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 attention.

Active 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 waves.

Passive 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 appointment.

When 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 better.

I happened across a decades-old 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 IPG’s 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 program.

Sometimes 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 attention.

This notion got some modern underpinning at the Advertising Research Foundation’s (ARF’s) AUDIENCExSCIENCE conference at the end of March. NIQ’s 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 – attention is being paid to relieve cognitive dissonance.

Neuro-Insight’s Founder Dr. Richard Silberstein told me something similar a few years ago about attention: that it can be an indication of distrust, skepticism – 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 ad-produced incremental sales.

So 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 Wu’s Attention (New Problems in Philosophy).

The 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 TV/streaming) 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 TV/streaming is an order of magnitude higher in attention than ads appearing in scrolling environments (especially video ads requiring an active click to start playing).

This 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 for?

Last 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, “my” company RMT. Resonance like attention comes in two main flavors, but they are not active and passive, they are:

1. The resonance between the specific piece of creative and the specific viewer (associated with typical doubling of incremental sales lifts and branding metrics)
2. The resonance between the specific piece of creative and the media context (associated with typical 36% increases in incremental sales lifts and branding metrics)

These measures are measures of metadata similarity/difference along 265 psychological vectors. If there is “LOVE” in the ad and “LOVE” in the program, that is an oversimplified case of resonance. The ad:context resonance scores across all 265 variables turned out to outdo all other EEG metrics in predicting EEG synchrony, the strongest predictor of ad sales effect.

Numerous 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 effects.¹

I’ve 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 long-term business outcomes.

¹There 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 3-5% sales increase on certain media buys due to using Realeyes’ AI predictive model to evaluate tens of thousands of AI-generated ads and only let the ones with good attention scores get on air.

Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.

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