All Views Are Not Created Equal: Why Attention Matters

For years, digital advertising has relied on viewability as a fundamental indicator of an ad's potential. While viewability remains a valuable metric, confirming an ad's initial opportunity to be seen, it merely scratches the surface. Real advertising effectiveness demands more than just this technical eligibility; it requires a metric that offers consistent measurement across channels, provides instant feedback, and correlates directly with concrete business outcomes. That crucial metric is attention. 

The Impact of Attention

Higher attention leads to higher brand recall and stronger purchase intent, which is reflected in your ROAS. Therefore, advertisers should focus on buying attention rather than impressions to eliminate wasteful spending and boosts campaign effectiveness. 

So how do we do it? 

Human attention is fundamentally about cognitive focus and active engagement. Measuring this engagement at scale, meanwhile, presents some challenges. While various methods exist, each serves different purposes and comes with specific limitations for direct, campaign-level measurement: 

• Neurological studies: Arguably the best at capturing human attention as it measures conscious and subconscious brain activity. However, it’s more suited for controlled lab studies, making it hard to scale. 

• Eye-tracking: A Good proxy for cognitive focus. It is easier to scale but it gives no insights for audio. 

• Survey-based studies: The classical approach. Scalable and flexible in design but self-reported, and the risk that comes with that. 

While these methods offer valuable insights, the persistent challenge remains: how do we measure true attention directly and consistently across live advertising campaigns? 

The Solution: Data Modeling 

The answer lies in sophisticated data modeling, particularly when these models are trained on high-quality qualitative data. By leveraging a multitude of technical signals, such as user interactions, scroll depth, and time spent on content, a well-trained model can accurately predict human attention with high precision. This breakthrough enables comprehensive attention planning, optimization, and reporting at scale. 

The good news is that this is possible now, and an industry standard for attention measurement is coming together, creating clarity. This will bring a lot of positive changes for advertisers, who will now better understand the fundamental aspects of attention, as well as how to measure and act on it precisely. 

Are you ready to discuss how to buy attention and optimize your campaigns on several aspects? Contact your local specialist 

• Denmark: Siham Abdulkadir, Sr. Programmatic Specialist at [email protected] 

• Finland:  Mauri Kolehmainen, Programmatic Specialist at [email protected] 

• Norway: Maja Wirum, Senior Programmatic Specialist at [email protected] 

• Sweden: Elias Bjerkeryd, Product Director at [email protected]