As Upfronts (and Tariffs) Loom, Attention Measurement is at a Crossroads

Can you measure - and plan for - Positive Attention?

Attention has been a buzzy topic in the advertising world over the past several years. Yet you’d be hard pressed to find a common definition of the term, let alone agreement on what it should be used for.

Some of questions you hear in the market are:

• Should there be a single Attention metric?

• A whole new suite of analytics?

• Should it be for picking and choosing what ads a brand should run (i.e. creative optimization)?

• Media planning and buying?

• Is Attention something you can definitively measure - or even explicitly ‘purchase?’

Well, my partners at Rembrand (which uses AI to insert In-Scene Media consisting of virtual product placements and brand-integrated vignettes into creator and professionally produced video), are hoping to perhaps bring some clarity to the situation. In fact, Rembrand has an Attention Hypothesis, and we set out to explore it together.

Here’s the idea:

• Without first capturing a consumer’s attention, brands can’t really get very far, whether they are trying to drive awareness, lift, sales, or something else. So maximizing attention would seem to be crucial.

• But theoretically, marketers want - and need - to create positive attention for their brands, while avoiding negative attention. Generating positive attention requires a brand to get noticed - ie. getting their message out there - but they also need that message to resonate in a positive fashion.

• To understand attention what’s positive, you almost need to understand the opposite, or negative attention. When a brand is in the wrong place, at the wrong time, saying the wrong thing, that can be negative attention, and no brand wants that.

• Factors such as environment, context, format, consumer mindset, etc. really matter when trying to generate positive attention (or avoiding negative attention)

Therefore, the current approaches to measuring attention in the market— which tend to isolate what is measured to either a media exposure or the creative itself, don’t make sense, as the two are inherently intertwined. To generate positive attention, all the pieces of a marketing effort must work together.

Here’s Rembrand’s (and others’) big bet: positive attention is an excellent leading indicator of campaign success.

The more positive attention a brand can generate, the more they should realize a greater downstream effect on all the other key metrics they care about, such as brand perception, purchaseintent, and of course sales. A leading indicator gives a brand earlier signals on what the performance of their campaign will be, and gives them the chance to refine both media placement and creative messaging (in other words, you should have a much better shot at success if you start with Positive Attention).

If you can in fact track Positive or Negative Attention, that should help with early campaign optimization, and might even change how marketers make decisions for budget allocation at the start.

To me, this all sounds great (would anyone argue against positive attention?) The thing is, the importance of such a Positive Attention measure, not to mention a means of practically applying it, remains largely unproven. If you can gauge Positive Attention, and if you can actually make it actionable -that could be huge for the industry. But as we know, changing the fundamentals of a complex marketplace is never easy.

So in order to road test this hypothesis, we started with a few big questions:

• How are Attention Metrics being used in the market today?

• Do ad practitioners see all Attention as being created equal?

• In practice, do they actually see a marked difference between positive and negative attention? Can they even tell?

• Should sentiment analysis be brought into the Attention Equation?

• Ideally, if we could measure Positive Attention, couldn’t we determine whether there is indeed a correlation between crucial downstream metrics like brand lift purchase intent etc.?

• If we could make this connection -how would that change how brands plan and execute media campaigns?

To get some answers, we did two things:

• I surveyed my Next in Media newsletter readers

• I talked to a cross section of executives focused on this world (including research experts from OMG, brand execs from Haleon, top media buyers, Attention vendor CEOs, and more).

The result is this Next in Media report. Let us know what you think, and feel free to share with friends and leaders across the industry. Thanks!