Helping Advertisers See the Bigger Picture of Attention

Phil Sumner, SVP Global Data, Audiences & Technology Solutions Director at Publicis Groupe, has tracked the evolution of advertising metrics throughout his career. He thinks attention can help the industry recalibrate and solve some, but not all, big issues. He discussed the importance of viewing media and creative attention together and how the industry needs common definitions to make life easier for advertisers.

Why is attention important? And do you feel like 2024 is going to be a really big leap in conversation around it?

It's been “the year of mobile” for so many years of my career, and now it's like that with the year of attention. Now, is there going to be sort of an inflection point with attention this year? I don't know. I feel we’ve reached a point of inflection with attention actually over the last sort of 18 months or two years. I think attention will change and it will keep adapting.    

I think there's a pretty wide realization now that it's beyond just a bit of industry buzz up there or some frothy thing that we're talking about. There's a groundswell of thinking that it’s something we should look at and keep on testing. And it's giving us better information than we've had for the last 10-15 years, especially in digital. It gets us back on track of bringing some of the measures such as reach and things like that, better correlated with what the outcome is.   

Attention is important, but it's always been important. It's one of the key principles of advertising and always has been. So. It's not a new concept. We've been looking at attention advertising for many, many years. We've just had an acceleration over the last few years. We can measure more. It's an exciting time. But again, it's not going to solve every problem. It might be different for different brands in different countries and different sectors. It calibrates and helps us get back towards something that's sensible. 

If you were to ask advertisers, " 'Do you care whether someone is paying attention to your ad?' They're going to say, 'of course.' " Then, when you get into the details of attention measurement, do you think some of [the issues with adoption] is because there isn't a standardization, or that maybe they talk to different people, and they approach it in different ways? So, they're thinking, “It's hard for me to wrap my head around exactly what attention measurement means.”  

One of the other big issues here is the definitions. And I think, going back, we probably should have [chosen]something better than calling it attention, because it's so broad. Because if you speak to a hundred people, those hundred people have different definitions. That creates confusion that you didn't have with viewability or other measures. So, having this big thing called attention creates confusion. I think it's important that we spend time as an industry getting together to better define it. And there are the big industry initiatives, like what the ARF has done with its 120-page report, and other players. I think a better definition is coming together. We, as an organization, are trying to simplify it, to break it down, and answer, "What is attention?" 

You have three sub-classes of attention across both media and creative. Biometrics, which is facial coding, eye tracking, and GSR; Biometric-informed proxies, the at-scale models from the likes of Adelaide and Lumen and others; and Proxies which are based off sort of a geometric viewability++, and you can classify that as attention (Phil elaborated on this topic in a recent WARC article). But it's not informed by biometrics in any way. They all have their validity and they all come into play at different points. But to make those distinctions clear, we need to go back and do a bit more work on that.  

The end client - the advertisers - wants simplicity. They want to be able to wrap their head around exactly this: when my agency partners and the technology companies are saying something, I know exactly what they mean.  

Yes; again, a simple common language. A common lingua franca or trading language between buyer and seller and all the actors in between reduces friction and surprises, and we can all benefit.   

You talked a bit about media attention and creative attention. What’s Publicis’ perspective on whether those are completely separate things to be viewed in a vacuum, or whether it makes sense to view them together and sort of think about them holistically?

That's sort of the six-million-dollar question. If you speak to different people, you’ll get different views across the group. At Publicis, we have big media organizations like Zenith, Starcom, and Spark [Foundry] and big creatives like BBH, Saatchi, and Leo Burnett, which will have a very different view of what attention is.       

There's a realization now that the industry is sort of fragmented. I understand the reason for that, and it sort of made sense. The media route was easier to scale and their models can get adoption quicker. You take the creative out, it’s easier to have these measures that go far and far and wide. So, in a sense, the fact that we focused on media as an industry is kind of logical. It's not a sustainable position, in my opinion. Long term, because it's only one part of the picture.

The evidence of the last sort of 40 years is that creative is up to 50% of the effectiveness of that of an ad. So the industry has neglected an awful lot of that part by not thinking about them together. We have to bring them back together, but it's hard. There's not a silver bullet for that. It's going to look very different for different brands in different parts of the world. But I don't think looking at them in isolation now is a tenable position.   

There are different types of creative measurement. There's one that's coming in at the early process, doing biometric facial coding and understanding how to improve attention and emotion. That's appropriate for some campaigns where there are big investment levels. And there are a lot of tools out there that will take a massive [amount of] creative and give optimization suggestions on the fly.  

To conclude, I don't think it's a sustainable position to have these things separate. We've got to bring them together.

What’s your advice for potential clients who haven't really embraced attention that are trying to get their feet wet in this space? 

My answer for this is probably a little bit vanilla because it doesn’t necessarily differ that much from some other form of sort of measurement. I think it's really important that just because there are big bits of work out there that show the link between outcomes and improved attention.

The proof points are really robust. But just because it works for one brand or one sector is no guarantee that it's going to work for you, especially when we talk about creative as well. What levels of attention do you need for your brand? How prominent does the branding need to be? It's very nuanced at a brand level. Which means you've got to think about testing what attention is and doing it specifically for your own brands.

You can't just base it on what's out there. You've got to sit down and prove that this works for you. Also, the clarity on what's being bought and where it comes in terms of the whole planning process is really important. And again, you rely on the vendors and your agency partners to educate you. I'm a big believer in sending learning agendas because they get everyone on board for what those goals are.  

Finding really simple learning agendas, e.g., not making them too ambitious, with really clear hypotheses is absolutely fundamental because it gets everyone working together.