Served But Not Seen. The Invisibility Problem.

Media Planning for Attention, Part 1

“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of consumers. Hence, a wealth of information created a poverty of attention.” – Herbert Simon, winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Economics

First, the good news. The attention span of humans is not getting shorter. It’s been what it is for millennia. It will continue to be what it is for a very, very long time. What has changed rapidly over the past twenty years is the amount of information we can distract ourselves with.

Last time we talked about finding the most effective media mix. We’re doing kind of the same thing from a slightly different angle. This week, we’re exploring attention — why it matters and why you need a media team that knows what they’re doing.

Here’s the bad news: Dull media costs US advertisers billions of dollars per year. Not dull creative, dull media. We’ve talked about the obscene cost of dull advertising before. Dull media is any channel that underdelivers on both passive and active attention.

According to a recent report by Dr. Karen Nelson-Field, Peter Field (no relation as far as we know) and Adam Morgan, “Around 75% of MRC-accredited digital inventory receives zero active attention. That means the vast majority of the ads you invest in fail to deliver the value you expect.”

(Dr. Karen Nelson-Field is a media scientist and a former professor/researcher at Ehrenberg-Bass. Peter Field is the father (okay, co-parent) of marketing effectiveness. Adam Morgan is the founder of eatbigfish, a strategic consultancy for challenger brands.)

This is an issue with ad platforms themselves. Part of the problem is the approved definition of “a view.” If at least half of the pixels of your ad are seen for at least one second, that’s considered a view. That’s not a lot of pixels and not a lot of time.

2.5 seconds of active attention seems to be the minimum amount of time it takes for a message to encode into someone’s memory, and only 5% of digital ads get more than 2.5 seconds.

(Before we go any further, you might be asking yourself, “Wait, what about my ads and my brand?” If Milly, Peter and Maurice are running your media plan, you have nothing to worry about.)

What’s the difference between active and passive attention? If you’re totally engaged in, say, a conversation, you’re paying active attention. If you’ve got a podcast on in the background while you’re playing sudoku, you’re paying passive attention to the podcast. Okay, you’re probably switching active attention between the podcast and sudoku. And your cat. And your phone. Humans do a lot of switching. That’s not evidence of shortened attention spans. It’s just how we’re wired. Here’s the thing …

Without attention, active or passive, there is no memory. Sounds obvious. It’s really important.

So how do we measure attention? For this report, Nelson-Field, Field and Morgan looked at 114,899 biometrically confirmed ad views across 190 campaigns from 164 unique brands in 46 categories across CTV, linear TV, social, gaming, and web environments. They were looking for both the long-term ROI effects and the short-term advertising strength (STAS) of these platforms.

What is short-term ad strength or STAS? According to the report, “Unlike traditional metrics based on recall or perception, STAS reflects real-world influence and spontaneous brand conversion through a simulated buying moment (a virtual store). Itʼs also effective at capturing the effects of passive attention, which is important given how much advertising is consumed this way.” In other words, it is a measure of how effective an ad is in the short term and a proxy for sales.

A media plan with a STAS score of 100 means it had no effect above baseline. Ads with scores above 100 show a measurable impact on conversion.

The report shows that on average, non-dull media delivers better on both long-term ROI and short-term efficiency. Extremely dull media has much less of an impact.

(Short-Term Efficiency per $1 Spend is short-term ROI; it’s a measure of immediate sales results based on media spend. As you can see, non-dull media plans are better.)

Passive attention does deliver positive brand and business effects, so it’s okay if your ad is on in the background. Active attention, however, is 7x more impactful. Also, the longer someone pays active attention to an ad, the longer they remember it. According to the report, active attention is better at building mental availability and, over time, market share growth.

Great. Where’s the problem?

Understanding the Invisibility Problem in Digital Advertising

Digital ads in particular sometimes have a “served but not seen” problem. They’re often ignored. They get scrolled past too quickly to have an impact. Or they’re buried on websites no one ever visits on purpose. Nelson-Field makes the argument that CPM is a terrible metric — she calls it “cost per meaningless thousand” — because advertisers are often paying far too much for media that fails to deliver on attention.

To be clear, there are fantastically effective and efficient digital placements. And if it were a matter of “you get what you pay for,” that would be one thing. The problem is advertisers often get a hell of a lot less than they pay for.

Let’s take a quick look at the difference between “non-dull” and “extremely dull” media plans.

“Non-dull” weights media spend on CTV, linear TV and premium social, while “extremely dull” media plans spend nearly 73% of their budget on non-premium social media.

Non-premium social channels are fast-scrolling environments where thumbs are flying and ads sail by quickly. The ads themselves are competing with user-generated content. That means ads are served, but they’re barely seen. Is that bad? Not necessarily, especially for larger brands with distinctive brand assets and plenty of mental availability. You see the McDonald’s arches fly by, you know what the ad is for. If you’re a smaller brand and your brand assets aren’t yet distinctive, well, that’s a problem.

Premium social channels, on the other hand, are channels where the creative is seen for longer with more time for active attention. This includes YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, Snapchat Spotlight, etc.

Are all social media channels “bad?” Of course not. As always, it depends.

Next time, we’ll compare “The Eye-watering Cost of Dull” with a research paper we looked at a few weeks ago called “The Effects of Advertising Media Channel Combinations on Brand Performance.”

Where do they seem to line up? Where do they differ? And what does any of this mean for you?

See you then!

Sources!

“The Cost of Dull Media – Dr Karen Nelson-Field
The Attention Economy and How Media Works: Simple Truths for Marketers – Dr. Karen Nelson-Field
Interactions between attention and memory – PubMed