Two Valuable Days at ARF AxS 2026

It was the Advertising Research Foundationamp8217s annual AUDIENCExSCIENCE conference hosted by People Inc in their stylish New York City quarters Bob Lord President of Horizon was the Day One Keynote speaker He predicted that some agencies would arise again as the trusted growth partners of advertisers in sharp contrast to their current status as vendors These would be agencies with unified and open technology systems He described these both as operating systems and as learning systems He proposed that marketing become integrated into the Enterprise Resource Planning ERP systemBy amp8220openamp8221 he meant collaborative and able to accept new technologies they themselves had not invented He advised us all that explainability is almost as important as results Without explainability there is no guarantee that good results can be repeated And that results must be the universally accepted results of the CEO CFO Wall Street ie growth as measured by money not by vague proxiesOn Day Two the opening Keynote address was given by the inimitable Laura Martin Senior Internet ampamp Media Analyst at Needham ampamp Company on Wall Streetamp8217s View of the Ad Industry Laura has spoken before at these ARF conferences and once again she shook up the minds of the audience She painted a picture of how four American technology companies are rising to world dominance Google Meta Amazon and Microsoft They are all betting on AI and Wall Street she reported is betting on them to be rightShe raised some doubt as to the future of advertising by discussing the use of agents by consumers to find the best things to buy and to get them delivered A post by Shelly Palmer I had read the day before reported a prediction by Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince that AI bot traffic on the Internet would exceed human traffic by 2027 Laura appeared to be of the same view that the funnel would collapse and humans would no longer participate in brand selection She implied that brands themselves might no longer be necessaryPersonally I do not see that happening StatusPrestige would also have to disappear as an RMT subconscious Motivation for brands to become obsolete Also the RMT Need State of amp8220Perfectly Madeamp8221 would have to disappear Human subconscious Motivations and Need States are probably not eradicatable by outside forces short of psychotronic technology capable of a new level of super lobotomy The effects of the modern mediasphere have to a large extent shaped who we are and how we use our brains so this is a scenario not to be ignored as a dystopic possibilityLaura noted that Wall Street decides what is going to happen next in our business based on the belief that the ad revenues will and should follow time usage by media types I was going to raise my hand to comment on this belief but someone else beat me to it Time spent unless it is related to ROAS is not the proper determinant of allocation of ad budgets In fact right now the allocation of ad budgets is far out of line with time spent as shown in my article on the subject Today video gets 58 of time spent and only 28 of ad spendConsistent with prior phases Phase 3 of the ARF Attention Validation Study finds that attention metrics are not directly interchangeable across suppliers and show the strongest alignment at the broad channel level with weaker agreement at more granular levels such as platform and placement The ARF therefore recommends using a consistent attention measurement provider or methodology across campaigns Across the campaigns studied television and YouTubeOLV generally received substantially higher attention scores than social media but higher attention did not consistently translate into stronger brand lift In some cases lowerattention environments still delivered stronger lift likely due to factors such as media weightimpression volume and nonskipability That is even though attention was lower for social platforms if given enough media weight social platforms also showed significant brand liftThis dissociation of attention from business results was also found in the Kantar breakout session where Deepak Varma Head of Neuroscience Kantar reported that the more brain resources are used for attentiveness the less brain resources are available for emotion and showed data that confirm what many others have said before that it is better to have some attention than none but that the quantity of attention is not always an improvement and can be an obstacle Dr Richard Silberstein has also observed that attention can be a sign of skepticismEmotion on the other hand is clearly essential for advertising to work If one does not care there will be no behavior change Only about 15 of faces show emotion in the use of facial emotion recognition so those other 85 of faces might cover emotional reactions that are unmeasurable by that methodology Obviously we do not always show facial emotion and why we do it is often to reduce the effort it takes to communicate with other humans I would also say that amp8220feelingsamp8221 is a better word to use than amp8220emotionsamp8221 because it is more inclusive of what marketers mean by the word amp8220emotionamp8221 which tends to also include values motivations mindsets and all the other nonrational and subconscious amp8220stuffamp8221 that goes onI presented for RMT with our partner Dr Michael Platt Director of Wharton NeuroscienceAI McKinseyamp8217s finding that 70 of CEOs judge marketing success based on yearoveryear YOY brand sales growth and the tendency to lower media budgets 20 in this period of global uncertainty point to the need for a breakthrough in marketing science and we believe we have one It is the mixture of big data neuro AI and empiricallyderived content coding which enables us to guide the placement of any given ad into the environments and to the persons causing the greatest sustainable YOY brand sales growth Of all of the sessions I attended ours was the only one placing so much importance on sales effect and showing as much proof data based on real inmarket sales results Presentation available here as a PDF or here as slidesNielsen made twostage appearances at the conference In the first ARF CRO Paul Donato conducted a fireside chat with Nielsen CRO Pete Doe One of Paulamp8217s first questions was about the industryamp8217s concerns about the change in currency Pete pointed out that the differences in the numbers fell as expected well within statistical tolerance ranges in fact the laws of statistics would have predicted that more and larger changes would have occurred yet he empathized with those networks whose numbers went down our own analyses show that the hardesthit networks averaging a 002 rating went down an average of 0004 of one rating point When asked about Nielsen ONE measuring TV CTV computer and mobile together Pete reported that N1 is in good shape clients are using it for advanced audiences at the persons level measuring not only reachfrequency but also outcomes in terms of brand lift and sales lift all through one planning buying and postevaluation dashboard amp8211 echoing the ideas of Bob Lord for unification of platformsIn the Nielsen breakout session Pete and Nielsen SVP Data Science David Kurzynski copresented STAR Synthetic Total Audience Ratings a new Nielsen system for further improving its CTV measurement based on big data plus Nielsenamp8217s exclusive streaming meter The system captures subminute viewing of both content and ads on all devices amp8211 TVs phones tablets desktops and laptops It uses Gracenote for metadata and addressable ad logs enabling true addressable measurement where applicableI see the system as visionary because it explicitly encourages streamers to contribute their data to the measurement system ANAamp8217s Aquila system similarly encourages data contribution to their smaller hub aimed at reach frequency modeling across platforms In the future more and more of the data needed will be held by the media themselves How they contribute or do not contribute walled gardens their data to the industry systems will determine the future of audience measurementNielsenamp8217s STAR system is not dependent on getting these data contributions although there are already over 20 major national media platforms contributing data through integrations with Nielsen STAR will simply get better and better the more that its synthetic data is replaced by real data Nielsen only uses synthetic data as a last resort many others use much more synthetic data than Nielsen including Aquila because the walled gardens will only release synthetic or highly aggregated and selected data Nielsenamp8217s use of walled garden data makes maximum use of verifiable data and advanced data sciencemachine learning to forcefit synthetic data to real data as reported hereThe ARF like a fine wine gets better and better with ageBuilding HighPerforming TeamsOur new podcast explores the topic of Being in the Inbetween Phase a liminal stage of growth when we can feel disoriented lonelyamp160or frustrated and why itamp8217s also a powerful indicator that real growth is happeningamp160Rather than rushing to amp8220fixamp8221 the discomfort this episode invites listeners to slow down listen more deeply to themselves and learn how to navigate uncertainty with trust patience and selfawarenessThis monthamp8217s podcast length is amp877646 minutes Watch the VideoPosted 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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Two Valuable Days at ARF AxS 2026

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Two Valuable Days at ARF AxS 2026

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