In this exclusive Q&A, Valentina Giolo, senior Southern Europe business director at DoubleVerify, outlines how marketers are currently leveraging attention, how success is being measured, and how the industry can better utilise the category as it develops.

How is attention currently being used to drive business outcomes and how will this change following identify a deprecation on desktop and mobile? 

In an industry where privacy-friendly solutions are paramount, and there is a greater content oversaturation than ever before, attention measurement is quickly becoming one of the most important ways to gauge campaign performance. Advertisers are now able to get privacy-friendly data from ads which reveal exposure and engagement—this helps them to better gauge levels of attention, and optimise their campaigns to prioritise higher performing placements, devices, ad formats, and more.

We’ve found that optimising for higher attention in this way correlates with campaign effectiveness and improved business outcomes, and we’ve worked with brands to demonstrate this. For instance, we partnered with Mondelēz to evaluate and optimise performance of a cross-platform display campaign for a popular snack brand, and the results spoke for themselves. Optimising around attention correlated with a 9% lift in brand favourability and a 8% lift in brand consideration. 

Mondelēz’s experience is not an outlier. At Vodafone Germany, focusing on attention resulted in a 43% lift in qualified traffic and a 77% lift in sales conversions. Ads with high levels of engagement (those registering strong attention metrics) drove 2.5x as much qualified traffic and sales rates than low engagement ads. Organisations of all shapes and sizes should be confident that optimising for attention can drive improved outcomes for their business. 

However, complexities around measuring attention remain. To drive these improved outcomes, brands have to be certain they have accurate, trustworthy insights to build upon. That starts by having the right solutions from the right partners—those who are able to directly observe and report on key attention signals.

How is attention currently being measured? What engagement-based metrics are available to media buyers, beyond technical standards such as viewability?

There is a wealth of engagement-based metrics available to advertisers beyond technical standards such as viewability. For instance, DV Authentic Attention® analyses over 50 data points on the exposure of a digital ad, the device a consumer uses to view the ad, and the consumer’s engagement with that ad – in real-time. 

For exposure, it is possible to evaluate an ad’s entire presentation, quantifying its intensity and prominence through metrics that include viewable time, share of screen, video completion, audibility, and more. For engagement, DV Authentic Attention analyses key user-initiated events that occur while the ad creative is displayed, including user touches, screen orientation, video playback, and audio control interactions. With these solutions, advertisers are able to benchmark top performing sites and apps, evaluate cost-effective private marketplace deals characterised by high performance and focus on tactics, ad units and creatives that deliver the most impact.

How can campaigns be optimised towards attention, on both live and post-campaign bases?

Brands can close the loop between measurement and optimisation with end-to-end solutions to drive outcomes across the marketing funnel. Brands can leverage post-bid attention measurement in near real-time through comprehensive dashboards and data feeds/reporting. Impression-level data can be sliced and diced across a multitude of campaign dimensions to help brands understand and improve performance. We are also innovating in the pre-bid optimisation space and will soon be releasing DSP-integrated attention segments to allow brands to programmatically optimise toward high attention inventory while maintaining scale. 

On post-bid measurement use cases, attention-based products are best used as always-on solutions. It can be helpful to first establish a performance baseline before beginning to make optimisations or improvements. Brands can also analyse how attention indices have trended over time to uncover changes in performance and isolate potential drivers. Global attention industry benchmarks can provide additional context into how your campaign is performing in relation to your specific industry vertical. Industry benchmarks are available for 11 different industries, including automotive, CPG, education, entertainment, financial services, health and pharmaceuticals, media and sports, retail and restaurants, technology, telecommunications, and travel.

What further industry standards or education (if any) is needed to help the market leverage attention?

As attention is still a growing category, there are a lot of different approaches to measurement in the current state. The key to developing this space is transparency and industry collaboration. On our end, we’re actively working with industry bodies such as the IAB and the MRC to help further education on different approaches and definitions when it comes to attention measurement. DoubleVerify was also recently accredited by the MRC for our full set of attention metrics, an extensive process where we provided full transparency into how we measure attention in the industry. Through collaboration and transparent partnerships, we’re optimistic that the industry can take a more holistic approach to attention, integrating it into their wider strategies for maximum impact.