How to Improve Ad Attentiveness Measurement

(For those who follow my blog, I’m sorry I went dark. I was in the hospital for a month…one week in critical care…with long Covid…despite getting all the boosters… that turned into double pneumonia. Yes, Covid is still with us unfortunately.)

Measuring attentiveness to advertising has become a big deal over the past few years. The ARF helped to fuel this resurgence when they updated their media model. Unfortunately, while I was in on those discussions, the main point I tried to make fell on traditional thinkers’ deaf ears who think attentiveness is all about copy quality or ad type.

A main determinant of whether a consumer pays attention to your advertising is independent of copy quality or media channel or media partner…it depends on whether or not that consumer cares about your brand.  In short, it is based on the relevance of the ad to the individual consumer based on their brand preferences.

I have evidence from three large scale studies that this is the case.

Studies for Ally bank, Kroger (e-com sales), and Campbell soup were directed by the MMA using the “brand as performance” protocols that I had a lead role in developing.  In those studies, we used an analytics partner to track ad impressions and sales/conversion results at an ID level for a backbone of hundreds of thousands of  IDs.  We also surveyed 5,000-10,000 individuals from a panel whose IDs are matched to this backbone.

So, with this study infrastructure, we can analyze if those who we KNOW were exposed to advertising for the test brand based on server log files and pixels respond to a survey question that they remember seeing the advertising. This was analyzed by how many points in a constant sum question the respondent gave to the brand of interest.

The results are clear and consistent… consumers who have interest in buying your brand are primarily the ones who pay attention to your advertising!  (BTW, all groups were exposed to the same bundle of media types and creative.)

Can great advertising raise the levels of attentiveness to advertising? Sure, that is likely (and I have seen some evidence that attentiveness can vary by ad type and platform too) BUT…it is likely that these indices of attentiveness by interest in buying the brand will still hold.

There are two major implications from this analysis.

1. Improving ad attentiveness research. You should always analyze ad attentiveness by interest in choosing the brand, as measured by a constant sum question. Those who give 0 points are generally non-buyers of the brand with no interest.  Those who give 1 point are non-buyers but with some interest. Those who give 2+ points are mostly brand buyers.  You need to know who is paying attention to your advertising.  Also know that advertising for a big share brand should always have higher attentiveness because of this phenomenon.
2. Advertising targeting.  If an audience over indexes on non-buyers, delivering ad impressions to that audience will under perform because they are largely not paying attention.  An audience that over indexes on those who give 2+ points to your brand will OVER perform.  Don’t you want that?  This is the fallacy of broad reach marketing; it calls for delivering proportionate ad impressions to audiences that are pre-determined to not respond.

The hierarchy of advertising effects starts with ad impressions being served and ends with sales. The marketer controls the top of the process while the consumer controls the bottom of the process. 

But now we have evidence that the handshake between marketers and consumers occurs at ad attentiveness.

Consumers must WANT to pay attention to an ad and that is largely based on the relevance of the ad to that consumer’s needs and especially their brand preferences. It is the behavioral economics principle of fast and frugal decision-making…we eliminate irrelevancy from our choice set because the brain is a lazy piece of meat (Gregory Berns)…and paying attention to an ad is a choice that we make hundreds or even thousands of times per day.

So, for any of you marketing research providers who want to leapfrog your competitors at the ad attention measurement game, bringing brand preference into the analysis is the secret.