Winning Consumers’ Attention in the First Critical Few Seconds

Siim Säinas, Google Social Measurement & Insights Manager APAC, leads marketing measurements, insights, and strategic analytics projects in 16 markets. He spoke to Attention Leaders about how personalized feeds makes measurement difficult, why media and creative measurement are more powerful when viewed together, and why creativity is a moving target. 

Why is attention important? And what is the state of attention measurement today?   

Attention is incredibly important. I'm not going surprise anybody with that [insight]. 

Especially working in social media, which is primarily my focus at the moment. We all know how attention has changed in a predominantly skippable environment. For those reasons, it's incredibly important that we nail those critical few seconds at the start and make sure that our creative actually has a fighting chance. 

So, we often hear people in the industry speaking about creative and media attention. How do you think those two forms of attention should work together, particularly in a social setting?   

Formats are certainly important considering the media environment and how busy it is. And one of the real struggles with social media we have had for many years, pretty much since the dawn of it - is that we really don't know what is the context of our ad.   

Everybody has their own personalized feed. It's geared towards that user, so you're able to hide certain ads. And then the algorithm will also start hiding those ads, it will start showing you more cat pictures because you tend to like cat pictures and so on.   

This means that we really need to nail those first few seconds. And if you follow a more traditional path of storytelling then it will most certainly struggle with attention, view through, and effectiveness.

What do you think the state of the application of attention is now in terms of making the kind of adaptations you're talking about? And where do you think it will go in the next couple of years?   

I think the industry has [had] a tremendous jump over the past five years. It is a very exciting moment because we do have now probably better measurement and analytics than we have ever had about what happens every second of the creative [exposure]. 

That is incredibly exciting. And I think the large majority of advertisers are energized by these sorts of moments, which include AI and what you guys do [with] understanding emotions.

I don't think that all the creatives that I've presented these findings to are equally excited about seeing that sort of data and taking it forward, and maybe even being able to understand what to do with it. So, I think there is certainly a gap there. Because I think innately, we all believe that creativity in and of itself is this sort of mysterious dark part that comes from an unknown source. And I'm not sure data and numbers have always been at the center of it.   

Due to creativity still being a human [endeavor], we will still need quite a bit of work to get creatives to understand what to do with all of this stuff. But, in terms of marrying media and creativity, I mean, everybody's trying to do that. On rare occasions, it's happening in a very interesting and magnificent way. 

If you look at the Effies or awards that are being handed out to most campaigns, I would argue that a big chunk of them are a marriage of media and creativity.   

There was a Samsung campaign out of Australia that got several awards where they gamed the experience of getting a Samsung flip phone. So, you needed to game the Google search algorithm to be served the ad about the phone. The whole story was flipped literally whereas the consumers were looking for the phone rather than being served [the ad] in a context that they probably even didn't expect or would find slightly annoying.   

It's quite an interesting take on it, and I think it's a beautiful example of when media and creativity come together, and what they can do.   

Yeah, that was an amazing campaign on many levels. So, you briefly mentioned AI there, which is both a buzzword and a big part of how attention measurement will apply in both creative and media settings in the future. How do you think AI solutions in the Attention space will meet current demand? And where do you see that going in the future?    

I mean, it’s here to stay. I think some people kind of wish otherwise. There's an enormous amount of people that are experimenting with AI, predominantly for direct response objectives, because that seems to be that sort of lowest-hanging opportunity - just automating production assets that generally are rather straightforward. You could argue that emotion and attention capture also play a very big role there. Because the narrative probably is a little bit shorter; it's probably a lot snappier and a lot more straightforward.   

Based on the folks that I know are doing it, AI is very well suited to do that. When it comes to brand marketing, that's a different story entirely. I don't think that we've seen anything that incredibly interesting [yet]. There's been a few tries. I remember Coke did something, and there's been a few that I've kind of raised eyebrows and they've been very creative.   

But we have had quite a big challenge with AI Image generation, for example, which was about the narrative consistency really being missing in most of these tools. Remember that weird Will Smith AI video where he was eating spaghetti? It's one year old, right? AI and LLMs have made a massive leap forward. And I think that is quite exciting. It'll be foolish to predict something very accurately, but I think one thing is that I think that the average level of doing something is going to normalize right? These tools will make it easy for anybody to just go out there and do something relatively average.   

But considering the fact that we want humans to pay attention, I think the machine world is going to be very different.   

But let's pretend that it's still going to be humans five years from now. Then the attention spectrum will also change, right? And if that's a swath of like average [quality content] from all these tools, then also that equilibrium will change.   

 Creativity is a moving target. It's never going to be the same. It changes with the day, the weather, the environment, what’s happening around us, and the people they're serving ads to. With brand marketing, especially where you are trying to do something really noble and be noticed for that, there will be a passion for real experts and real creativity for many years to come. I don't think that's going to change, but their toolkit might change.   

Maybe they're ideating together with the likes of Gemini or Chat GPT and so on. Maybe there's a sounding board or a script-writing helper. Maybe there's a bit of help for editing and so on. But there's still the human element. Someone needs to figure out what the captivating storyline is and how you get attention from users, especially in an environment where we're kind of bombarded with all this stuff.   

What advice do you have for other people seeking to learn more about attention measurement and potentially bring attention, measurement technology and practices into their organization?   

I feel every day, we're learning every day something new and exciting in this marketing measurement field. The big thing for me, at least in the past 16 months, even if you don't want to consult anybody, please consult the creators.   

We have more data and more sophisticated measurements. We tend to also innately start believing in our own ego. It's very easy to creep in, especially in an environment where, if you're meeting with the CMO or the CFO or the finance team very often, it will be a relatively cut-and-dry conversation in most cases about effectiveness numbers. So, I think it's also our responsibility to bring in the people who are actually taking the narrative apart and putting it together and everything in between. 

The winning algorithm is still about using humans and all this sort of testing and measurement in the smartest way we can. And there's an enormous amount of very creative people, but they might not speak your language. They might not have the same vocabulary, or they look at marketing very differently. Including more of these people in your decision-making and understanding why certain results look this way or the other way. 

The most basic recommendation is that everybody by now should be using these tools. Because I think there's an enormous amount that we can learn from emotions and attention and all the good stuff that drives effectiveness.