Sometimes You Want Active Attention, Sometimes Passive Attention is What You Want

Everyone has their own definition of these things as ARF has observed so please allow me to stipulate my own working definitions of active vs passive attentionActive Attention The mind is conscious of the ad and has chosen to focus on it Eye fixations show that they are taking place within the ad and not just around it There is a decrease in Alpha waves and an increase in Beta wavesPassive Attention The gaze is in the direction of the screen on which the ad is appearing Visual perception is occurring There is no decrease in Alpha waves Or as Paul Donato says he is staring right through the screen and his mind is a million miles away thinking about his dentist appointmentWhen one first hears the terms active and passive attention there is a tendency to assume that active is always better However there is considerable neuroscience evidence that suggest that sometimes for some ads in some contexts passive might be betterI happened across a decadesold piece of work by Herb Krugman an advertising research genius who also competed in rodeos Herb was the first adman to test EEG that I know of His sample size of one was his secretary at IPGamp8217s Marplan division I was next door managing the Applied Science Division He noted that so much of her brainwaves while watching TV were Alpha waves often right through the commercials as well as through the programSometimes he saw Beta waves take over during certain ads His research into what these waves meant gave him concern that the ads which produced Beta might be cases where his secretary was actually thinking about the ad and possibly thinking critically about it He had initially become excited about the idea that during Alpha viewers would let commercials in without critical thinking and therefore the ads might retain the greatest persuasion and sales effect during Alpha what I am now calling passive attentionThis notion got some modern underpinning at the Advertising Research Foundationamp8217s ARFamp8217s AUDIENCExSCIENCE conference at the end of March NIQamp8217s VP Ad Effectiveness North America Matthew Cottle presented EEG findings showing that when an ad has low EEG attention this would be active attention and high EEG emotion and high EEG memory encoding that means the message is easy to understand and so requires very little attention but when attention is high and emotion and memory are low that signifies confusion amp8211 attention is being paid to relieve cognitive dissonanceNeuroInsightamp8217s Founder Dr Richard Silberstein told me something similar a few years ago about attention that it can be an indication of distrust skepticism amp8211 and one could not really decipher what attention means without looking at in context with the other EEG measures such as emotion memory encoding and for many neuroscientists synchrony which Wharton Neuroscience has established as the single best predictor of adproduced incremental salesSo in some cases you would want the passive attention For certain ads however active attention might be what you want to see For example if the ad is a shoppable ad and the eye fixations are seen carefully inspecting many parts of the product itself onscreen Lee Weinblatt told me years ago that is the signature of true interest Other researchers have apparently also discovered that as it is included in Wayne Wuamp8217s Attention New Problems in PhilosophyThe attention field has also not consolidated its position There are numerous suppliers supporters and enthusiasts One of the most common findings of most attention suppliers is that longform premium content aka TVstreaming generates the most attention of both kinds roughly double the duration of shortform videos in the Skip in 54321 framework where researchers have seen that a lot of attention is not to the ad but to the countdown and the skip button and TVstreaming is an order of magnitude higher in attention than ads appearing in scrolling environments especially video ads requiring an active click to start playingThis one collective finding is of enormous importance If truly mentally assimilated it would cause advertisers to question their fleeing TV to digital in such droves that digital is now 80 of total global ad spend But the great landslide continues in the digital direction obviously giving no weight to the attention findings The attention community needs to prove its value by making this finding stick Otherwise what is all the hullaballoo forLast but not least one other direction for attention suppliers to consider is packaging attention with resonance as measured for example by the leading exponent of this metric amp8220myamp8221 company RMT Resonance like attention comes in two main flavors but they are not active and passive they areThe resonance between the specific piece of creative and the specific viewer associated with typical doubling of incremental sales lifts and branding metricsThe resonance between the specific piece of creative and the media context associated with typical 36 increases in incremental sales lifts and branding metricsThese measures are measures of metadata similaritydifference along 265 psychological vectors If there is amp8220LOVEamp8221 in the ad and amp8220LOVEamp8221 in the program that is an oversimplified case of resonance The adcontext resonance scores across all 265 variables turned out to outdo all other EEG metrics in predicting EEG synchrony the strongest predictor of ad sales effectNumerous studies have validated that resonance is predictive of all KPIs across the entire funnel Therefore why not combine attention and resonance especially since recent studies by ARF and others do not support the idea that attention is predictive of lower funnel effects1Iamp8217ve discussed this idea with many of the attention suppliers and all seem interested so perhaps it is just a matter of time before the industry has a validated holistic approach to optimizing short and longterm business outcomes1There are some pieces of evidence that sometimes attention can have lower funnel effects it appears to depend on the use case For example Mars has reported a 35 sales increase on certain media buys due to using Realeyesamp8217 AI predictive model to evaluate tens of thousands of AIgenerated ads and only let the ones with good attention scores get on airPosted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership selfpublishing platformClick 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 MediaVillageorgMyersBizNet

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Sometimes You Want Active Attention, Sometimes Passive Attention is What You Want

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Jon Miller | Cofounder Marketo, Engagio | The Gumball Machine is Broken - Rethinking B2B Marketing - By Mike Linton

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