NBCU’s Kelly Abcarian marshalled the call for revolutionizing opportunities in the measurement space and challenged attendees to drive change by questioning how they consume content, how they connect with that content, and ultimately, why, with current technology’s available options, is measurement still the same.
One of the new insights revealed at the ARF’s Attention 2023 conference: Providers of “attention” metrics use a variety of measures.
Conversations with Great Minds gathered two of the 2022 Great Mind Award winners, Martin Renaud, winner of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Award, and Dr. Duane Varan, winner of the Erwin Ephron Demystification Award, for one-on-one interviews that profile their individual approaches to effective research in advertising.
In this session, Aarti Bhaskaran (Snap) and Priscilla Aydin (OMG) presented their partnered research that investigated: the channels, platforms and motivations Gen Z utilizes to consume content; Gen Z’s expectations from brands as well as their receptivity to different types of messaging; how brands can effectively converse and plan for GenZ, including selecting the right platforms/media, cultural moments and developing authentic messaging.
Over the past two decades, Duane Varan of MediaScience has conducted more than 100 studies about video advertisements that have interactivity features. “We know that interactivity is physiologically more arousing; people are more engaged, and that translates into better memory,” he said. “So, we know that interactive ads work, but now the question is: Why do they work, (and not) what we can do, but what we should do.”
This study used neuroscience-based methods to explore if AR experiences—content as well as ads —provide more immersive engagement than other media.
This presentation described the findings of a major ethnographic study (conducted in Germany, Austria and Switzerland) that compared the impact of video advertising on various platforms: TV, BVOD (VOD provided by commercial broadcasters), YouTube and Facebook. The study used eye-tracking devices to assess attention to ads and unaided recall as impact measure.
Dentsu conducted multi-phase research on visual attention to advertising in the U.S. and U.K. across channels, platforms, formats and devices. For digital ads, they worked with Lumen, and for television ads, they worked with TVision. There were two components to the research–exploring how much attention consumers pay to advertising “in the wild” and exploring attention to ads in a structured design with forced exposure to pre-selected ads for varying amounts of time. They learned that, for example, uplift in outcomes was stronger for viewing of four seconds of a six-second ad than for four seconds of a 20-second ad. This research has provided Dentsu with an extensive data set on attention and an understanding of the drivers of attention that can be applied to future plans.
In 2022 the ARF Cultural Effectiveness Council conducted 18 in-depth interviews (IDIs) with senior research executives via Teams and Zoom to understand how the 'Future of Qual' would evolve with rapidly changing qualitative methods and the urgency across industries to understand cultural shifts. Council members Chloe Stromberg of LinkedIn and Anne Kaplan of Paramount, who worked on this project, presented what the Council learned from these interviews. Their presentation was followed by a panel discussion with a mix of Council members (Tony D’Andrea of General Mills and Tristan Marra of GLAAD) and culture-savvy researchers outside the Council (Danie Hemsley of Cassandra and Kendra Clarke, former Senior Director, Head of Experience Research and Design, Core Technologies at Twitter), led by Council Co-Chair Janelle James of Ipsos. The presentation and discussion focused on how qualitative research is evolving, how it can overcome its challenges —particularly those related to diversity and cultural understanding—and best practices for conducting qual research, moving forward.
Member Only AccessMax Kalehoff of Realeyes discussed what can happen when you manage for creative attention to further bridge the gap between media and creative. Realeyes uses a model based on NCS’s model on contributors of campaign outcomes to calculate how media and creative attention lead to quality exposures and brand impact. Realeyes also leans into facial coding via webcam to measure human attention on video creative—how it is captured, retained and encoded. To apply the creative efficiency to a nominal CPM, Realeyes ran a simulation study of 42 YouTube ads across seven CPG cleaning brands. They found that creative efficiency determines up to 3X delta in quality exposure share. The study also identified what moves the needle on creative attention and efficiency in CPG.