Hesitant hombres

Avenue C’s Managing Partner Pia Coyle thinks her industry brethren in media agencies are missing a big effectiveness trick that’s well beyond blunt audience reach and frequency numbers for the OOH sector. 

But the pain, time and energy that comes with adopting new metrics that challenge long-held assumptions around channel planning and legacy thinking is partly to blame for why advertisers and media agencies have been slow out of the gates for a new system that scores any OOH screen and format across the country for how likely the advertiser message it is carrying will land in a person’s long-term memory encoding – essentially the end-game for advertising effectiveness.

There’s a slight irony in that the industry stampede and take-up for new attention metrics has not spilled to a world-first in Australia applying neuroscience to an entire media sector.

Coyle, who serves on the Outdoor Futures Council, admits her peers have been slow, despite media agencies always demanding better data. The problem, in her mind, is two-fold: ingesting new metrics into planning protocols and systems and fear from the buy and sell side for what happens to pricing – buyers worry rates will go up for screens with high-performing neuro impact scores while OOH operatives fear  hits to their yields in lower-scoring formats.

“I'm definitely a fan of Neuro Impact Factor (NIF),” Coyle told Mi3 on today’s podcast. “There is definitely a delay in how the industry has adopted this metric." Coyle says after conversing with industry peers, the “unspoken stuff” partly explains why.

“Generally speaking, a new metric is always a little bit slow to be adopted because people are very much set in their own ways and like to use things that they've used for a very long time,” she says. “Their clients understand those old metrics so there's a bit of that but there's a little bit of ‘what do we do with this thing and who's going to start using it first’. From an agency point of view, there is a little bit of hesitation in market about what the Neuro Impact Factor might mean for rates. And what I mean by that is does a really great NIF score mean that a media owner is going to try and push a premium onto a client in a negotiation? There's definitely a bit of hesitation in using that terminology and what that means because we don't want to upset the way pricing happens.”

So price rules, even if ad effectiveness is greater?

“Yeah, that is an interesting point because I think generally speaking, a good media practitioner who is working truly on behalf of their clients will pay more for something that is more effective. And I hope that that is the case across the board because I think that's what keeps our industry going – great client results is what we should all be aiming for. But I think there has to be give and take. And I think agencies are always a little bit sceptical about whether a price goes up in one area or does it come down in another area or it only good for when there needs to be a premium applied versus when there needs to be a further discount applied?”

Action amigas

And OOH operators are thinking likewise on the pricing downside, hence the metaphor for the present: Coyle agrees there is a Mexican-style stand-off.

“Media owners are a little bit hesitant to work out how this should be applied, if at all, on their end,” she says. “That really differs by media owner. You can talk to anyone from any of the big guys all the way through to the smaller players and they're wondering where this is going to go - I think it’s probably the biggest question. How should I use it? Are my competitors using it? What are the agencies thinking? No one's just diving in and I think that's probably now the time for that. There’s some really big wins to be had for clients. If we all just get our shit together and start talking about it…and then work it out together. That's what this needs - a bit of a safe space for everyone.”

Double standards?

Coyle puts another challenge to her industry peers – the likes of Google, Youtube, Facebook and TikTok, she says, “produce some data that not many challenge. They just take it on board and it does justify the cause for that particular channel. So I guess my observation there is it would be silly to think that most of these methodologies aren't there to substantiate something that holds up the qualities of the channel in question".

Speed bumps

OMA’s industry lead on NIF and the now decade-old Move OOH measurement system, Grant Guesdon, deftly dances around the Mexican scenario when asked. 

“No, I'm not going to challenge Pia on that,” he says. “A media buyers job is to buy it for as cheap as they can and the media sellers is to sell it for as much as they can and that hasn't changed since I worked in agencies, with or without the Neuro Impact Factor. Look, I think we're still, as an industry, trying to see where it sits. We've got reach and frequency, which is attention based, and now we've got an impact score on that attention. And it's that moment we're saying, okay, what I can start to see is if I'm looking to do a traditional type of buy, what sort of NIF scores do I want to achieve there? I might be going for a lower NIF score because I'm going to be having an ongoing presence across an entire launch cycle versus I might do with a digital screen. We know it's got a higher NIF because of the light, the movement.” 

Tequila sunrise

Guesdon remains philosophical about the current market usage for NIF – he likens it to the arrival of Move in 2010 – it took two years before Move got real momentum in the market.

