Navigating the Attention Trail

Anna Estlund is the Senior Director of Insights and Strategy at Pernod Ricard. She shared with Realeyes how the company is approaching attention measurement for its roster of brands. 

• Attention as a finite resource: Therefore, quality and focused attention are crucial to impacting consumers. 
• Why attention measurement is like hiking: Measuring attention can involve different paths, but the goal remains the same - driving sales and brand value. 
• Creative and Media collaboration: Attention requires both creative content and media platforms to work together to optimize message delivery and achieve engagement. 

Why is attention important?

Part of it is that giving our full attention is a lost art. We all know this intuitively as consumers, right? We're all guilty of double screening, and I think we've tricked ourselves into thinking we can multitask. But that doesn't really work.  

I think of attention as a finite resource that we've tried to artificially expand. If my attention to you at this moment is a quarter, I can only break that down into smaller coins; nickels, dimes. I can't magically make more quarters and give you more at this moment.   

So, two attention facts really stick with me from different types of media that I think illustrate how [attention] is important. The first is that one in three TV ads likely play to an empty room, which is quite shocking. So viewability does not equal attention. We all need to take it a step further. The second one is that 50% of impact for TikTok ads happens in the first two seconds. So, these days, not only do you need active attention, you need fast attention.  

Attention is a step to driving sales and equity, which is what really matters. And it's always been critical in marketing. It's just much harder to do it today.

Great answer. And, as you said, attention's always been important, but what about the state of measurement like new technologies or new approaches that make it more likely that we can measure attention?  
 
I'm going to give you a hiking analogy about it. We're at the start of the trail and there are different paths to the top. With attention, we’re at the start of the trail, meaning we're in our early days. There are great technologies out there. My expertise is on the human behavior side of the insights world, which is still mostly using survey-based recall and facial coding to understand attention, which is pretty basic. Therefore, attention is kind of baked into all the creative research we do.   

I've been really pushing to elevate its importance with our research partners and experimenting with partners like Realeyes to really help us get further down that trail. And regarding the different paths to the top; there are a lot of different ways to measure the potential of a creative asset or the potential of media placement to earn it. But they’re still kind of separate. The incentive systems aren't synced yet. We haven’t found that kind of unified approach. Agencies are all working to keep up and take some of those best practices, compared to specialists who are more experimenting and leading. There are different paths to the top, but at least we're all finally talking about it.

Talk to me a little bit about how Pernod Ricard thinks about creative attention and media attention. Should they be viewed side by side? How do you look at them and their importance?  

It's an excellent question. There are a lot of challenges, but they should work together like peanut butter and jelly where they’re better together. Both are ultimately trying to just slow the scroll and capture and hold attention. You need media where people are prime for attention. The message and the medium need to work together. But I still see a lot of examples where it doesn't work. It can be the equivalent of fireworks in the desert where it's beautiful, but nobody sees it. Or another extreme would be a static name in Times Square; something that's too basic for a very dynamic media environment.   

One of my biggest spirits brands probably had hundreds of assets, if frankly, not a thousand. Once you talk about dynamic content and contextual precision, and all that just running in the holiday season, for example...  You take kind of those challenges and multiply them out. And that requires a ton of coordination between the marketing, media, and insights teams. So how you [optimize all those assets and placements] is really kind of the key part of the question.  

We think about it in simple steps. The first is the shared definition of success. How are we going to know at the end of the campaign if we've done it right, or if we need to pivot?  

To do that you need a shared language framework and KPIs.  

To be honest, we're still somewhat in the early days. We've done a beautiful job of syncing our teams to work together for creative effectiveness in general. We know what success looks like for a campaign. And attention is kind of baked into that.    

The second thing you really need is a shared system to plan together. And this is where it becomes hard, right? You need to consider every creative in your campaign; not just the hero assets - the big TV and video assets. Most people have a long tale of assets.  

And so, because attention is different on different platforms, you need to plan creative for that. Increasingly, we find ourselves really asking the question about our “always on” and our retail media assets. 

A lot of companies, including us, do consumer journey planning. But that's a good start and again needs a double click for click for attention.  

The kind of world Pernod is in you really need to think about personalization as well because increased relevance will help with attention. I'm a sports fan, so if you serve me up in an ad for a Minnesota Twins jersey on ESPN, you are way more likely to get my attention.   

That world of contextual precision and dynamic content requires even more intentional coordination. If Jameson is running hundreds of ads in the holidays, and then you add on the routes to personalization that we can do based on all the data and tech we have, there’s a lot to think about what to keep and what to kill when you do it again next year.  

What are some of the best practices for a company that is thinking about attention but might feel like the train has left the station?     

It's a really good question. I've worked in marketing at small companies like the Minnesota Timberwolves, where there was something like three people in marketing, and I worked in companies like Nestle, where you had hundreds of marketers.  

One, it’s just about learning and educating yourself, and two, it's about experimentation. Start by understanding the landscape and best practices because they’re evolving fast. You have to keep educating yourself.   

There are great industry events and content out there. I think your Attention Leaders series is one of them.   

The Advertising Research Foundation also does really good work. But there's just a lot of great free content out there, podcasts or webinars or whatever to just get that baseline understanding of key issues and your measurement options.   

I'll share a few things I've learned in my attention journey in the last year. As I mentioned up top, attention is finite. So, you have to think about the quality of attention. It's not just being present. It's not just passive attention, like, Am I multitasking? You have to really think about the active attention of your consumer.  

The other thing I've learned is that attention varies by content, type, and platform. I know the work Realeyes has done with Meta and others on demonstrating that a Stories ad is different than attention for a Feed ad, right?  So, you have to think about matching that content accordingly.  

And the last one, which I thought was really interesting, but kind of intuitive, is your category dictates your attention. If you're doing an ad for an entertainment service or a movie or a sports team, or, luckily for me, spirits, you're more likely to get some piece of attention, more so than a category like pharma, where you have to work harder for it.   

That's why insurance companies use Patrick Mahomes or a talking gecko to try to grab your attention. So, thinking about where your category falls in that attention spectrum can help. The last thing would be about experimentation. There are a lot of different options out there. Start small based on what you've learned. Make some assumptions and a simple action plan.   

Think about what you can measure. Find your attention allies internally and externally. Just start talking about it to your creative, media, or insights teams and your agency partners. Look at your creative in the context and the media that it is going to run in before it runs. Since my world's more on the measurement side, I'd say the number one principle I think about is just to make it as real world as possible.

Put your creative in your media environment. If you're going to pre-test it, put it on YouTube and TikTok, so you can see some interesting behavioral stuff like if people are going to drop off and start skipping your ad. The average for a 15-second YouTube ad is like seven seconds to skip. So, are you doing better than that? And sadly, it's worse on other platforms. You have to get attention even faster.   

The simplest way to measure it is, you know, survey-based recall. With the theory that if people can remember and play back your brand or your message well, you had to have had their attention.   

But I think the next step up is facial coding. I'm more excited about active attention versus just passive attention. Are you getting some kind of emotion associated with the attention? Because you need attention to set in motion to ultimately get to the behavior change. You want to get somebody to buy something or do something.  

So that active attention of... is someone smiling and is there joy? And are they watching? Are they confused about something? We've used facial coding a lot to understand the emotion and the story arc of the ad but using it to understand if you have active attention is a really interesting thing that a lot of people are doing now, too.