Your Brain on Advertising

The Advertising Research Foundation’s (ARF’s) ATTENTION 2025 conference was audience riveting from beginning to end. Not your everyday conference, deeply important issues were vigorously debated, and to this optimist, the conference concluded with the beginnings of a new consensus forming before our very eyes.

But first, let me explain the title of this piece. The ARF Cognition Council, on which I’m proud to serve, will soon be putting out a tome of a white paper on the subject of “The Brain on Advertising”, a review of the latest findings and theories in neuroscience, and how they relate to advertising. The subtitle of that extended paper explains what I mean by “a five-dimensional game” in my title above: “MOTIVATION, ATTENTION, EMOTION, PERSUASION, and MEMORY and their impact on consumer behavior”.

In other words, readers of the new ARF Cognition Council report – soon to be published – will learn that in addition to attention, which has recently been treated as if it were the only “impression quality” factor relevant to creative and media decisions in the advertising industry, there are actually also four other things practitioners have to get right if they are to be a big success in advertising. They must master not only attention but also motivation, emotion, persuasion, and memory.

When our concluding panel of the day began, the imminent publication of this paper was announced, and in my remarks on that panel, I tried to bring together all that had been said that day with this new and shocking wider framework around the cognitive processes upon which advertising effectiveness rests. And the results I saw right after the audience was finished applauding the day and heading for the drinks, were surprisingly encouraging. Erez Levin was heading up to Scott McDonald to recommend that next year’s conference should change its name to ARF IMPRESSION QUALITY 2025, and three attention/emotion suppliers took turns shaking my hand and talking about how we can combine our impression quality metrics to cover the five dimensions.

The ARF started out the conference by reviewing the progress of its three-phase Attention Validation Study, now in its third phase, in which different attention and emotion metrics are being compared with each other and with outcome metrics for the same set of advertising campaigns across different verticals.

With the roomful of attention suppliers, along with many enthusiastic users of attention data and others, the ARF’s Tracy Adams and Paul Donato were diplomatic in referring to the phase two results, in which many attention and emotion suppliers were compared in terms of their reports on the same set of creative executions. (The actual report showed that the highest r² achieved with advertiser-supplied success scores was 0.12, and for the cases where the KPI was sales, the r² was very close to zero. This was not mentioned.)

But in the presentation of findings, ARF cited that each supplier had its own approach to attention and that these approaches all produce different results, evidently “measuring different aspects of attention”. This is a much more positive way of looking at it. And one with which I totally agree. Erwin Ephron and I championed the idea of adding attention to the ARF Model when we were co-chairs in revising that Model back in 2002. Without getting attention off the ground in the past half decade, the industry chances of finally getting to regularly using any impression quality metrics was apparently doomed to forever remain close to zero.

Of course, without motivation, emotion, persuasion, and memory, attention by itself is going to have a low ability to predict ad success. That 0.12 for attention alone, when combined with metrics for the other four dimensions, could be close to 0.90. And the industry was not going to go from zero to five dimensions all in one fell swoop.

And what a terrific contribution attention has made to understanding the differences between television, short-form user-generated video, and social media scrolling. This was pointed out succinctly by both Mike Follett and Marc Guldimann at two separate points in the proceedings. Karen Nelson Field, who was not there in person, had been the pioneer in discovering the far greater attention paid to TV ads as compared to YouTube, etc., and the further gap between shorts and social media scrolling video and display ads, but then this finding was replicated by almost every other attention company.

Ironically, this major contribution showing TV at the top and social media at the bottom of the attention hierarchy, came over a five-year period when the percent of advertising revenue for U.S. national advertisers going to television went down from 40% to 30%, and to digital from 60% to 70%, totally ignoring the results of the attention suppliers on the most important finding upon which they all agreed!

ARF presented results of a survey they had conducted among advertisers and agencies which showed that advertisers are significantly less impressed with attention data than agencies, and ranked eleventh in terms of frequently used metrics by advertisers and agencies. This explains the reason why the most blatant and consilient of the findings of attention so far had no effect on the massive shift in ad spend to digital away from TV.

In the ARF survey, when asked what challenges attention still faces, the number one answer was data accuracy/reliability concerns, noted by 61% of agencies and 48% of advertisers. What this really means, I think – based on what the buy side has been telling me - is that sometimes attention really works and sometimes it doesn’t - although the suppliers are left with many positive cases to present (and Lumen has distinguished itself by also presenting negative cases).

Every presentation that day was something that adds to industry knowledge, and I heartily recommend that all ARF Members get hold of the decks or the videos – and the videos will be worth the longer investment of your time. I wish I had room to cover it all here. Certain panels I must cover because they are emblematic of the degree to which progress has moved forward.

The Joint Attention Measurement Guidelines, which have been published by MRC and IAB, are available for industry review until July 12, 2025. All of you are invited to provide feedback, and it will be given careful consideration in finalizing these Guidelines.

In one panel, Adelaide and EDO, and DoubleVerify debated which of their metrics are of most value, who has the most proof of success, who has the most usage, and who can speak most persuasively - and I think they all won. What I mean is that each approach is probably orthogonal to the others. I know from analyses that RMT (the company using my resonance method which reflects motivation, emotion, and persuasion) is orthogonal to EDO (TV drive to search/website), and I suspect that RMT will be orthogonal with attention (e.g. Adelaide) and with device metrics (DoubleVerify). Being orthogonal means measuring something else, and therefore additive in being able to increase sales and branding outcomes.

The point in the day that would have won based on biometric measures of audience arousal was the faceoff between Duane Varan and Mike Follett. Leaving aside one remark that crossed the line, both gentlemen argued like gentlemen and did great credit to our industry and to the institution we call ARF. Duane had already circulated a paper he did with the prestigious Ehrenberg Bass showing that the one metric that was best at predicting attention is heart rate, which slows down when someone is paying attention. This had raised ire among some of my attention and emotion-measuring/predicting friends. Duane talked a bit about that but focused on a study that some in attendance called his own version of the ARF Attention Validation Study. This showed that none of the attention suppliers who volunteered to be in his study, also done with Ehrenberg Bass, were able to predict ads that received attention versus ads that did not receive attention as established by his “ground truth” (which some criticized as being something other than a self-evident truth standard).

The argument came down to both being right but in different ways. The audience felt (based on my talking with a number of people afterward) that Duane was probably on solid ground to claim that the attention suppliers in the industry were not measuring what a pure scientist would call attention, but most agreed with Mike’s pragmatic point that whatever eye tracking is measuring it appears to be useful and scalable.

I would add that with other affordable, efficient, validated, and scalable impression quality metrics, we should build on the base of attention which has already been established in the workflow of the major agencies, not seek to have that thrown out and replaced by something else. Instead of cursing the darkness, the attention companies have lit the first of five candles.

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

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