Quality Impressions

What is an impression In the Advertising Research Foundation ARF model an impression has always been an Opportunity to See OTS event meaning that an ad was delivered to the proximity of an awake human possessing the ability to seehear that adIn the ARF model the quotqualityquot of an impression has to do with the probability of attentiveness to that ad However attentiveness to an ad depends not just on the media delivery platformamp160it is even more strongly a reflection of the attentiongetting power of the ad itself plus it also reflects the attentiveness of the audience member being given the OTS Years ago recall studies showed young people better able to remember ads than older people That could have been a function of memory or of attentiveness or bothARF CEO Scott McDonald says quotPlease make sure the reader understands that the term 39quality impression39 is an interval variable not a binary variable like 39viewable impression39quotBut wait there39s more Attentiveness also reflects the resonance between the ad and the context and between the ad and the audience member Ideal targeting would reach people that would tend to be grateful for the OTS because of being already interested in something within the ad whether having to do with the product or with the psychological aspects of the creativeSo in order to create a level playing field for what is a quality impression the first thing to decide is whether the focus should be on the holistic process or on an attempt to separate out the media contribution to the qualityattentiveness of an impression I propose a dual focus to resolve this challengeTwo companies that exemplify this fork in the road or dual path as I recommend are Adelaide and RMT Note I am involved with both Adelaide39s founder and CEO Marc Guldimann writes brilliantly on the subject and at this stage in Adelaide39s development uses the term quotnoisequot with reference to the creative as he is currently focusing on coming up with a fair crossplatform measure of attention quality reflective only of the media sideRMT today has been proven by impartial thirdparty research to identify impressions that have higher vs lower advertising effectiveness measuring recall brand perception change purchase consideration purchase intent brand adoption and actual incremental sales ROI Nielsen NCS Neustar 605 Simmons The way RMT does this is by identifying the overlap between the ad and the context and the overlap between the ad and the audience member in terms of 265 psychological dimensionsSo in one approachamp160the creative is being held neutral and in the other approachamp160the quality of the impression is related to the campaign specific ad itselfBoth make sense from different points of view From the standpoint of a pricing currency the ad creative must be held aside says traditional advertising thinking From the standpoint of making a specific media buy for a specific set of ads with the sole intention of raising the sales and branding effect as high as it will go the ad creative must not be left out of considerationHence to cover all bases one ought to go both waysI was a pup in the business working at Kenyon ampamp Eckhardt where the research heads Sy Lieberman and Ted Dunn as well as my boss Norm Hecht allowed me to perform a metaanalysis of the agency39s database of 1500 copy tests I was hoping to find that across diverse creative the effect of the creative would average out and leave me with differences by media types that the agency could use in planning and buying for greater impactWhat I found was frustrating The creative refused to average out The media type relationships changed from one campaignad to another For a specific Lincoln ad one media type beat another for a different Lincoln ad the media relationship flipflopped The mediacreative covariance factor appeared to be stronger than the media factor I concluded that four variables would need to be analyzed together creative media audience and product These were the early groupings toward what is today RMTMike Drexler years later was the Media Director at Bozell Jacobs Kenyon ampamp Eckhardt He devised the agency39s own system for predicting quality impressions using all the industry studies he could find and putting it all together Between 2018 and now dentsu has been studying attention and has devised its own system for predicting which media will deliver the most attentive impressionsAdelaide argues that having a common standard currency for attention would be more valuable and the WFAANA now appears to be asking for something like that The Adelaide system came out of Parsec which was the only media company to charge based on duration of viewing so Parsec had a strong reason for needing to develop a system that would predict duration of viewing Adelaide however has transcended sole reliance on duration having found that attention has a lot to do with clutter and the distractiveness of a specific environment and today it is operating in programmatic digital display where study after study shows that the measure is more predictive of outcomes than is the MRC viewability standard Of course the MRC viewability standard was designed to be the lowest minimum bar below which an ad could confidently be given zero value Viewability remains perfectly suited to that assignment Quality impressions is a different assignmentClutter That old bugaboo never went away We just got tired of talking about it To media companies it39s hard to resist the temptation to squeeze in more ads especially in media types where the production costs escalate year after year although the clutter is worse in digital than anywhere else Linear TV when it stuck to the old ad load guidelines raised little objection from viewers grateful for the medium But today the clutter is part of what is changing the industry to a tiered streaming environment where some choose full ad loads and some deliver a second revenue stream to the media company in order to lighten or eliminate the ad loadAdelaide today is moving into video with data from TVision analyzing ad load effects pod position and position in pod size of screen and genre One day Adelaide will supply allmedia comparable quotmediasidequot contributions to quality impressions By that point they will also be working with eyetracking companies to analyze the interactions with the other nonmedia variables involved in the quality of an impressionOur recommendation to the WFAANA is to institutionalize the use of both RMT and Adelaide as the types of systems to plug into the WFAANA measurement model Both systems have global capability today and can be part of the pilot testing of the new WFAANA measurement models in every country This would ensure that the new audience measurement plan for the future is totally covering the issue of quality impressions from every angle both taking maximum practical marketplace advantage of the covariance between creative and media RMT as well as maximizing ability to adjust for clutter and other mediaonly effects Adelaide By using both RMT and Adelaide together one is covering all bases relevant to quality impressions and will net the highest returnClick 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 MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet

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Bill Harvey

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