Attention Is Not Enough Without Persuasion

amp160amp160Long ago David Ogilvy put down attention as something he could achieve with little effort His hypothetical example to explain his position was an ad showing a gorilla wearing a jock strap This would garner lots of attention but the end result for the brand was unlikely to be acquisition of new customersPeter Drucker and Byron Sharp each in their own way have taught marketers that nothing is more important than gaining new customersDigital brought hundreds of thousands of new people into the marketing business who have no knowledge of anything that might have happened in marketing in the 20th CenturyIn fact the word amp8220persuasionamp8221 is rarely used today even by people who learned it in the prior century Just as a quick review the word persuasion in the context of advertising and marketing means to change the predisposition of a person to buy or not to buy a given brandIn WWII many of the people who went into advertising after the war helped the war effort by studying how to change other sorts of predispositions At the time this was called propaganda warfare by some and psychological warfare by others Hitler had shown the world just how powerful persuasion could beAt Grey Advertising in the Mad Men era Al Achenbaum and Russ Haley proved that attitude shift the term they preferred to quotpersuasionquot was just as measurable as dayafter ad recall and much more correlated with subsequent purchase behavior Frank Gromer a couple of years later at Foote Cone ampamp Belding replicated their results across all forty brands he studied These pioneers changed the industry from using dayafter ad recall as the primary measure of an adamp8217s effectiveness to attitude shift which later came to be called persuasionRemembering none of this todayamp8217s industry has jumped on attention as the key quality to be improved by new media selection practices This is a good thing and can only help However as Adelaide founder CEO Marc Guldimann has oft pointed out optimizing for attention would not necessarily maximize other Key Performance Indicators KPIs and Adelaide optimizes for whatever KPI the client wants and does so using attention prediction and algorithms that reflect observed relationships from past campaigns between attention and that chosen KPIHowever attention is a gateway condition a threshold You must get past the inattention barrier to tell your story and persuade And as Karen NelsonField says amp8220while accepting any KPI a client wants is cordial without understanding the nuances and biases of the KPI these measures can inadvertently train algorithms on measures of the sample bias versus attention ie brand usersnon users amp8211 see Jenni Romaniuk Better Brand Health 2023amp8221But if your ad does not persuade getting attention will not do you any good if your KPI is incremental new customer sales Attention might get you the reminder effect needed to bring back the memory of an ad for that same brand an ad which did persuade you sometime ago to start buying that brand and so the reminder effect might repersuade you to stick with the brand That wouldnamp8217t be growing the brand the way Drucker and Sharp have so famously urgedSo it would be better if your processes of creative development and media selection maximized both attention and persuasion This would not only keep your current customers but also attract new onesWhat about ad recall Ad recall has not gone away It played a reduced role for decades but has been rediscovered by the latest generations of marketers Like attention it is another gateway condition necessary but not sufficient to cause change in predisposition Until you get persuasion you can only remind those who were persuaded in the past Not growing a brand but at least plugging some leaks in the bucketPart of the problem is the drunk and the street lamp tendency The unusual name I give this tendency comes from the joke about the drunk who was looking for his dropped car keys under a street lamp A bystander asks which is his car and the drunk points down the street aways The straight man asks why the drunk isnamp8217t looking by his car and gets the response that itamp8217s easier to see things over hereOr as Abe Maslow said quotIf the only tool you have is a hammer you tend to see every problem as a nailquotamp160The tools that are popular today at universities and in marketing include eye tracking biometrics neuro and verbal response and these greatly favor measuring attention Persuasion strikes most neuroscientists as being a much harder more complex problem In the 1960s the fact that semantic differential scaling was predictive of sales response beating ad recall by far in its correlation with sales is not a factoid remembered in the halls of academe or even in the big agencies Too much time has passed with not too many people interested in such esoterica anyway Esoterica with major pragmatic implications howeverOther than hiring track record copywriters art directors and commercial producers whose work has not just won awards but increased sales what can you do to put more persuasion into your campaignsIf you know your target find out what persuades them including types of product features they like and what they care about in life and associate your brand with those things product featuresbenefits as well as brand imagery attributes eg altruism used by celebrities etc in emotional ways in your ads When predispositions change approach positive emotions have typically been evoked rather than just avoidance emotionsAnd in media selection you can include two more variables in your optimization planning and buyingDoes the media context resonate with the adDoes the addressable ID resonate with the adMy company RMT Research Measurement Technologies is the leader whose technology has been multiply proven by third parties to achieve these two things for youWouldnamp8217t it be great then to be able to put attention and persuasion together in AI cuttingedge media practices Fortunately the original pioneer in todayamp8217s attention economy Professor Karen NelsonField and her company Amplified Intelligence and RMT are now putting their technologies together for clients who would like to go both ways maximizing both attention and persuasion More on this in the futureIt has always been my MO to wrack my brain to grok what is needed and to build at least a working system before advising people so there can be quick wins for brands In this case both systems are working and we are now integrating them for charter clientsThis quotcocktailquotamp160approach combining metrics to maximize predictivity of incremental sales effect was hailed by many during the final Attention panel at the April AUDIENCExSCIENCE Conference This will be the first instantiation of itPosted 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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Attention Is Not Enough Without Persuasion

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Bill Harvey

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