On September 21, 2022, speakers from Kantar, Meta, Next Media Partners, Snap, VMLY&R, Wunderman Thompson Intelligence and XRGuild shared insights into how the Metaverse will impact marketers. They discussed implications for interoperability as well as paid advertising.
The ARF’s Paul Donato interviewed Snap’s Gaz Alushi about the impact of privacy-centric ecosystems on measurement and the consumer. From his perspective of working within a walled garden, Gaz speaks to how Snap puts the consumer first without conflating tracking with measurement in capturing the impact of an ad campaign. Paul and Gaz also discussed the industry’s response to privacy regulations, working with first- and third-party data, the MRC’s cross-platform standards, and how Snap works with partners across the spectrum to measure its audiences.
Stephen DiMarco (Tubular Labs) moderated this discussion on the second day of the conference with the anchor commentators who shared their perspectives on what they heard and what it means.
An impressive body of work is building in attention measurement. The three winning-papers sessions preceding this panel revealed a work in progress with shared goals as well as differences in approaches. Moderator Earl Taylor of the ARF’s MSI division asked the speakers about their views on barriers to the process, and opportunities for further improving attention measures.
Tristan Webster and Kenneth Wilbur showcased their most recent collaborative work examining attention and frequency in advertising: the impact of multiple exposures on people’s attention to TV ads. They applied CTV data which TVision has collected natively in the field to provide insight into the long-examined question, “Is there an optimal frequency for TV ads?”, but more granularly: “What is happening in the media environment while viewers see ads, and how does that affect their attention?”
Realeyes uses software solutions for measuring human attentional and emotional response to advertising. Max Kalehoff explained the importance of attention measurement as a gauge of brand performance. He urged companies, particularly those with latent sales, to incorporate it into their business models.
This presentation focused on the implications of attention for advertisers, and how we can start applying these insights from a planning and buying perspective. Although viewability has become a proxy for attention, just because an ad is considered viewable does not mean eyes on ads. Viewability isn’t necessarily a true indication of attention – it can be quite arbitrary, and we need to go beyond that to the better and more accurate representation of those natural attention behaviors.
As consumer concerns about privacy are growing and legislators are responding by introducing legal restrictions, marketers are focusing on contextual targeting (instead of cookies) to make their advertising more effective. Research by Integral Ad Science (IAS) has shown that the growth of contextual targeting is not only being embraced by marketers, but also welcomed by consumers: they prefer ads that match the content they are viewing – which makes them more relevant to them.
This presentation, based on research conducted jointly by Activision Blizzard and Alter, looks at the power of gaming with emphasis on ROI. Jonathan provided the background of esports, which he defined as professional gaming organized across teams or leagues with a range of game types. Professional e-gaming has grown rapidly to 436 million global viewers as of 2020 and is a highly fragmented marketplace.
The speaker, Marc Guldimann, founder of Parsec Media and co-founder Adelaide, is also a co-founder of The Attention Council. In his presentation he explained why he and the Council are promoting the use of attention metrics to help advertisers place ads into media environments that drive superior performance.