Attention Strengthens Advertisers’ Contract with Audiences

Tom Roach, VP Brand Strategy at Jellyfish, shared his perspective on how attention improves advertising effectiveness. He spoke to Realeyes about why attention wanes, why the ABCs are still important, and why we need to acknowledge there are various forms of attention. 

Why is attention important?

Well, it's such a fundamental component of communication, particularly brand communication. In order for people to buy your stuff in the future, which is the predominant means of brand building, creativity, and advertising, you need them to attend to your message.  

You need them to understand it to a degree and make sure they know that it's your brand. You need to be really memorable so that your communication has a lasting impact on their memories and creates associations in their minds. And so it can have that impact commercially. 

All of those things really are predicated on the initial thing of getting some attention to start with and keeping their attention to a degree. It's like the classic ABC of communication: Attention, Branding, Communication, of judging creative communication.  

That's the basic reason it's really important. And it's always been important. It's something we talk about an awful lot these days, and it's become a huge part of the conversation, particularly about measurement, both on the creative and media sides. 

It's also something that the the legendary ad people of the sixties were grappling with, too. John O'Toole used to say something like, “You're an uninvited guest in the home of your consumer, and they can magically make you magically disappear at any second.”

When executing advertising, it's best to think of yourself as an uninvited guest in the living room of a prospect who has the magical power to make you disappear instantly.  

He was talking about people switching off their TVs, but I think that quote is completely relevant to the world of scrolling and 'skip-ability'. We're scrolling through our feeds all the time. We need to grab people's attention, or they will just scroll right past our communication.  

People don't need to watch our stuff; they're there to watch other stuff and be entertained or informed. We in advertising are really just piggybacking on the back of that other content -slightly parasitical in a way. Therefore, there's this kind of contract that that we have with consumers, which is, we need to engage them and entertain them as much as the stuff that they're there to consume. 

Over the last, maybe 15-20 years, with the original advent of the new digital platforms. I think we've slightly eroded that contract and forgotten the importance of grabbing people and entertaining them. 

People have said in this interview and elsewhere that attention has always been important. It's the technology that has caught up to measure that. And that makes some people afraid because historically campaign success was predicated on the idea that people were paying attention. But what technology may be able to tell us is, all right, were they actually paying attention? And what do you need to change to get them to do that? 
 
Yeah. It's interesting listening about measurement and data. I suspect that when you look at the kind of attention curves that a typical channel will have, they all will have lot of attention for first few seconds, then it drops away. The thing that I think is interesting about that is, it's also true of TV. It's also true of print and some of the older mediums. Probably only cinema can get people's attention and hold it for really significant amounts of time. 

I bet you if you looked at people, the amount of attention people pay to books, you'll see that most people probably read the first few pages of a book, and then put it to one side. So I think it's true of all content in the history of the world that it starts strong and then there is a massive drop-off in attention. 

The difference now is that we have the data to see that we didn't know before TV was not getting all loads of attention. I think people probably assumed that that that a TV spot would hold and maintain attention in and keep people's eyeballs glued until the TV show started again. We now know that's not true. And I think in seeing the data and seeing the drop-offs, it made us more alarmed by the fact that people aren't paying as much attention as we thought they were. I think that in certain digital platforms they really aren't paying as much attention as we would hope.

Maybe some of the platforms thought they were, and that's been quite alarming. We've basically become incredibly alert to the fact that the attention is not what was assumed. That's probably sparked the requirement to get interested in this stuff. Also, I think we always knew that that visibility and opportunity to see wasn't really a great a great mark of how many eyeballs were on the things that we were putting out there.  

So the ability to track people's eyes and facial coding works to see whether people are really attending to our communication has provided an extra level of specificity to our, to our understanding. And so yeah, technology is providing a fantastic opportunity to understand better how people engage with our communications.  

There’s a lot of conversation around “what type of attention are we talking about?” There's the idea that you know in a vacuum you produce a piece of content and what does that do to someone? If you have their full concentration? And then you have the idea of environments or platforms, so how does an ad perform in a particular space? Is one more important than the other? 

I think it's really important to say that there are many forms of attention. And that this focused high beam, high involvement attention is only one kind. It's perfectly possible to communicate with people and get a very low-attention processing from their brains and still do a job for your brand.

Thinking about perimeter boards at a sports event or most out of home are just in the environment. We're not necessarily paying loads of very direct specific attention to them. Most TV, that's consumed a lot of the time, people are engaged in other activities there too - maybe second screening.

Maybe their attention is more to the sound of the audio of whatever they're consuming. So, it's important in these conversations not to sound like we only care about one form of attention, which is eyes on a high kind of concentration attention on a particular piece of content. And it's funny, when you hear the TV people talk about attention, they are less and less concerned with the very specific kind of digital video attention that the digital people are really interested in. Because, in the TV world, there's a variety of forms of attention, and they can benefit from all of them, and much of it is less concentrated. 

Ultimately, there are many forms of attention, and we shouldn't be too fixated on one form. But I can understand in the kind of digital advertising context; when people are staring at a small screen in their hand, the number of seconds that you've got to play with are shorter. 

That's a great point about TV – you can imagine someone at commercial break. Maybe going off and doing something within earshot of the show. So it's not even just creative attention, there's visual and there's audio, you have to think about how you get someone’s attention no matter what they’re doing?  

It's interesting. While linear TV viewing is in decline, quite dramatically, it still has tremendous benefits and all sorts of other ways of doing work for advertisers. I don't think the TV media owners are able to monetize audio in the same way. And but we know that's a part of the way in which TV advertising works. The digital platforms don't have that opportunity to get those different kinds of attention. 

And I think there's probably a lot of low-involvement processing happening in digital where people are seeing a bit of branding. A lot of digital display works that way where you're on a site and you see stuff around the thing that you're mainly wanting to view or read or watch.

And it gives you an impression of a brand and an impression of the presence of a brand. But it's not necessarily delivering high attention. It's not necessarily delivering like messaging to people, but it's still going to be working in a sort of like in a peripheral vision sort of way. 

What are some key tips for a brand that is just starting out or worried that they're you know they're behind the competitive set in testing attention or understanding it?  

If you, as a brand or an advertiser, are concerned that you're not getting the attention that you're that you think you deserve and your creative deserves, testing is currently only what real way to understand how it's working or if it’s not working so well.   

Testing a campaign in as close to the environment either as a simulated environment or the actual environment is the way to do it. And, of course, it's not just about testing attention [in a vacuum], it’s how long have they been watching it for? What are they taking out of it?  What are they looking at? I'm really interested in emotional measurement and understanding the emotional impact of communication. Because that's when people are when your communication evokes strong emotions, then you've got a greater chance of delivering your brand message and it being remembered. 

I think it's good that many of the attention testing people don't just test attention. They're looking at a broader set of metrics. If you only focus on one metric, you could probably make some wrong decisions about [your marketing].