We sat down with Donia Baddou, global VP partnerships at Lumen Research, to discuss all things attention. Baddou expands on the potential benefits and challenges for advertisers when it comes to adopting these tools. She looks at the approaches being carried out by marketers around the globe, and considers what the future holds for attention in advertising.  

What are the potential benefits and challenges for advertisers adopting attention metrics?

One of the main benefits for advertisers is being able to incorporate prebid attention benchmarks at the campaign planning stage in an omnichannel way – this applies to agencies, but also SSPs and DSPs. Attention tools allow advertisers to view their campaigns from a birdseye view; they can see where their audience is engaged, and where outcomes actually come from. 

Our idea of aggregate attention – which involves catching consumers’ attention across different channels and delivering just the right amount – is what we believe drives the best outcomes. One of the challenges here is that we don’t really know frequency in real life – we only know it within specific environments, such as a Facebook campaign, on Amazon, or The Trade Desk. As an advertiser, it can be hard to connect these channels while ensuring that attention is being aggregated in a way that makes sense for your brand. It’s important for brands to consider how much attention they actually need – not all brands will need the same amount. A well-established brand that most people have heard of will require much less attention than a new brand starting up, for example. This has a ripple effect across deals set up on SSPs, what is bought on DSPs, as well as the curation of media plans. 

Another challenge for advertisers is the lack of standardisation. Additionally, there is also a lack of uniformity in how attention is used by different DSPs. Each DSP has its own algorithm and its own way of pushing certain inventory in certain areas. There is a lack of transparency, which is a roadblock to knowing whether attention is doing its job of informing and driving better outcomes. 

A challenge that we face at Lumen as a data provider, is that we don’t always have access to outcomes. This can be due to the fragmentation of how outcomes are stored or attributed. Sometimes advertisers don’t have the tools needed to store their outcomes in a way that makes it easy for analyses to be carried out. Retail media partners are an exception to this, thanks to their closed loop system. Elsewhere, it can be difficult to attribute sales for brands across different platforms. 

How is the collaboration between major DSPs and measurement solutions shaping the future of attention in advertising? 

This collaboration is making it easier for people to start using attention as a tool to inform their buying strategies and scale their campaigns. Having both the prebid and measurement solutions within one DSP is the perfect way to create the optimum level of attention needed – it’s a continuous loop that keeps getting informed with campaign information. It tells brands what the optimum level of attention is to create brand or sales lift.

This shapes a future where we have more transparency about the drivers of success for particular brands, and highlights that in certain instances, advertisers need to go with premium publishers. They are more expensive, but they deliver better attention. This is backed by data, which should make it easier for agencies and brands to convince stakeholders that buying more expensive inventory is worth it.     

What innovations or best practices are emerging from these partnerships?

We are building a different attention journey for each brand and partner – this in itself is innovation. Attention is often talked about as a monolith, with outcomes sometimes forgotten. The best practices emerging from activating the optimum level of attention through pre-bid and measuring it, are coming from advertisers learning things they didn’t know before. Many are seeing that certain channels drive much better outcomes than they had expected, and vice versa. Whilst we know that – broadly speaking – more attention is better, understanding how to drive cost-efficient and optimal attention is key.

While attention metrics are widely discussed in the UK and US, what unique approaches or insights can markets in Japan, APAC, the Middle East, and LATAM bring to the conversation? 

I see a wide enthusiasm for attention from these regions. I’m talking with local DSPs in India, Japan, Singapore, Brazil, among others – they view attention as a tool for outcomes. There is a desire to use attention at a systemic level, beyond seeing it as a measurement tool for one campaign. They see it as their job to contribute to the education of the market. Of course, different approaches work for different markets, and each local area needs to work out what works best for them. 

How can regional differences inform a more global understanding of attention?

When it comes to forming a global understanding of attention, it’s essential to analyse markets all over the world. No single market can inform a global understanding. In order to gain this, Lumen Research has carried out studies across the globe to determine whether content consumption in different languages could affect consumer attention. The page of a premium publisher in say Japan, China, or any Arabic-speaking country looks completely different to a Western one. We wanted to find out whether reading direction or a language’s alphabet/characters, for example, would affect attention. In fact, we found the variance to be tiny. But this kind of research allows us to be much more accurate. Although the variance is not highly significant – it’s important that we know what it is, and that we have taken measures to verify it. What's more, it provides reassurance to global users that their market has been taken into consideration, and not brushed over with a blanket approach. 

As advertisers increasingly seek more reliable and actionable metrics, how is the industry working to meet this demand? 

The industry is working towards improving accountability, through driving collaboration between their key partners including attention measurement, brand and sales lift, and marketing-mix-modeling. I think there are many companies in our industry who are doing a fantastic job of this. Additionally, the work that will come from current industry initiatives, by the IAB and The Attention Council, for example, should be very helpful. 

Moving forwards, transparency remains essential. As an industry, we need to be honest about what can be achieved, as well as what can’t. On the more technical side, visual attention must include proprietary eye-tracking data, and this data has to be recent, verified, and audited. Beyond reliable metrics, it’s about having an attention category with certain types of metrics, and not trying to include certain tools within attention when they shouldn’t be. This is an interesting time in which many new tools and technologies are emerging, but we need to use them in a way that makes sense.