Pay (for) Attention

Why did we do that Please resist the temptation to write to me to say quotI never paid a premium for anything everquotamp160Well obviously it was because we believed in the importance of standout Or to put it another way because we knew we had more chance attracting the consumer39s attention by being in those positionsWe didn39t need data indeed to take the magazine example what data there was via the old reading and noting scores showed precious little difference between righthand and lefthand pages Yet we all paid more for RH because we quotjust knewquot Sometimes we rambled on about logos disappearing into the gutter but mainly we quotjust knewquotThe truth was it was a matter of supply and demand Everyone wanted RH everyone quotjust knewquot so the publisher charged more Same with first in break although in this case as has been pointed out to me by several eminent TV researchers there was some data squirreled away that supported the theory that audiences declined throughout the middle stages of a commercial breakThis week Magnetic the trade organization for the UK magazine industry held its annual Spark conference The session I attended featured Mike Follett from Lumen Anna Sampson Magnetic39s Head of Research and Insight and Mike Florence CSO at PHD chaired by Dominic MillsYou can view the session and indeed the rest of the Spark event hereLumen has done good work on how to optimize ads and I can imagine editorial layout in magazines the major findings from which indicate that aside from anything else arresting content is key to attracting an audience to ads surrounding it and that as a medium magazines are consumed online at a slower pace than social media platforms presumably because it takes longer to read arresting content than it does to scroll through random content The reality of quotprecision targetingquot is still nowhere near the promiseMike Florence made the point that agency contracts slow the progress towards attention becoming a key planning metric He was referencing contracts with clients not spend commitments made by his group traders to particular vendorsWhat was strange was Mike discussing contracts as if they were things that happened to him as opposed to happening with his input and involvement He did go on to say that many client contracts happen at group level which although it makes things harder must surely be a process over which as CSO he has some influenceHe also sought to lay some blame for this state of affairs on the auditors His argument went we are contractually bound into delivering a price as judged by the clientappointed auditorI hold no candle whatsoever for the oldfashioned pricedriven media auditors but blaming them for a clause within a globally negotiated contract agreed by the agency seems harshI suspect but of course cannot prove that a larger issue with building attention metrics into planning comes with squaring off group trading dealsI39m with Mike Florence in seeing some progress as price became less of a differentiator although to be fair this point has been made many times over the years and so far hasn39t been proved correctBut the ambition must be that factors like attention become more significant in media executionHopefully the good work done by trade bodies like Magnetic and there39s a lot of it about feeds through into the trading policies of individual magazines After all negotiations involve two parties Someone has to make the first moveAttention is a key metric It always was It39s just that now we have far more proof served up in a way that has the potential to influence how agencies plan and indeed buyClick the social buttons above or below to share this content with your friends and colleaguesThe opinions and points of view expressed in this content are exclusively the views of the author andor subjects and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet Inc management or associated writers

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Pay (for) Attention

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Brian Jacobs

"About That with Carl Mayer": Involved Media Connected Audience Fall 2024 Report (Episode 5) - By Carl Mayer

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Pay (for) Attention

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