New metrics for a new world

The past few years have been marked with tremendous evolutions in the media landscape. With new platforms on the rise and old platforms modifying current offerings, a crowded marketplace for content creation and publishing has made it difficult for advertisers to stand out. Thanks to this spike in the number of platforms and content creators, casual social media users are constantly overwhelmed with content, sponsored or otherwise, everyday.

The extensive variety of content available has made users quite selective in what and who they engage with. The numbers from our global consumer study echo this –

Two out of three surveyed users said they were more likely to pay attention if an ad caught their interest in an infinitesimal five seconds.

Audience fragmentation has become a significant concern for digital marketers in this saturated backdrop. Per a YouGov report, consumption on digital media is outstripping consumption on traditional platforms but the number and difference of media types has marketers questioning where trends will stick and where they will wane. This is bound to make campaign planning, targeting and accurate measurement a challenge.

If brands wish to truly engage with their consumers against the array of content and ads competing for attention, evaluating impact in innovative ways and drafting channel-specific strategies is essential. Solutions that can focus on consumption by platform, region, demographic, engagement signals and more, are key to win attention, and thus, ensure brand relevance.

Maximising campaign performance for results

The deluge of content online has heightened the need to understand, and maximise, impression value. Measuring dominant criteria such as viewability and click-through rate (CTR) is important, but it cannot end there for marketers looking to excel today.

There is a need for an end-to-end approach to performance measurement and campaign optimisation that goes beyond assessing the usual suspects.

Thankfully, the industry has evolved to a point where advertisers can directly measure user attention across ads and devices, even if user attention is a complex, non-binary concept. According to a recent media quality survey launched by DoubleVerify (DV), attention metrics that matter vary greatly based on channel, format and desired KPIs. At DV, we account for this by quantifying attention through measuring several granular data points at the impression level, which can then be aggregated into actionable metrics. This approach does not rely on third-party cookies and analyses over 50 data points on the exposure of a digital ad and consumer’s engagement with a digital ad and device in real-time. For exposure, we evaluate an ad’s entire presentation, quantifying its intensity and prominence through metrics that include viewable time, share of screen, video presentation, audibility, and more. For engagement, we analyse key user-initiated events that occur while the ad creative is displayed, including user touches, screen orientation, video playback, and audio control interactions.

When snack giant Mondelēz International wanted to evaluate and optimise the performance of a cross-platform display campaign, it used our approach and was able to highlight the value of “high-exposure” impressions on the campaign. This correlated with a nine percentage point increase in favourability, an eight point lift in consideration overall, and a five point rise in purchase intent among the brand’s primary target audience.

Revisiting essential metrics

Evolved digital mediums and digital marketing strategies are changing how consumer attention is perceived and measured. This makes it critical for marketers to get a strong grasp on the measurement metrics that matter most today. The three critical metrics that provide a well-rounded view of campaign performance are:

1. Attention index: Attention Index provides advertisers with a more nuanced understanding of their ad's effectiveness by evaluating multiple data signals. A high attention index suggests that the ad is resonating well with the audience and keeping them engaged, leading to stronger business outcomes and overall campaign success. Attention can be broken down into two key components - ad exposure and user engagement.
2. Exposure index: This evaluates an ad’s entire presentation, quantifying its intensity and prominence through metrics that include viewable time, share of screen, video presentation, audibility and more. While exposure is a crucial aspect of advertising, it needs to rank high along with factors like engagement, CTR, and conversions, to provide a more comprehensive understanding of how well an ad is performing.
3. Engagement index: The engagement index is valuable to assess key user-initiated events that occur while the ad creative is displayed, including user touches, screen orientation, video playback and audio control interactions. A high engagement index indicates that users find the ad content valuable, interesting, and relevant, leading to increased click-through rates, interactions, and potentially conversions.

Demystifying the Role of AI

The popularity of Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI, for content production is consistently growing among marketers. But from an attention measurement and campaign evaluation standpoint, AI has much to offer to the digital advertising landscape. Two key areas where AI is likely to have a noteworthy impact in the advertising industry include real-time performance optimisation and automated programmatic ad buying. For example, machine learning can be used to predict optimal bid prices for ad placements after considering factors like viewability, contextual and attention signals. DV’s Scibids solution, Scibids AI, helps us achieve this by spanning the media transaction end-to-end, from activation to measurement. This provides advertisers real-time campaign optimisation, without the use of third-party cookies.

It's crucial to note that AI models need to be customised and trained using relevant data to drive effective results. This data can come from multiple sources including campaign costs, attention or viewability data, first-party data (i.e. purchase or audience data) and more. That being said, as the role of AI in the media industry continues to grow, advertisers who incorporate AI into their media and measurement strategies are poised to see results.

Attention is at the forefront of a paradigm shift in media performance measurement, and its accurate measurement in advertising is essential for optimising campaign effectiveness.

But as AI grows by leaps and bounds, combining attention data with AI capabilities will be integral to enhance campaign measurement and optimisation.

Such an approach will enable advertisers to identify the best-performing inventory that maximises business outcomes and advertising ROI, without sacrificing scale, and empower brands to create captivating ad experiences. In the data driven advertising future, the attention and AI amalgam will be the secret to strengthen connections with target audiences and craft brand images that stand the test of time.

This article was written by Neil Anderson, sales solution specialist APAC, DoubleVerify.