It’s time to pay attention to OOH attention
A decade after launching viewability metrics, the Media Ratings Council is moving to standardise attention metrics globally. That means buying media based on attention metrics will scale faster and clients across the globe need to get well acquainted with attention which looks beyond legacy metrics that focus too much on eyeballs alone.
My latest work into human attention has been focused on the out-of-home media category, to better understand how the channel can deliver attention, as well looking at how it stacks up to other mediums in our modelling, for a holistic view of the attention landscape. For the last two and a half years, I’ve been working closely with the team at QMS to develop, build and execute a study that looked at human attention in OOH environments. And together we presented our findings at SXSW Sydney.
The results? Well, they are fascinating, but when you look a little deeper, they make perfect sense.
Dr Karen Nelson-Field presenting at SXSW Sydney
Why will attention be key to the future of advertising and clients/agencies leaning further into it in the future?
Across the globe, agencies and clients have been watching and leaning into attention as a media metric because not all reach is created equal. And it is critical that we continue to look beyond legacy media metrics that are one-dimensional. One of our most easily answered industry questions is what value does reach really hold if an ad cannot be seen? As former Unilever CMO, Keith Weed quite aptly put it: “Unviewable ads are like having your billboards underwater.”
The opportunity to see an ad though is clearly an important first step in audience connection. However, most current media measurements do not provide clarity on whether a human is actually watching. In other words, an opportunity to see, is not the same as seeing. Clients need to invest in the media channels where they know their communication can be seen. Because in this new era in media, the ability to consider multiple dimensions when planning and buying, especially now in out-of-home, is real and available for clients right now. So that leads us to why should you pay attention?
Well, because without attention, there can be no impact.
Attention has been proven to correlate strongly with mental availability, advertising effectiveness and driving brand growth. All obviously desirable outcomes for brands, and something that together with QMS, we now have the ability to look at across OOH for the very first time.
The complexities of measuring attention in OOH means we had to expand our methodology
The big thing to point out here is that this attention study looks at actual human behaviour, in real situations, looking at actual billboards and street furniture. Not AI. Not simulations being showcased in a theatre. Real humans moving past real OOH formats. And this is phase one of the study, which only looks at pedestrians. We are not looking at attention from those looking at billboards within cars. That is for another time.
The methodology we devised saw a remarkable 1.23 million humans measured, making it the single largest sample collected globally by Amplified Intelligence.
The study ran across Melbourne, Brisbane, and the Gold Coast, and encompassed nine locations across two formats – digital large format billboards and street furniture. The clients involved in the study spanned 11 major advertising categories.
The other interesting point to note here is that while the methodology was incredibly complex, the principles to how attention is measured across other channels remain the same meaning active, passive and non-attention can now be measured across multiple channels including OOH. Having a universal measure of attention is crucial for the success of attention metrics in the ad ecosystem.
Dr Karen Nelson-Field presenting at SXSW Sydney
The results surprised us, but only at first….
At first, the results seemed too good to be true. But our methodology and sample are sound, and when you understand OOH (like QMS do), the results make sense and line up with findings in our other studies. There is a lot to unpack in this study and I encourage everyone to speak to the QMS team to get the full results, but to give you a taste of what the topline findings are:
- Across all sites in the study, we observed an average of 12 seconds of total attention, with a 40/60 active/passive contribution across pedestrian audiences.
- Further to this, we saw an average of 5.5 seconds of active attention across the sites tested, which is great news given active attention is becoming increasingly scarce. 5.5 seconds is also significant as we’ve proven 2.5 seconds of active attention is the threshold to potentially commit new information to long term memory.
And this is all to do with the rare relationship between time-in-view and active attention.
Let me explain that a little further.
On most digital formats, attention is fleeting, not sustained – so your attention to the ad decays super-fast. Even if an ad is in view – it’s not being viewed, it is being avoided. Think of a display ad as you read a story on a news site. It’s in view – but your attention is on reading the content.
But this is different for out-of-home formats where attention to the ad is less fleeting, and more sustained – so the attention decay is slower. What this means for out-of-home is that as time in view increases, so does active attention.
We also found that each site type has a predictable active/passive attention ratio. This is good because active and passive attention serves different purposes depending on the campaign and brand size.
For example, active attention is more effective for campaigns introducing new information or for smaller brands with lower awareness compared to larger competitors. Passive attention is valuable for reinforcement campaigns and larger brands with established messaging and distinctive brand assets. This is really important because the site types used, combined with the predictable active/passive ratio, means the data we have can be used at scale across like type sites within our portfolio. Essentially, the way the methodology and models have been constructed are built to scale.
So what this now means is that depending on the campaign objectives or the brand itself, we can now help clients better plan their OOH campaigns by placing them on locations and formats depending on where they sit within the flywheel.
Why is this research at the forefront of global campaign innovation?
These results show OOH can play an expanded role in communication strategies and presents opportunities for advertisers to further optimise the way they use the medium. As a channel with stable levels of both active and passive attention, this data can now be applied for planning and buying, allowing brands to cost effectively leverage the attention flywheel to drive strong brand outcomes.
This type of study is not something that you usually see being undertaken by a single publisher, so I must applaud the QMS team for commissioning this study as it will have a big impact on OOH across the industry.
What’s next for attention? Both for OOH and media in general?
A study as unique as this is exciting! It allows for a true holistic view of the attention landscape. The data from this global first study will now be available in our Amplified Intelligence planning tools, which gives us another key piece to the attention puzzle. But this is just phase one and whilst it gives us a strong insight into how audiences view and consume OOH compared to other media, there is still more to uncover.
Together with the QMS team we are excited to dive deeper into more formats, more markets and more transport modes to demonstrate how OOH formats can deliver better results and outcomes for clients in their media planning and buying.
Article by Dr Karen Nelson-Field, founder and CEO of Amplified Intelligence.
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CONTENT SPONSORED BY QMS | Article by Dr Karen Nelson-Field
I used to drive past outdoor ads and see the whole ad as it wasnt digital, now most of them have lots of ads that rotate so I’ll often not actually see a particular ad as it’s only on screen for 1/5 of the time.
Non-digital outdoor ads still just show the one ad the whole time.
Does this make the non-digital ad 5 times more expensive?
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