Attention is the new architecture for AI visibility

0:10Hello and welcome to this episode of The Walk Podcast. My name is Alex Brownsell and I'm the head of content for Walk Media. Brand is back. Well, it's what we always like to say at Walk, but this time there may be something to it. AI platforms are becoming more integral to how consumers discover and purchase products and services. And long-term brand equity has been found to be a key driver of visibility in LLMs. But that brand equity is built by memory, and memory cannot be built without attention. Advertisers investing in short-form formats risk starving the input, leaving their brands invisible to AI.

0:51I'm delighted to say that I'm joined by three experts who can really help us to understand this complex new marketplace The role that attention plays in memory and AI visibility and what brands can do about it We'll be speaking to Carl Various, Head of Partners and Specialists for Google in the Nordics Dr. Karen Nelson-Field, Founder and CEO of Amplified and of course a long-standing friend of WALK I'm Scott Reinders, COO of Connect, which is part of the Up and Up group, Africa's largest independent agency group. But before we begin, here's a quick word from our sponsor. If you're listening to The Walk Podcast, you're already tuned in to what's defining the future of marketing.

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2:07Hello all, great to have you all on the Walk podcast. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for being here. Thanks. Thanks Alex. Right, this couldn't be more important right now to what brands are thinking, the challenges they're facing, the way that the media ecosystem is evolving. Carl, if we can just begin, I guess, with that audience behavior, sides, the way that we're seeing things changing in search and Google. Obviously, you've got a really fantastic position to sort of understand what's happening. Could you talk us through some of the changes that you're seeing? Yes, absolutely. Yeah, we're seeing a fundamental shift in how people search and moving from blue links to more into conversations.

2:48And with AI overuse and AI mode, we see that billions of people have already picked that up. And then you're moving into much more of a conversation versus just searching for things. And this is probably much more becoming in natural language as well. But we're also seeing that people are using more and more AI when they're looking for products and services. And then for marketers, this is becoming then like a collapse of the messy middle. It's actually the machine that does the heavy lifting for all the consideration and bringing that up. And consumers are feeling much more confident when they go into that space on the decisions that they make.

3:30Could I just pick you up there on the messy middle? Because that was a fabulous piece of research I think Google put out about five or six years ago, and really influential. And it seems interesting that actually we might be seeing a decisive change in what's happening in that messy middle then. Yes, I think so. But I also think it's actually the AI that is doing the messy middle that is actually still there, but it's just much quicker. And we don't even notice it. So it does an even better job in the messy middle of getting that type of information to the users. So then they feel much more confident.

4:05And I think that this is a massive opportunity for brands that understand that if you can win here by being very helpful for your users and being relevant and actually being in people's minds even before this starts, you know, that will be a big shift. And if you're not, you're basically invisible. Yeah, I think that was going to be my next question, really. When the AI is returning, just a couple of choices often, I guess, what happens to the brand that isn't the top pick? How, I guess, does potentially brand advertising make a difference here? Yes, I mean, I know from the research that I think is extremely well that you've done for building brands in the age of AI.

4:49I think that is one of the best reports I've read this year. and I think it really points to how important brand equity is in the combination of also, of course, what you do in the end when you're going for the conversion. So for great marketers today and in the future, you have to really make sure how to build your brand equity and also being helpful in the end and for the conversions coming. Yeah, I would highly recommend any listeners that haven't seen the walk guide to brand building in the age of AI I do please take a look. And I mean, even for market leaders, visibility isn't necessarily guaranteed, is it?

5:28You know, a brand's own site is only 5 % to 10 % maybe of what an AI will reference. What are the new questions that marketers need to ask instead of where do I put my ads? What kind of brand is an AI actually capable of seeing? I did an example for a company in, I was searching for a mobile subscription for my son, Oliver, that is 15. And then I did that in AI mode and then in Gemini Alive. And then I asked them, you know, what subscriptions do you want to recommend to me? And then they, of course, picked the four big brands that we have in Sweden. but then I said well we are often out in the archipelago and we go skiing in the north of Sweden and we also like to see some you know can you include it in some kind of family package and then the AI said or Gemini said well then you should use Telia because they have the best coverage across Sweden and that's been Telia's brand position for decades you know they've always positioned themselves and they are very strong about that so that they picked that the lllm pick up the brand equity and then the second part was they picked up the family packages that they have done in feeds but they also have in ads so it's kind of the combination of the long term and the short term and then the recommendation became that and that was the one we choose to buy yeah in in south africa we've got a lot of our clients asking the questions now you know how do we show up on gemini and other lms and we've developed a framework we call levers and drift where we basically get you know we try and find ai to find two kinds of signals levers which are essentially channels that a brand has direct control over you can go into your wikipedia page and and you can you know edit that as you know to your will you make sure your google profiles are all up to date you're showing up on maps and so forth, all your location services from that perspective.

