AdColony partnered with MMA at MMA Impact to Talk About the Holy Grail of Advertising: Attention

One of the world’s biggest mobile ad networks AdColony participated in MMA Impact MENA with the moderator of AdColony General Manager EMEA & LATAM Warrick Billingham. Joined by the guest speakers of L’Oréal Egypt CMO Shaima Ismail, P&G at Starcom MENA Strategy, Insight, and Data Lead Donnacha Kinsella, and Lumen Research Managing Director Mike Follet to talk deep dive into the importance of attention in advertising, and how the right attention metrics can be measured.

Warrick Billingham, AdColony General Manager EMEA & LATAM said, “It is no secret that advertising has always been about attention. For the brands, it is important not just to understand but directly know if their ads are creating attention on their target audience. It’s just now that it can be measured much better in the digital world compared to before with the advantages of eye-tracking and other digital tools. Brands have the opportunity to leverage this once-in-an-era transformation by leading the imperative for marketing change and adopting proven, peer-driven, and scientific best practices, without compromise.”

Importance of Attention Economy

80% of the advertisement is now digital brings the importance of actual attention on driving sales and brand metrics. Posts, newspaper advertisements have always been an issue. But with digital advertising, there is this assumption that the inventory is infinite. So you can have as many ads as you like. Thousands, millions, billions of ads served but just because of lots of serving that doesn’t mean that users have looked at it. With ad verification, brands can understand metrics such as valid, viewable, brand-safe, quality.

Measuring the Attention

Measuring attention is never easy, and verification is important but still many marketers in many regions don’t use verification tools. With ad verification, brands can understand metrics such as valid, viewable, brand-safe, quality. In terms of effectiveness, a lot of advertisers use media brand lift studies or track panel analysis to engage or measure their campaigns. This will allow brands to see which digital advertising they should move with to get a better business impact. If brands stick only in the ad verification and what it gives in terms of the ad viewability that would be the one example of the silent measurement. We need to look beyond what impact did this ad have on the consumer.

Tips for the Marketers

When the campaign is running in the different digital touchpoints you cannot really confirm if the results of the brand studies you are getting are specifically designated platforms for your video campaigns because the campaign is running on multi-platforms & cross channels.

Another challenge is scalability. How quick and big access can brands have to consumers to really understand the impact on them and to be able to get the assessment of the campaign impact.

Marketers ultimately want to know what their return on ad spend is going to be with advanced data solutions and customer data platforms being developed. They are actually getting closer to understanding the customer value and or maybe even the customer lifetime value. All advertisers and marketers are thought to be heading in this direction.

The attention metric was not known and could not be measured until this time, no one actually knew what kind of actions to take. But now, thanks to companies like Lumen, which can measure attention, brands both know what to do and are aware of consumers’ behaviors and reactions. From this point on, it will be important for brands to take action, not just talk about consumer attention anymore.

You can watch the full webinar from that link.