Marketers, You Have 9 Minutes to Earn Attention

The useful part

Advertising HQ brings the people shaping advertising, commerce, and media together for four days of unscripted conversations and after-hours connections. The event brought marketers together to explore what attention data can reveal about whether an ad was actually watched. TVision's Yan Liu Corey Presley A closer look at who's watching Yan Liu, CEO of TVision, opened the event by discussing the gap between TV exposure and attention.

How it works

• Liu pointed out that viewers are often in the room without watching, and sometimes an ad plays to an empty room.
• Using another example, Liu showed that the same ad drew more attention alongside sci-fi and sports content than news and reality shows.
• For marketers, that means where an ad appears can affect how much attention it earns, even when the creative stays the same.
• Attention fell as the score widened, then rose when the game became more competitive in the third quarter.
• The example illustrated how both the content on screen and the viewing environment can affect attention—raising a question for marketers:

What to take from it

Of that time, approximately 24.5 minutes are spent with advertising, and only nine minutes represent actual attention to those ads. In one study, TVision looked at hundreds of campaigns across 20 different industries, and found each percentage-point increase in attention corresponded to nearly a 1% increase in ad awareness. The second half drew more attention than the first, which Liu described as unusual for a football game.

Example or evidence

• "When you're building awareness, you need to build awareness that lasts," Tarraf explained.
• consumer spends 213.5 minutes a day—nearly four hours—with television and streaming video, he shared.
• Bahri said she had come in skeptical that attention would correlate with action, but Liu's presentation left her intrigued by the possibility.
• Tarraf was also intrigued, wondering whether an ad interrupting a program caused viewers to check out or whether their attention carried over to the ad.

Details worth keeping

This post was created in partnership with Viant As TV and streaming audiences become increasingly fragmented, understanding what happens between an ad being served and a viewer paying attention is becoming a more important part of evaluating media. In these instances, a completed view measures playback, but not attention. Liu also stressed that context affected attention.

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