7:32But then you get Drift, which is where humans talk about the brand, where the brands don't have full control of what that might be. And I think they need to make a plan to have some sort of influence in those spaces. Places like Reddit are hugely influential and are crawled by the LLMs a lot. YouTube, the comments and the actual content in that. And so it's really, really important for the brands to be able to play in that space. And that's where we're starting to guide our clients. Of course, one of the things that we are seeing at the moment with platforms is the revise of AI slop, shall we call it?

8:11From the planning process and the way that you're working, how are you trying to avoid that pitfall, I guess? yeah i mean i think everybody's getting swept up in uh this this trend around automated creative and trying to get creative out at scale um but you've got to be so careful about you know putting creative out in such volume that the actual quality of that creative is impacted and so we didn't want to be left behind in in you know putting something like this together and so we've it was a very easy leap for us to take the attention science work that we've been doing with Karen and apply that to a automated creative tool and system that we've dubbed the hummingbird engine in order to put creative art at scale but almost treat that that scale as a byproduct we really wanted to make sure that the creative that we put out that is automated is effective and that's the bottom line with that yeah I mean I think what's really interesting from what you're saying is actually there are actually almost like two kind of um levers that not levers because we've just talked about levers i'll use a different word two kind of paths for brands to sort of achieve success here one is adopting perhaps more tactical things things like reddit but actually the other thing is that long-term consistency and that the ais will you know gemini will recognize where brand has had a really consistent message on on something for for years and that is is so important and i think you know we talk about consistency in marketing so much and how important it is and how there's such a tendency sometimes for for new cmos to come in and wipe the slate clean and do something completely different but actually that consistency can really actually pay dividend in the long run and the beauty about this is is like back to the fundamentals of marketing but now it's with a little spike of ai too in the tools to do it in in a slightly different way, but still the fundamentals need to be there.

10:16And I think if you're not playing in that space, you're leaving it open for the public to decide what your brand should be and how it should be represented in the LLMs. And so brand marketing is critical from that perspective. So that kind of brings it back to attention. I mean, hearing what you're saying, and I'm excited that I've been pounding the pavement for a very long time about the need for memory structures to be built and brand equity. But we have what I call a visibility starvation issue. So, you know, if you know anything about my work, I talk about the fact that, you know, for the last 10 to 15 years, we've been focusing on sub one second of attention.

11:00And again, if you know my work, you'd know that attention, moreover, more people watching for a longer period. So more of the sort of flat decay formats versus the heavy scrolls are those that lead to attribution of brand. And, you know, most of the industry is still not doing that. So I think this is probably extremely pivotal time for our industry because we're kind of going back to brands need to be visible to be visible. But again, that's an attention issue. So for me, I think this is the perfect time for people to think about attention. And whether we want to use that word or not, whether we want to use visible, ultimately, we need to think about the types of formats that bring us what you've both just described, which is information that feeds the algorithm to be answering questions.

11:58And so I'm pretty excited about what that means from perhaps switching media from a large proportion of fast decay formats, which I've explained before, a lot of people watch first half a second and do everything they can to exit with their thumb, to things like YouTube car where there's a flatter decay where, as I said, lots of reach watch consistently over time. So it's a pretty exciting time for a brand, I think, to be celebrated and encouraged to move back to the basics. Can you, Karen, can you give us a bit of a sense then for a brand that is investing in low attention media? What is the risk and how does that ultimately then translate into danger from an LLM visibility perspective?

12:53Look, I mean, I'm not an algorithm expert, but I can give you an example. And I love that you just prompted me with the word risk. So I've built a metric that describes using the data that we have from our new generative model. And what it does is it's a risk factor of misattribution from a branding perspective. So, you know, Scott talked about it before. Or basically, I can kind of tell if your brand doesn't have enough attention on it and I can kind of codify this risk. So the question was? The question is, like, if you're a brand that is investing heavily in low retention format. What is the risk?

13:40And then that risk that then ultimately boils down to invisibility. Yeah, so the risk is that this misattribution, to Scott's point, is significantly higher because attention is a mechanism to being remembered, but the creative is the connective tissue, if you like. So if your creative is not being seen and particularly your branded assets, then none of this is going to work because, you know, even big brands are not safe right now for those who particularly overinvest in sort of low attention media. So there's a massive risk. And I think to your point, Scott, you know, brands are scrambling and I'm sure you've got brands scrambling on your side, Carl, where they're going, how do we get in front of this?

