Attention doesn’t move sales or other brand outcomes, studies find

Attention has been getting lots of attention from media buyers in recent years, with some studies linking measures of it to higher sales or brand preference. Such metrics are playing a growing role in media planning and even as currency in deals. But recent studies question whether attention measures actually drive sales or other outcomes important to brands. Research by Kroger Precision Marketing and the Advertising Research Foundation—which have no stake in the measurement business—have found little or no correlation between attention measures and sales lift or other marketer objectives. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs Both are impartial when it comes to whether media buyers should use attention measures. The ARF, a body made up of companies from across the ad industry and jointly overseen by the Association of National Advertisers and 4A’s, did the research as part of a multi-year project to evaluate various attention measures and whether they relate to outcomes brands want. Kroger Precision Marketing is a retail media network that gets paid regardless of whether attention scores move money across different media operations powered by the retailer's data. ‘Vanity metric’ Even so, Kroger conducted research into whether attention measures, specifically DoubleVerify’s Authentic Attention product, had an impact on incremental sales, and the answer was a resounding no. Speaking at an Advertising Week New York panel last week, Cara Pratt, senior VP of Kroger Precision Marketing, called attention “just a more modern vanity metric,” applying a phrase typically given to measures that sound more important than they are. “Yes, there’s a correlation of [sales to] viewability,” Pratt said. “Yes, there’s a correlation to click-through rate. But there is not a correlation that we found in any of the testing [between attention] and actual performance and business impact.” Kroger’s media activation team got involved in evaluating attention “just to formulate our own point of view on attention metrics,” said Shannon Hartmann, KPM’s group director of media activation and buying, in an interview. “It wasn’t necessarily to debunk anything, but we were just trying to figure out if this is a good optimization strategy. What we ultimately found is that that there wasn’t a correlation with what we define as incrementality.” Viewability, which is a prerequisite for attention, did show meaningful correlation with incremental sales, Hartmann said. DoubleVerify’s attention measure, which was used by Kroger, is the only attention product accredited by the industry’s quality arbiter—the Media Rating Council—based on a process DV brought to the MRC to evaluate and an audit finding the product adheres to the process. It’s among the more complex approaches on the market for measuring attention, incorporating 50 data points, including viewable time, share of screen, video audibility, user touches, screen orientation, video playback and audio control interactions. Kroger finding tracks with ARF Lack of correlation between DV’s attention measure and Kroger sales data isn’t an issue unique to DV’s measure. Research released by the ARF in April on other attention measures also shows little or no correlation between those measures and sales or other target outcomes. That research spanned numerous measurement firms, research approaches and outcomes measures that participating brands deemed important. The ARF study, which did not include DoubleVerify, involved 12 companies using a range of attention approaches that included eye tracking, facial coding, surveys, manual slider input from respondents, neuroscience and other biometric indicators. It also involved campaigns from marketers who wanted to track the relationship of attention to several outcomes, including brand lift and reputation, sales, awareness and reach. The ARF found almost no correlation between attention measures and brand success criteria. The highest correlation—0.12 on a scale where 0 is no correlation and 1 is complete correlation—came for firms using a combination of eye tracking and facial coding. The lowest correlation, 0.003, came for companies using only facial coding, with other methods scoring somewhere in between. That doesn’t mean attention has no impact at all, Paul Donato, the ARF’s chief research officer, pointed out. At minimum, some level of attention is necessary for ads to have any impact, he said. Donato said other factors, including creative quality, pricing, messaging and media placement, may play bigger roles in driving the outcomes marketers want. NextGen Marketing Summit Join us for a crash course on Gen Z, DTC marketing and the creator economy Register today Surveys on brand favorability and purchase intent were the outcome measure most frequently used in the study, which focused on attention measurement of ad creative, Donato said. But the outcome measure marketers are most interested in appears to be sales or conversions, based on what the ARF is seeing in the third phase of its attention research, which is now underway to evaluate the attention performance of various media platforms. DoubleVerify didn’t participate in the second-phase ARF study reported in April, but is participating in phase three, Donato said. And given its ability to gather audience and response data in real time, DV should be in a good position to correlate its attention measures with sales and conversions, he said. More news: 5 challenges facing agency leaders as 2025 looms Research support for attention The Kroger and ARF studies aside, other research, backed by attention measurement firms and agencies that work with them, have shown considerable correlation between attention measures and positive brand outcomes. One was a study released last month by Lumen Research, whose processes have been independently audited by PwC, and Havas Media Network. The study evaluated more than 9,000 campaigns, 1.8 million survey respondents and 5.6 million impressions and found attention closely correlated with outcomes, with the greatest impact on brand preference and purchase intent. The research follows another study Lumen released last year from PwC, which found that attention (as measured by Lumen eye tracking) correlated better than viewability on such measures as click-through rate and conversions. In separate research, Coca-Cola Co. in 2023 reported finding that Adelaide Research’s AU attention metric, which is based on a complex system of more than 1,000 variables, drives lifts in brand preference surveys. Generally, agencies and marketers say they use attention metrics for planning rather than as currency, including during a show of hands at the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement Summit in New York on Oct. 9. Using attention for planning may involve using projected “attentive seconds” as a factor in figuring how much media to buy in order to hit reach and frequency goals. Also read: How marketers really feel about TikTok and YouTube But the reality is that marketers also have been building attention metrics into their programmatic bidding algorithms, which ultimately affects CPMs, said Ali Manning, chief operations officer of Chalice, a custom algorithm developer. Attention is turning into a “market-driven currency,” said Marc Guldimann, CEO and co-founder of Adelaide, speaking at the CIMM Summit. Buyers may initially use attention for arbitrage, but then it reaches a point that it affects inventory value, and then buyers want guarantees around the metric, he said. “There are already a bunch of publishers out there offering guarantees using our metric and our data,” Guldimann said. “Opinions don’t matter. The market will decide what happens, and the good news is we’re already starting to see it happen.” ~ ~ ~CLARIFICATION: This story has been updated to provide additional clarity regarding DoubleVerify’s attention measure and that it does not include measurement of sales.

Attention doesn’t move sales or other brand outcomes, studies find

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