Attention is All About Delivering Value

As attention matures, advertisers are looking to their media partners to help them navigate this landscape. Parvati Vaish, SVP, Director of Analytics at Havas Media Network, shared Havas’ approach to attention, the importance of connecting creative and media attention, and why those just starting out should focus on testing and learning.  

Why is attention important?

We all know that there's so much noise out there between ads and user generated content.  

There's just so much information that our audiences and our customers are constantly being exposed to. And as we think about how we can really be delivering more meaningful experiences, which is something that is really core to how we operate here at the Havas Media Network. Attention is really one way to ensure that meaningfulness is taking us past really table stakes, (metrics like Viewability and Brand Safety), to something that really gets us at relevance of our messaging and resonance of our messaging.  

I think attention really helps us be smarter and how we're engaging with our customers and ensuring that we're delivering value to them with those experiences.  

There's creative attention and media attention - with a lot of different agencies and players that are all participating. How does Havas approach attention and how do you help your clients navigate it?  

It's very core to the way we operate. We’ve leaned into delivering against the idea of meaningfulness to our audiences and the way we define meaningfulness is being in the right place with the right message for the right audience at the right time.  

I get excited about the different attention players in the market because I think they are checking different boxes. Havas Media Network is currently working on building the largest global attention database by sourcing data from different partners that have a best-in-class methodology. 

The intention behind this is really to be able to start combining different expressions of attention and what it tells us about the experience, so that we can ultimately craft what we are referring to as the meaningful ad unit or the MAU.  

What the MAU tells us and our clients is, what are the right placements, and the right audience to buy against, all grounded in this idea of attention, allowing us to really quantify meaningfulness as it exists in market. Then we assign a dollar value to it, so that we can be trading on the idea of attention, not just Viewability.  

We are working with partners that are really effective at looking at creative efficacy by looking at attention retention. Such as: how effectively are we able to keep an individual's attention? And how does that tie back to emotion? And that's where partnering with Realeyes has been really helpful, and some of the discovery that we've been doing but then also marrying that with a deep understanding of the propensity of a particular placement to capture attention.  

And that's where our partnership with Adelaide comes into play. And then globally, we also have a partnership with Lumen that we've been leaning into to use attentive seconds to understand the likelihood of a placement and retain that attention along with the creative that's being served within there.  

We can start using the data side-by-side to better optimize the context in which we are running our ads through the AU and the propensity to capture attention and the content that is running within it, that we can evaluate through a tenth of seconds, or the Realeyes methodology, in more panel-based environments, too.  

Where is this whole space going to go in the next couple of years as it becomes more mature, and more clients demand agencies, and their partners help solve these big challenges?  

One thing that's already underway is a standardization of how we are talking about attention. Everyone is talking about attention just a little bit differently these days and it limits some of the application of it, as we are thinking about it from the perspective of really trading on attention.  

Step one is really going to be some level of standardization. And I think with that there's going to be a level of consolidation of partners and providers of attention data as the market starts refining. One area that I'm really hoping the market will go towards is the idea of starting to understand the attention availability of an audience.  

Forget the creative and the media placement; I’m talking about really understanding how much attention a particular target may have to offer for a brand or a message. And then really being able to use that as we're thinking about audience-based planning, right? We know that everyone these days is talking about being audience- and customer-first, and the experiences that are being built and how we're going to market.  

But we are doing it very much from a creative and media perspective. First, we're creating messaging that we think will resonate best for the audience and placements that we think make the most sense for our audience.  

I'd love to see the attention space going in the direction are really starting to quantify how much a particular target, how much attention a particular target has to offer, so that we can start building that into how we are actually planning and buying our media and delivering creative experiences.  

Because if we can add that lever to the context and content mix, then we understand the connection that we can create with an audience based off of their attention availability. That is, I think, where it'll start getting really interesting and differentiating in the space.  

For clients that that come to you or just companies that are maybe just starting out and you know, maybe all this feels a little bit overwhelming. What's the best advice for them to get their feet wet?  

Yeah, I would definitely say, take the time to have conversations and ask a lot of questions. It's a new space. A lot of providers are still defining and refining their narratives and their approaches, and it's constantly evolving.  

So, if you're just starting out in attention, don't go off of the term alone and make assumptions of what that means. You need to really ask questions to understand how attention is being defined. And think about how it can really apply throughout your processes and your decision making.  

We know that attention is critical to how we are engaging with customers and every component of how we plan and buy our media and even optimize it. But we have to be very thoughtful about how we're using attention and where we're using it to ensure the right decisions are being made.  

Ask a lot of questions, understand the methodology deeply, so that you can make the right decisions in terms of where to leverage a particular expression of attention in the decisions. Make sure you test and learn. It's a new space.  

It's a new metric, and everyone is using it a little bit differently. So, there's a lot of opportunity to do some testing, to do some learning and continue refining how it can be leveraged. And I like to always encourage folks to think outside the box a little bit when it comes to attention.