14:26This is a massive paradigm shift from even a year ago. So I'm pretty excited that the industry has caused and the technology is causing this change of thinking versus, you know, someone like me who's been on the pavement forever to say, you know, memory is important. Understanding, you know, getting people to think about your brand, to review your brand, to talk about your brand is important. So yeah, it's a pretty exciting time. Yeah, and I think it's from a marketer's perspective on media quality, either you're targeting people that are not in market now, most of them, then you need high attention media in order to build them memory structures, or you're targeting people that are in market now, and then you need high intent media that can capture the high intent.

15:15And I think that that probably will be how we look at media quality in the future. And we'll have to define that much harder when we're actually doing the media buying.

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16:13I know you guys have been doing quite a lot of work about this and from what I've seen I was wondering if you could talk us through vocal authority, silent zone, vocal zone and memory sealing. Could you talk us through those and why YouTube sits where it does as a sort of more sustained attention environment? Well I mean that sort of comes actually from some work and I'm going to quote her so my last book, an incredible human called Sophia Perez looked at this and kind of codified human noise. So she's not a published author, but she does have papers and they've won, you know, SMR type things.

16:55But she talks about this. So she talks about the silent zone. And I interpret that as media invisible to AI training, but it also is then brands that are on media that's invisible to AI training, not sort of getting enough attention to kind of switch over to the vocal zone, which is high attention environments and not just high seconds, but sustained, as I said before, like sort of slower decay formats that hold attention for longer periods that trigger this human noise she talks about, which is reactions, comments, reviews, essentially acting as what she calls the volume dial for a brand's authority in the eyes of AI.

17:38So I think that's, you know, she wrote this paper quite a number of years ago and has a framework around it. And when I sort of add my work in, and then obviously the three of us are sitting here, it makes complete sense. I personally, we at WALK have been following your work, Karen, for a long time and how you've really changed how the industry's looked at attention and involved attention and integrated attention into workflows. And I think it's interesting that we maybe are shifting from a place of attention being a metric to being something more akin to a system architecture, less as a sort of output measure and more as an input and actually something that can be actioned from an advertiser standpoint.

18:29And Scott, I know this is something that you're really involved with at the moment. Can you give us a bit of an idea of how you're building in some of your processes? Yeah, sure. I mean, attention is, as you were saying, accepted by the industry at large as something that is important and largely because of the work that Karen's been doing. But I think people have been trapped or have trapped attention as an output and a metric. And I think there's something that's quite stagnant about it at that stage. so we are looking to build attention data upstream in our workflows by leveraging karen's new generative model called attention ai and it essentially helps us plan media up front using attention and do our creative production using attention data and i think that's where innovation is and that's where it's very very exciting because it gives the campaigns the best possible start before we spend a cent in the media environments so could you give us a sort of yeah tangible example if you're you know you're working and planning for instance how is that sort of informing your work and making things i guess yeah it goes back to the fundamentals and i think we talked a little bit about the brand building fundamentals and how important that is um you know it's it's really important when a brief lands for the media schedule to be to be done before creative can be can be briefed and kicked off and so we'll do a round one draft of a media schedule and we'll get in a room with the creative teams and hash it out make sure they understand where the media investment is going to be going what are the actual ad formats and placements that they're going to be working towards and then we'll get clients sign off on that and then the creators will run and get going with with producing that creative once that creative is is built and done.

20:16We'll run it through the attention AI model and we get some really good benchmark scores out of that. And I think Karen can probably describe how that data works better than I can around the synthetic audiences that come out of it. Well, look, I just want to touch on something you actually said before, and I have been thinking about this. I love the word trapped that you used. you know we to your point and thank you for I'm humbled that you say that we changed the category but you know it's a decade of research we got standards established industry has adopted it but to your point Scott I agree I think it's gotten trapped and I think the reason why it hasn't been universally integrated is because vendors have taken ownership of the metrics and I never wanted that.

21:07I never wanted it to be a single score, a proprietary black box dashboard. I never saw it as that. I always saw it as almost a free marker of information. And what we've done now is built creative led data that essentially everyone can use across all sorts of different use cases. So rather than one thing for planning or, you know, versioning, creative versioning or planning or ROIs or agents, and essentially think attention has to change shape and I'm putting it out there to all vendors. You know, we can't be stuck in this, this is how you should use it industry. We should be saying, here's some structured data, which we've built a model to do so it's machine readable do what you want to Scott's point like he has an incredible platform and and building and it's it's working for the customers and we haven't been prescriptive of that we've just provided creative led distributions of viewing and they do the magic So for me personally, as someone that has been very much about change in measurement and how brands show up, I feel like this is the moment in time where Carl's world collides with my world.

