Quality of Attention

Erwin was fond of recalling the debate in which Alfred Politz and other giants of advertising research argued about the inclusion of the Perception layer since it could only be inferred from Recall and not measured directly at the time since we knew nothing of P300 cortical evoked potential waves until the 80s In the new version this has been replaced by Attentiveness one of Erwinamp8217s pet inclusions Here are the links to the original model shown with my comments and the 2003 updateThis ancient debate about the quality of attention to advertising is as relevant today as it has always been and modern evidence for that is the recent industry work in establishing viewability standards for digital As more and more video consumption takes place on devices that go where the individual goes the questions we ask about attentiveness will also change to include measurements that can be taken with builtin video cameras in the viewing devices themselves But with the great bulk of TV viewing still taking place in the oldfashioned setting it39s time to remind ourselves of one area of attentiveness measurement that we appear to have left by the wayside room leaving during commercialsA 2013 study by Audits ampamp Surveys see page 58 showed that the average prime time TV commercial lost about 8 of its audience to channel switching and about 30 of its audience to room leaving an additional 4 turned off their TV sets In 1990 when Arbitron39s president Rick Aurichio sent me to France to bring back technology that would lead to the PPM my main motivation was to be able to measure room leaving during commercials and I spurred Arbitron in the direction of being able to resolve signals within a 10second epoch so as to be able to report on such room leaving Unfortunately the PPM technology never got down to such a fine temporal resolution although today39s Automatic Content Recognition ACR technologies reopen that potentialSettop box data has done a good job of measuring commercial switchaway the other factor Audits ampamp Surveys was one of the first to measure Especially when reported at the secondbysecond level as TiVo Research TRA has always insisted upon although others typically condense data by using 5second blocks or other simplifications Yet room leaving was always the larger factor though never pursued due to the difficulty of measuring it The telephone coincidental shown to be able to capture attentiveness related data by my 1960s work with Hooper and by Audits ampamp Surveys39 later work has long since been lost as a viable technique due to answering machines A great loss since it had been a truth standard for other TV measurement methods and now we are without any truth standard at allImagine if in the next year or two someone were able to commercialize at scale the measurement of room leaving during commercials viewed on TV sets This would provide another valuable data point for use in advertising media optimization ACR technology on the one hand could provide such measures for immobile TV sets and builtin video cameras in PCsMacs and mobile devices on the other hand could provide measures of the viewer disappearing meaning that heshe is probably not watching the commercialAs research companies become more alike and closer to parity as reported here in our recent series about the growing potential competition for Nielsen passivelycaptured attentiveness metrics at scale could provide an edge for some entity mentioned in those articles or a newcomerBest to allBillamp160 amp160I also brought back a hairline fracture to my left heel garnered during a spinning leap performed while dancing with four French women in Cannes but that39s a long story for another time and placeThe opinions and points of view expressed in this commentary are exclusively the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecom management or associated bloggers

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Bill Harvey

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