Attention and brand profit are strongly linked, new study finds

Attention is more than a vanity metric, at least according to a study being released today by Lumen Research in cooperation with consulting firm Ebiquity and WPP’s Essence Mediacom media agency. The new study shows a nearly complete correlation (0.98 where 1 is complete correlation and 0 is no correlation) between the number of attentive minutes per thousand ad impressions delivered by a media type and the incremental profit generated for brands. NextGen Marketing Summit Join us for a crash course on Gen Z, DTC marketing and the creator economy Register today It’s a marked contrast to recent research from Kroger Precision Marketing and the Advertising Research Foundation showing little or no correlation between attention metrics and sales or other brand outcome measures. Kroger’s research showed no correlation with its attention measure, and the ARF, looking at a dozen attention measures applied to ad creative found, at best, a 0.12 correlation with any brand outcome. The studies were done in different ways. Lumen data wasn’t evaluated either by Kroger or the ARF in those studies, which were more limited in scope than the analysis that the attention tracking firm did based on data collected and analyzed by Ebiquity. The new study builds on research released earlier this year by Ebiquity and WPP’s Essence Mediacom, Mindshare, Wavemaker and Gain Theory. That was based on marketing mix modeling for campaigns from 141 brands covering about $2.3 billion in media spending in the U.K. The study looked at the relationship between media choices for campaigns and incremental brand profit. Overall it found a profit return of $1.87 per media dollar invested on average. TV fared best, accounting for 55% of incremental profit but only 44% of investment. Media measurement blog Tracking TV, social and digital updates Click here The new study brings Lumen’s attention data into the equation, by applying averages from prior research about the attention performance of various media types. It’s also based on outlay and cost data that came from a combination of Ebiquity media audits and Lumen research for brand clients. The study looks at the correlation between what Ebiquity’s analytics show to be incremental profit return on dollar (or pound) investment for the brands and Lumen’s attentive minutes per thousand impressions (APM) measure. It only analyzes six broad media types. Lumen CEO Mike Follett said he’d eventually like to see more granular research that incorporates more specific media placements within channels. ‘Not all reach is equal’ “We’ve got hundreds and hundreds of media and hundreds of formats,” Follett said. “When you add all of that in, and if they could give us that level of granularity, I’m sure the [correlation] will come down a little bit. But I think this is really important, because it’s such an amazingly strong correlation.” “This data is another strong piece of evidence supporting the theory that not all reach is equal, said Richard Kirk, chief strategy officer at EssenceMediacom, in a statement. “Increasingly we can see that reach data needs to be adjusted with media quality metrics, in order to re-establish the link between reach and outcomes that has been eroded by fragmentation in the last 20 years.” While the link between attention and incremental profit in the study is based on Lumen data, Follett said he believes attention data from Karen Nelson-Field’s Amplified Intelligence or GumGum would show a similar correlation. “Both of those companies adopt a very similar methodology to Lumen, and I bet you get very similar results there,” Follett said. Lumen is also participating in the next phase of ARF research on attention measurement as it’s applied to media (as opposed to the application to creative in the last phase), which will look at how various attention measures correlate with sales and other outcomes. The study being released today is based on Ebiquity marketing mix modeling that requires months to process and analyze data, Follet said. So it’s more applicable to planning allocation by broad channel mix than to real-time buying of specific media.

Attention and brand profit are strongly linked, new study finds

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