Key Finding:

Attention scores for advertisements do not appear to predict effectiveness. Paying more (or optimising creative) for longer attention is unlikely to be worthwhile.

Recently there have been calls for advertisers to pay more attention to the amount of attention that different media can deliver. It’s been implied that very short exposures can not influence consumers’ memories, that some media deliver such low attention environments that their advertising space should be discounted heavily (or avoided), and that seconds of attention should be a new media currency. It’s also been claimed that advertising creative should be judged for its ability to command attention.

Such claims should be treated with scientific scepticism. Especially claims that come from people selling attention measurement, or from media selling high attention environments (e.g., cinema).

At face value these claims seem doubtful. Much advertising requires very little attention to process. Billboards, print, and online display can be consumed in seconds (or less). Video requires more attention to process but video delivers sight, sound and movement, all of which help sustain attention.

Some attention is necessary, but more attention does not simply translate into greater effect.

Seconds of attention is a problematic metric for judging advertising space. It instantly suggests that cinema advertising is ridiculously valuable. Paying for more attention than is needed is wasteful.

Chasing more attention per view is the old “engagement” strategy dressed up in new clothes. A strategy which in practice tends to limit advertising reach, encourage outrageous rather than effective creative, and steers targeting towards heavier more loyal buyers.

Evidence

Ehrenberg-Bass Institute researchers have published studies on attention in high quality peer-reviewed academic journals, as have other academics. We summarise the knowledge from those studies:

• Measuring lack of attention is possible, i.e., how many people did not see and or hear the advertisement. Advertisers do not have to pay for ads that were not delivered, or were delivered but not “viewable.”
• However, measures of degrees of attention beyond inattention are far less reliable, difficult to interpret, and at best rather blunt, i.e., it’s possible to distinguish between low and high attention with some reliability but whether this matters is not clear.
  More attention to video ads increases brand memorability and brand choice. But for brands familiar to brand users, a fleeting, inattentive exposure is enough.
• In a laboratory, using a “gold standard” measure of attention, EEG (electroencephalography, i.e., brainwaves detected by scalp electrodes), Institute researchers have found that ads have a narrower range of attention compared with similar short videos (e.g., movie trailers).
• EEG and heart rate (another, more scalable attention measure) were sensitive to differences in attention to sound as well as vision. Many of the attention measures being sold to advertisers currently are measures of only visual attention, and different suppliers of these metric appear to rate the same advertisements differently.
• In a field test of Twitter advertising, Institute researchers replicated the distracted viewing environment for most ads – the ads were on screen for a long time (18 seconds) but people were deliberately distracted from looking at them. Even when distracted, viewers were able to see enough of the ads to make the advertised brands more mentally available, and therefore more likely to be chosen, in a subsequent choice test. Again, this effect was stronger for familiar brands (e.g., brands actually used). The effect was found for sports shoes but not for cars.
  While Institute researchers have found that there is no guarantee of the creative devices that will work in terms of generating a sales response, some creative devices (like humour) do help get attention. Ads employing humour deliver more attention. Showing the product/service being promoted, also brings more attention, unless the product display is generally understood to be negative (i.e. sick children, or patients in a dentist’s chair). Whether creative is of good quality, however, is something that is ensured by the advertiser, not amplified by the media.
• Revealing the brand (eg using Distinctive Brand Assets) does not reduce attention. Anyway, the purpose of such assets is to allow viewers to notice the brand more easily, make fleeting attention work better, ie deliver brain reach faster.
• The Advertising Research Foundation (2024) compared different providers of attention metrics and found no correlation between their scores for individual advertisements and the in-market success of the advertising (as judged by the advertisers, and in two cases measured sales).

Closing thoughts

Advertisers try to take into account wastage when deciding what advertising space to buy and how much to pay for it. Hence, what an advertiser will pay depends heavily on:

a) the reach the media can deliver, with premiums for speed, and un-duplicated reach
b) discounted for exposures that go to “the wrong people”
c) discounted for exposures that aren’t seen or heard

In recent years many people have reasonably put forward the view that (b) has been over-rated by marketers.

Have marketers not been doing enough to measure (c), lost exposures? In some media there are fake exposures (e.g., ad fraud, views by bots), but most of these are detectable by viewability metrics, and advertisers should not have to pay for unviewable ads. Once viewability is accounted for, almost all media still suffer from some advertising avoidance (deliberate or accidental, mechanical or mental). Again, some of this avoidance is measurable, such as the skipping of video ads, and advertisers do not have to pay for skipped ads on YouTube. And we have generalised knowledge about the level of ad avoidance for TV and radio. We need the same knowledge for other media.

Some media can also deliver longer exposures (e.g., cinema, live TV) and therefore more seconds of attention. Both ad avoidance and the value of long exposures are worthy of study.

The Institute will be releasing future findings to fill gaps in knowledge in this area. Meanwhile beware of those claiming that more attention is always better, and worth paying a premium for.