ARF Attention Phase 2 Report Overturns Widely Held Assumptions

In the second phase 12 of these companies participated in an analysis of the degree to which their pretesting of video ads focusing on attention and in some cases also emotion provided measurements of the creative that agree with the advertiseramp8217s assessment of the inmarket business success of these ads This was the question do the attention pretests agree with the actual inmarket results in categorizing ads as worthy of running or notPhase three which is now beginning will analyze the validity of the use of these varied attentional methods in filtering out lowattention media placementsThe results just released for phase two were shocking to many people What they show is that attention measures are not the best practice for deciding which ads to run or not runIn the current industry culture a vast amount of prior industry learning has been ignored In that environment it has been widely assumed that the key thing to measure is whether an ad is going to get attention and the rest would take care of itself This assumption has been shattered by the data Iamp8217m about to summarize from the ARF phase two reportAfter that summary Iamp8217ll turn back the clock to reveal what we knew all along amp8211 those of us who had not ignored previous industry learning from the ARF This will show that the phase two results ought not have been so surprisingSummary of Phase Two ResultsIt had been hoped that the 12 different suppliers would exhibit convergent validity amp8211 in other words that the suppliers would tend to agree with each other However not much convergence was seen For one set of 4 ads for one of the test brands all of which followed the amp8220problemsolutionamp8221 format there was a reasonable degree of agreement Across all 32 ads in the study however this was not the case Two suppliers used survey methods and their results had more convergence than the others Two others using both eye tracking and facial emotion coding also showed a bit more agreement with each otherWhen secondbysecond analysis was compared across the length of each test ad most suppliers tended to have a amp8220signatureamp8221 curve pattern that appeared for every ad testedamp160but which was quite a different curve pattern for one supplier vs another This suggests instrument bias ie the instrument has more effect on the data than the stimulus doesThe advertisers had shared with ARF but not with the attention measurers the degree of marketplace success of each ad on a fourpoint scale The advertisers also shared their Key Performance Indicator KPI which in most cases was salesbrand growth with the ARF and with the suppliers The R2 between supplier measures and the advertiseramp8217s ground truth was 012 for the supplier with the highest scoreWhere sales was the KPI and the supplier claimed predictivity of sales effect the R2 were 00007 for one supplier and 0004 for the other supplier This shows no relationship between attentionemotion and sales effectPrevious ARF studies more about them in a moment had shown that the most important thing marketers need from ad pretesting is the ability to detect an outstandingly successful ad Yet none of the suppliers identified the one most successful ad in the study as judged by the advertiser all suppliers undervalued it between 20 and 70It was also learned long ago that marketers also need to be able to detect the ads which would be the most wasted money Yet in the ARF phase two report all but one supplier overestimated a lowperforming ad between 60 and 360 while the remaining supplier underestimated it by 96The study had many other important conclusions including far higher attention levels for TV vs digital a fascinating analysis of humor in ads and many other subjects which make the actual report a mustread for marketers ARF Members may retrieve the full report hereWhy The ARF Lessons Of The Past Must Be LearnedWhat are the implications First and foremost advertisers must remember the learnings of the past and pretest ads using persuasion liking recall type measures as well as attention attention cannot be assumed to be a proxy for all of these things Attention in itself does not ensure sales effect Persuasion and ad liking together definitely do ensure sales effect if there is adequate store distribution shelf facings competitive pricing and sufficient ad spend And a naamp239ve supplier who thinks that the way you measure persuasion and ad liking doesnamp8217t matter and they can concoct any old way of doing it that is wrongIn the 1960s the ARF Model showed that an ad had to achieve exposure communication and persuasion in order to cause incremental sales The ARF Model was updated in 2003 by Erwin Ephron Jim Spaeth Bill Moran Denman Maroney Phil Brandon and myself and one of the things we added was Ad Attentiveness just above Ad Exposure and just below Ad Communication and Ad PersuasionIn recent times essentially in the last seven years Attention has become the widely assumed surrogate for every level in the ARF ModelIn the 3980s and into the early 3990s the ARF had conducted the ARF Copy Research Validity Project CRVP This was a comparison of 35 different metrics to see which ones had the greatest ability to predict which of two ads for the same brand produced higher sales effect as measured by Behaviorscan We recommend that ARF Members ask ARF for the relevant documents that show not only the CRVP report but also the followon work that ARF published in its Journal of Advertising Research Together this body of work establishes that persuasion and ad liking are the two best indicators of likely sales impact of a video ad and that certain ways of getting at these two dimensions are better than others14 of the 35 measures achieved over 90 ability to discern which of two commercials for the same brand would have the higher sales effect Not a single one of the 35 measures was attention In the 80s and 90s attention did not seem to the worldamp8217s finest advertising research minds to be worth inclusion in this closetoamilliondollar study which took years to completeFive of the 14 winning measures were composites based on two separate dimensions orthogonal to one another This supports the idea of combining attention with some other proven measure of predicting advertising sales effect amp8211 for example the one I invented called RMT Resonance Happy to bolster the attention suppliers in this wayCompare the over 90 ability to predict sales effect based on persuasion and ad liking with the generally lower than 12 shown for attentionemotion in the table above from the ARF Phase Two Attention Measurement Validation StudyWhat this reminds us is that when pretesting ads yes include attention but emphasize the rigor with which you measure persuasion and ad liking as more important than attention If you measure that way and detect an ad that is high attention but low persuasion andor ad liking donamp8217t put too much media investment into that adWhat shall we see in Phase Three when attention is applied to media selectionI think attention will fare noticeably better in that application As Karen NelsonField has said digital contexts generally limit attention to 12 seconds for scrolling feeds and 35 seconds for YouTube amp8220Skip in 54321amp8221 adsThis would cause some marketers to shy away from those types of contexts entirely whereas today the bulk of marketers have collectively invested an annual 600 billion globally in digital which is mostly in shortattention contexts Given their overinvestment in those situations itamp8217s understandable that attention has become the tunnel vision winner for todayamp8217s marketers most of whom grew up on social media and donamp8217t quite see that their bias is shortening the lifespan of their brands and perhaps at some point of their own careersCover image source The Advertising Research Foundation ARFPosted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership selfpublishing platformClick the social buttons to share this story with colleagues and friendsThe opinions expressed here are the author39s views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillageorgMyersBizNet

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ARF Attention Phase 2 Report Overturns Widely Held Assumptions

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Bill Harvey

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ARF Attention Phase 2 Report Overturns Widely Held Assumptions

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