Attention ‘no silver bullet’ for business outcomes, not yet ready as a currency and won't replace existing metrics, says IAB in review of nine key vendors

News 27 Sep 2022 - 4 min read

Attention ‘no silver bullet’ for business outcomes, not yet ready as a currency and won't replace existing metrics, says IAB in review of nine key vendors

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IAB Australia has run the rule over nine of the advertising vendors attempting to bring attention products to market – Amplified Intelligence, Lumen, Adelaide, Double Verify and Oracle Advertising to name a few. But its subsequent report states attention cannot yet be treated as an industry standard ‘currency’. Even with market maturity, the IAB also claimed attention will be no silver bullet for ad attention and business outcomes.

What you need to know:

IAB Australia has released a report looking at the different attention providers and their methodologies.
The Ad Attention Measurement Landscape Report, compiled by the IAB Ad Effectiveness Council, looked at nine attention vendors and concluded attention was not ready to be used as a currency.
It is “not a silver bullet” for marketers and is one of the range of metrics marketers should use to evaluate campaigns.

Attention is not ready to be used as a currency for media buying in Australia - and won't replace existing metrics - because there’s no consistency, no agreed methodology and a lot of people don’t understand how it works, per the IAB.

In a new, 53-page report released today, IAB Australia looked at the way nine advertising attention vendors work to provide the market with guidance that “cuts through the hype”.

Based on what it learned putting the Ad Attention Measurement Landscape Report together, IAB Australia said it has “confirmed that it believes that while attention measurement is an important input to understanding advertising impact, it is not yet ready to be treated as an industry standard ‘currency’.”

It looked at eye-tracking attention vendors Adelaide, Amplified Intelligence, Eye Square, Lumen, Playground xyz; neuroscience measurement vendor Neuro-Insight; and ad tech measurement vendors Double Verify, IAS and Oracle Advertising. The report was compiled by the IAB Ad Effectiveness Council which includes some, but not all, of the attention vendors reviewed in the report among its members.

Advertising is “not a silver bullet”, IAB Australia said, and marketers should use a range of metrics to understand the impact of their advertising investments.

"While evidence is emerging on the correlation between higher ad attention and business outcomes, and the potential for ad attention metrics to be used as an indicator for ad effectiveness, we believe it will not replace the need for existing media metrics," IAB Australia wrote.

"Marketers will need to continue to conduct other types of measurement in combination (such as MMM and experiments) to fully understand the holistic impact of advertising investments."

Attention is a "trade marketing battle ground", the report continued, but remains very much in the experimental stage.

IAB Australia's Ad Effectiveness Measurement Framework, from its ad attention measurement report.

“There are many ingredients needed for effective advertising and the recipe needed for success will differ for every advertiser and every campaign,” Gai Le Roy, IAB Australia CEO, said.

“Measuring how all the pieces of the effectiveness puzzle fit together as well as influence each other is an area ongoing investigation that needs to be constantly reviewed as the ad market, media options, consumer behaviour and the marketing mix constantly evolves.”

Natalie Stanbury, IAB Australia’s Research Director, said attention measurement needed to mature and urged marketers and the supply chain to do their own homework and draw their own conclusions.

“We encourage brands, agencies, and media owners to start experimenting with ad attention measurement to understand the nuances across brands, format, position, context, and cost,” she said.

The report also included a survey of 180 people on the topic of attention. It found 82 per cent of ad agencies intend to measure attention in campaigns over the next year, while 55 per cent of agencies said they know “at least a fair amount” about the concept. Three quarters (76 per cent) said they use insights from studies to inform media planning. In contrast, 30 per cent of agency people surveyed say attention is used for ad targeting decisions and 29 per cent for adjusting creative design.