If nothing else, Professor Byron Sharp’s keynote at last month’s Mi3-LinkedIn B2B Next conference got the industry talking.

The meatiest bone of contention was Sharp’s takedown of the data used by Binet and Field to formulate their 60:40 rule – a principle that suggests brands that skew their spend to brand building over performance advertising, or short-term sales activation, drive better returns over the long-term. The rule, with ratio nuances for different categories, is based on decades worth of IPA awards entries.

Sharp questioned the validity of using awards data to create the rule, stating it was a “weird data set … If you wanted to solve this issue, you would never use that data. But why did they use it? Because that's the only data they had.”

Binet and Field have gone to no new lengths to defend their 60:40 research – though Les Binet has previously addressed the issue of awards data and bias. But supporters mobilised via social media and trade publications locally and internationally.

Different data, same outcome?

Previously Unavailable founding partner James Hurman published a robust counter-offensive via Mi3. He essentially says Ehrenberg-Bass and Binet and Field arrive at similar conclusions, regardless of data used to get there:

“When we look at the data, we can see that the companies that do a good job of both making themselves familiar to the masses, and also getting their product or offer in front of people when they’re shopping for it, are the companies that grow the most efficiently,” Hurman writes.

“Peter Field and Les Binet call this ‘brand building’ and ‘sales activation’. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute calls it ‘mental availability’ and ‘physical availability’. I call it ‘creating Future Demand’ and ‘converting Existing Demand’. 

“They’re all the same concept. Yes, Ehrenberg-Bass has the resources to perform vastly more knob twiddling than the others, some of which is useful and some of which produces concepts so arcane that their practical application is out of the question (hands up who’s measuring mental availability properly, or could ever afford to do so ongoing),” Hurman continues.

“But – on the top-line basics, it’s advantageous for our industry that many independent researchers have reached the same conclusions.”

He thinks greater collaboration, including marketing science and research factions, would benefit everyone.

"Scientific pursuit is at its best when it’s open to new and different perspectives. When it collaborates. When it champions replication success and consistency of ideas," per Hurman.

"As an industry we’re lucky to be circling around a unified theory of how brand building works. That theory has been contributed to by many – both academic and practicing. Their findings are consistent. Which should be celebrated by the researchers, and be a source of confidence for marketing’s practitioners."

Mike Follett, Managing Director of Lumen Research, penned a counterview within the same Warc piece, suggesting Sharp’s assumptions around the data collected by attention measurement providers and the advice they subsequently provide to advertisers are misguided. Their default, he insists, is not to always tell brands to buy more attention.

“More attention is usually better than less attention in driving desired outcomes. But it’s the outcomes that count. As the Dentsu ‘Attention Economy’ study has so successfully shown, while some ads can, and do, work very well with fleeting glances, other ads, with different objectives, may require more attention to successfully communicate or build memory structures,” states Follett.

“It’s horses for courses: don’t be suckered by those saying otherwise.”

Ritson: Longer attention levels can be more valuable

Prof. Mark Ritson backed the attention firms – suggesting Sharp has that aspect wrong.

Via Marketing Week, he points out that effective attention measurement is essential to determine ‘actual reach’ – versus billions of dollars worth of ad spend that is wasted on unviewable ads every year in a bid for all out reach.

Ritson pulled together research from Lumen, Dentsu and TVision to counter the argument that greater attention is not worth paying more for – citing Dentsu studies that found while 2 seconds of attention drove prompted recall of 28 per cent, 14 seconds of attention almost doubles that recall.

“Clearly, some advertising can work with the barest flash of fixation [which means somebody’s gaze has landed on the ad for at least a tenth of a second]. But extending that attention to include dwell time also has significant ramifications. That means any wholesale dismissal of attention research is a grave error,” states Ritson.

“That’s partly because attention is so variant across different media and different formats within each media. Too often, advertisers have conflated reach with opportunities to see and spent their marketing budgets inefficiently. Marketers need to take more care with their money.”

Real reach requires attention

Writing in The Media Leader, Jon Waite, Global Managing Director of Mx Development at Havas Media Group, mounted a similar defence: “Attention metrics are powerful and crucial to quantifying ‘real reach’,” he argues.

“At their core attention metrics are a reach adjustment mechanic. You cannot champion the need for reach at all costs and ignore the importance of attention metrics,” writes Waite.

“For example, if you buy 1,000 impressions at a frequency cap of 1, you have technically ‘reached’ 1,000 people. But attention metrics tell us a different story.

"In digital display formats, 510 of those 1,000 impressions on average will not have an ‘opportunity to be seen’ (OTS) and less than 50 per cent of the ads served will be on screen for less than 1 second. This means you have only really ‘reached’ 490 people,” he adds.

“Or have you? Likely not. Even though 490 of these placements gave an ‘OTS’, only 9 per cent of your original 1,000 people ever look at the ad for more than 0.1 seconds. So, have I ‘reached’ 1,000 people or have I reached 90 people? With reach being of fundamental and unquestionable importance, surely, we need to be clear on that.”

While Waite agrees that there are diminishing returns for higher levels of attention, he argues that as currently defined, “‘reach’ delivers no attention. That is why these attention metrics are important: they help us buy better reach”.

Update: We originally published the uncut audio from Byron Sharp's keynote alongside this article. However, we did not obtain permission. Ehrenberg Bass Institute had specific arrangements in place with LinkedIn regarding the B2B Next conference. As a result, we have removed the audio, amended article headline and intro.