“The amount of people that we had logging on day one didn't change for the first couple of years and then we've seen a steady growth in usage of the move system to where we are now preparing and building Move 2.0, which will mean that we will have all formats measured and we'll be measuring with seasonality," per Guesdon. "So we'll move away from the average typical week we have at the moment and the benefit that the NIF will have is that we've got a generation of buyers that don't have the experience and wisdom of having bought traditional out of home…for a decade or more. Move was able to give them information about a market they may not be familiar with or a road or an area they may not be familiar with. And now what the NIF can do is add to that and say, 'well, now I can tell you a bit about the formats that you may not have understood before' – because all formats are slightly different whether they're in the same environment or not.”

Neuroscience v attention 

Which gets us to the big hairy question on methodologies and efficacy. Neuro-Insight and its peers in neuro-based ad effectiveness research have been around for at least 15 years but have struggled hitherto to scale in media beyond bespoke projects which deliver qualitative insights into how the brain, creative and messaging, channels and formats combine to land in long-term memory encoding. The Australian OOH industry’s NIF initiative is an early, global outlier. 

Neuro-Insight CEO Peter Pynta says questions around the difference between attention metrics and neuroscience is “pretty common” among marketers, agencies and media owners.   

“The attention debate has started a movement,” he says. “There's no question about it. And the movement is good because the movement is towards the quality of media which has been a long, long time coming. And that quality of media debate is not necessarily answered by reach or frequency. However, attention is not necessarily impact. And this is the really important distinction. It is a movement and it's a good movement and long may it live. I think we just need to be completely open and transparent about what it is and what it's not," says Pynta.  

"We too are very clear about what we are and what we're not. We measure visual attention, general attention, which actually don't really inform the Neuro Impact Factor and the reason why is because it takes you a little closer to impact – we find that something like a visual attention metric explains or correlates with long term memory by about 15 per cent. So it takes you a little way to the end game, if you like. That's the important distinction between attention and impact … There's a lot that happens between an eye gaze and what gets into long-term memory encoding. So attention metrics are essentially derived from eye gaze, which all you have to do is ask Karen Nelson-Field [Amplified Intelligence] or Lumen or XYZ that - it's a variant of that particular technology which is highly scalable.”

No brainer – it’s electrical

Pynta’s argument is that understanding how the brain is responding to stimuli and storing in long-term memory is critical – in the case of Neuro-Insight, it’s measuring electrical activity in the brain (other neuro ad methodologies are considered by some to be less robust because they use MRI tech to measure blood flow).     

“The two main constructs that go into the Neuro Impact Factor and what we do when we're measuring brain activity is measure things like general attention, visual attention, emotional intensity and engagement. But the jewel in the crown is long-term memory encoding. If your ad does not get committed to long term memory, whether it's conscious or subconscious – and of course 95 per cent of that storage is actually subconscious – that’s the big catch," per Pynta. 

"So when we say memory, we actually are measuring the areas of the brain that are associated with the storage of memories in the moment as you experience them. That's been scientifically validated. And then of course, you've got the commercial validation, which we now as practitioners in marketing and advertising are probably more interested in. So what does it mean? Was there a movement of the [purchase or consideration] dial? Does it mean behaviour change? Well, yes, it does”

Pynta says commercial validation – sales or specific marketing and brand objectives – has an 85 per cent correlation to what Neuro-Insight’s work predicts.  

Try it break it

“It's quite high but the major constructs, or the major pieces, are long term memory encoding and emotional intensity. They are the two big constructs that go into NIF. And it's a blended metric,” says Pynta.

His takeout for the OOH industry and media buyers is pragmatic – Pynta says there is “certainly a paradigm shift” underway in OOH measurement and he implores both sides of industry to “just get on with it". 

"As Pia said, use it, try and break it. If you want another paradigm shift, we see sophisticated marketers – yes, they’re using reach and frequency – but they’re also moving into the richer, fertile areas of effectiveness and ROI. If you don't use it, you're throwing away your ticket to have a genuine discussion about effectiveness," suggests Pynta. "If you don't use it, you certainly wouldn't want to complain about rising media CPM inflation because the NIF gives you another valuable lens upon which to evaluate your out of home investment.”

Ultimately Pynta, Coyle and Guesdon are dancing to the same tune, on the same [out of home] screen.