Ebiquity devises attention metric for meaningful comparisons between TV and social

Do we have your attention?

• Billed as a first of its kind method for making meaningful comparisons between mediums, the metric is likely to give advertisers cause to sit up and take notice, with the promise of more realistic models of campaign effectiveness.

• To achieve this Ebiquity folds its media cost data with specific attention data for digital advertising and TV supplied by Lumen and TVision respectively.

• This combines the average likelihood that a person will see a particular type of ad, with the average attention span to derive an easily understood cost per thousand seconds of attention figure or aCPM.

• In dismantling the silos that have traditionally walled off the two mediums, Ebiquity aims to provide a singular metric for quantifying advertising effectiveness across both mediums.

TV loses its lustre

• Driving the need for change is the slipping halo on TV’s shoulders as advertisers come to terms with the fact that they can no longer reach mass audiences at scale by running TV ad campaigns alone.

• This is the inevitable consequence of an explosion in digital technologies and the proliferation of new platforms, all of which conspire to distract and redirect consumers from more traditional media outlets.

• Addressing this shift directly, Ebiquity, Lumen and TVision have responded with an updated system of measurement that aims to piece this fractured and incoherent mediascape back together into something more coherent and tractable for advertisers.

In their own words

• Hammering home the importance of a one-size-fits-all metric, Martin Vinter, Ebiquity’s director of media, said: “The challenge advertisers are facing in the increasingly digital marketing ecosystem is capturing and holding consumers’ attention. And yet, until recently, the role of attention rarely featured in how advertising impact is measured. For too long the industry has been focused on performance metrics like impressions or CPM.”

• Yan Liu, chief executive and co-founder of TVision, continues: “When advertisers plan media campaigns based on attention data, they focus their ad spend on opportunities where they can reach engaged viewers who are actually in the room, watching the TV, attending to the medium. Ads work when people pay attention to them, and, as a result, they enjoy higher levels of brand recall.”

• Offering the Lumen Research perspective founder Mike Follett, principal author of the report, added: “Understanding the true cost of attention across media is a good first step, but the problem for marketers is that the attention of consumers with money to spend is getting harder and harder for advertisers to secure. This report shows how, for the first time, we are bringing together media cost data and attention data – for both digital advertising and TV – to create this powerful, new, composite metric.”

A solution founded on partnership

• By drawing together the skill sets of Ebiquity, Lumen and TVision, the Challenge of Attention report builds a one-stop calculation for comparing the cost and impact of channels such as TV, digital video and digital display.