It has been a big year for attention with everyone from media owners, agencies and Byron Sharp talking about it. Even in the time since I started writing this piece, the IAB Australia came out with a thorough overview of the attention measurement landscape.

A lot of the chatter – self-serving opinion pieces aside – boils down to a lack of shared language and common definitions. A general sense of ambiguity is breeding misunderstanding and preventing the discussion from moving forward. And it needs to move forward.

In one corner we have a highly regarded academic saying attention metrics are flawed, deeming paying more for anything above fleeting attention pointless.

On the other side of the ring, a different expert highlights the pressing need to move away from flawed viewability measures and how attention can help fill the void.

It’s little wonder we’re seeing a squabble break out.

Objectively, the argument for adopting attention metrics has come a long way this year.

If 2022 was the year we established why we need to be thinking about attention – which I’d argue it was – 2023 is the year we figure out how we do it. That’s “we” as an industry. To do that, we need calibration of language, definitions and concepts. Perhaps even some standards. But we’ve got to walk before we can run.

If history tells us anything, we’re exactly where you’d expect us to be in the adoption timeline. Take the example of viewability.

Way back in 2007, the concept of viewability came out of research conducted jointly by the US arm of the IAB, the Association of National Advertisers and the American Association of Advertising Agencies to figure out what would get advertisers to shift their budgets from TV to digital.

It would take seven long years before the Media Ratings Council (MRC) implemented its viewability standards and there were several steps in between. In 2011, the Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) initiative was born to revolutionise digital measurement. From that, concerns grew that some digital ads weren’t being seen at all.

In 2012, the IAB launched SafeFrame 1.0, a mechanism to measure whether ads were seen which upped the ante for the industry-wide adoption of standards.

There was much handwringing in the years that followed and by 2014, advertisers were waiting with bated breath for the MRC and IAB to share the industry-agreed standards. Even then, they only accounted for display advertising. Video would take longer still.

Here in Australia, it would be a further two years before the same standards were in place.

If you want to cast your mind back a bit further into the media annals, consider recency planning.

The concept began to get traction around 1995 stemming from two individuals separately looking at sales data patterns. The concept gathered steam and increasingly more evidence over the next decade. Then it plateaued as broader alignment and agreement failed to follow.  

To use another example, Byron Sharp’s guidebook to successful marketing, How Brands Grow, was released 12 years ago. While it has disciples, its empiricisms are far from universally agreed upon or adopted.

There’s plenty to learn from these varying examples. In these cases, the idea came about to solve a challenge that marketers were facing. Still, it would take several years, countless industry bodies, working groups and much debate before common terminology and standards were landed on.

Despite the breakneck speed at which we’re moving toward attention as a currency, right now, attention as a concept is still in the early adoption phase. There’s a bucketload of work to be done before we can even think about attention as a currency.

There’s something else we can learn from the examples of viewability and recency planning and that is how to expedite the process.

Right now, the New York-based trade body, the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) is working to define attention and validate its measurement through a new initiative called the ARF Attention Validation Project. It’s being strongly endorsed by the US-centric trade body The Attention Council. This is exactly what’s required. Not least because the ARF has a history in this area: way back in 2019, the organisation hosted a review of attention dimensions jointly undertaken by MediaScience, Google and… the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute.

But the Australian market is arguably at the forefront of the attention race. Not least because of Amplified Intelligence (AI) being based here and the uptake by all holdcos and independents (including Hatched) of AI’s attention planning product.

Why wait for the US or the UK to figure out the best way forward? Why don’t we form our own attention body so we can get ahead of this?

Learning from history, these cycles work best when driven by the wider industry rather than when parties with vested interests take the lead.

The IAB Australia review of the measurement landscape is a step in the right direction but let’s not leave it there. If we do, we risk another decade of back and forth before we come to an industry-wide agreement.