The Challenge of Attention

Download full report

Attention is important, so how do we measure it?

For more than ten years now, the sheer scale and volume of media available to advertisers has been proliferating. Digital technologies and platforms mean that consumer choice about how, where, and when they consume media content has exploded and so fragmented. It is no longer possible to reach mass audiences at scale simply by running a TV ad campaign. As a result, many now characterise modern marketing as an attention economy, a multimedia competition for consumer eyeballs.

Ebiquity in partnership with Lumen Research and TVision published a new research report, The Challenge of Attention, on how to include meaningful measures of attention in advertising effectiveness models.

HIGHLIGHTS

The first true currency of advertising attention: cost per thousand seconds of attention (aCPM)
What publishers need to do to maximise the attention ads receive on their sites
Understanding the relationship between attention and brand recall

// What we want to investigate and why

Objectives

The challenge facing advertisers in the increasingly digital marketing ecosystem is capturing and holding consumers’ attention: if they aren’t attracted to and don’t attend to an ad, there’s no way they can be persuaded to do anything.

In the report, Lumen shows how, for the first time, we are bringing together Ebiquity cost data, Lumen data on attention to digital advertising, and TVision data on attention to TV, to create a new, composite metric: aCPM or cost per thousand seconds of attention.

The report brings together multiple, relevant data sources to create a new, composite metric that quantifies equivalency of attention to both TV and digital media

Advertisers’ challenges in capturing and holding consumers’ attention
The cost of attention across media
Attention differences across media

// What we've discovered and suggest

Findings

The problem for marketers is that the attention of consumers with money to spend is getting harder for advertisers to secure. This report shows how, for the first time, we are bringing together media cost data and attention data – for both digital advertising and TV – to create a powerful, new, composite metric, aCPM.

What advertisers should do when it comes to Attention data
What can brands do to win the battle for Attention
Advertisers need to plan media campaigns based on Attention data to reach an engaged audience