about print OOH and static online ads and how they39re laid out and designedAnd eventually someone39s going to work out a way of quantifying the potentially greatest attentiongrabbing medium of them all cinemaNext week The Attention Council is hosting a summit of the great and the good from the attention measurement community It will be well worth a lookI was always taught that it was better to be 90 right than 100 wrong On that basis we should not get too bogged down in technical arguments which need of course to go on in parallel but rather go in search of pragmatic and actionable solutionsClick the social buttons to share this story with colleagues and friendsThe opinions expressed here are the author39s views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNetamp160

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Measuring Levels of Attention: 90% Right or 100% Wrong?

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Brian Jacobs

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