22:33My world collides with your world, Scott, and it gives a power back to you as a custodian of brand. What I also think is very interesting when you work now is that you can also look at the media effect or platform effect separated from the creative effect and then you bring them together again. Yeah, I mean, I can talk a little bit about that. I mean, I've been on stage here many times, talked about how, you know, media quality defines the range of attention possible. We still see that. So the user experience or the way that it's engineered defines how much attention you can earn. but there's a ceiling.

23:14But creative fits within that range and then its impact is reduced the worse the media quality gets essentially. So the beautiful thing about the model we've built and how it basically works in super, you know, five minute or five second way is you upload a creative, it splits out the frames, codifies it with language, cat, dog, person, cup, whatever's in the frames, sends it back to our proprietary models and speaks to those models and says, you know, this is a 9x16 or a 16x9. How much attention would this ad get given the elements within the creative? And then what it does is it not just spits back media quality to Scott's point, but it actually shows how creative works against those benchmarks.

24:06So it's genius because, well, the team are genius. I'm not. Because it kind of shows things like hook and hold, which we've built, which is, you know, does the creative work early or is it better in the late stages? So there's a lot that, you know, agencies can do to kind of improve the creative experience, which then flows through to the likes of YouTube. So it's a value exchange all around, in my opinion. and it's better creative, better for the brand, it's a better value exchange from a publisher perspective. Yeah, it's interesting that we're now at the point where we're able to talk about the creative side on attention because I guess the media side was the focus for a long time and all the work you did on floors and ceilings.

24:51I suppose then if you're a marketer, the thing to do then, and this is me putting this as a hypothesis by the way, and feel free to respond to this, is you make sure that you optimize your media plan, in the most high-attentioned manner possible against your goals, your KPIs. And then it's over to the creative to, you know, that you make sure you can get the best possible creative that you can to sort of hit the highest possible scores you can within those media environments. And have creative that's designed and produced for the specific ad formats and, you know, to leverage the ad mechanics like the skip now button in YouTube, for example.

25:28You know, there's so much that the creative teams can do within that space. They just need to be brought along the journey and the media schedule and a good chase list to make it really magic. To be clear, though, it's not always about high attention. It's about the objective of the brand and, to your point, fit for purpose. So, you know, shorts essentially is something that, you know, can add value to the, you know, reinforcement of a brand, for example. And I've written paper in WAG around the flight wheel of attention. So I think we've moved from only ever go here and high attention to how does sustained attention fit within?

26:18I think we should think about that. So I'm pretty anti-fast decay because of the wastage that it renders. But, you know, it doesn't necessarily mean that fewer seconds from, it doesn't always have to be 10 seconds is my point. But I also think that this is a testament to how important it is to bring media and creative together again, like it once was, actually, before we separated it into media agencies and creative agencies. And I see that as a trend going into where the industry is heading, that you need to bring that together again in order to be really strong as an advertiser. Yeah, well, that kind of brings us, I suppose, to sort of the rounding up kind of point around this, which is what brands, what marketers can and should do based on obviously what you're all learning from one another as well as in your own fields.

27:13If there's, what are the sort of practical steps that you would advise marketers to take based on what you've learned? The multiplier effect. Good answer. Yeah, I think, but it's really, it's a really good study too. But when you have a brand equity that is really strong, and then you're also very good in working on the short term, having good feeds, having good ads that answer to those things, and you bring those two things together, you actually get a multiplier effect to it, just as you have in your study. And I think that marketers that have set up and are working in that direction has a really good position for the future, even when agents are searching to do decisions for humans.

27:59Yeah, I think from my side, it was the point made. When our media teams and creative teams work closely together and walk the journey of this very tumultuous time that we're experiencing, you know, it can only lead to better things. I think when they are so separated, you know, that's where campaigns and brands can break. And, yeah. And my side, I would say, don't guess. We have incredible data now to understand how people view your creative within context and you are in control of how you then optimize within that. So I feel like from my side, attention became, to your point, infrastructure. And I think it's the one point in time where it is really important for brands to think about that and not make guesses anymore.

28:54it's it's such a fascinating time and and maybe we're just in the foothills of truly understanding what ai platforms llms and how they're changing our industry how they're changing the role of brand um so i know that you guys are only at the beginning of of the work you're doing and and what you're going to be finding out but we'd love to keep in touch and to hear more about what comes next walk subscribers can go in and read the multiplier effect report and the walk guides to brand building in the AI age. And Karen, I believe you are going to be writing a paper for us very soon. Maybe. Well, we're going to, we'll follow up on that.

29:28But thank you so much for joining the podcast. It's been fantastic having you on. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you. I'm afraid that's all we have time for today. Remember, you can subscribe to The Walk Podcast on your favourite podcasting platform. And if you really liked it, go on and leave us a review. Until next time, thanks for listening. You