The Attention Economy: Why not all reach is equal with Karen Nelson Field

0:06Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Uncensored CMO. Now, one of the primary jobs for every marketer is to capture the attention of your audience. And in today's media fragmented world, that is harder and harder than it's ever been before. So it's really important that we plan based on attention, not just based on reach. And that's why I'm delighted to be joined by Dr. Karen Nelson-Fields, who is a returning guest and the world expert on measuring attention. She's also launched a new book called The Attention Economy, which has just come out. So I'm going to quiz her on why does attention matter?

0:38How do you measure it? And what should we be doing differently to get more share of attention? This is a great episode. You're going to love it. Here it is. Karen Nelson-Field, welcome back to the show. It's good to have you back. Good to be here. Well, you've been quite busy recently, I think is an understatement of the century. And you've just got a new book out called The Attention Economy, as well, a blueprint for the category. Congratulations on that. I'm sure that's no mean feat. How long did that take to put together? So look, it's an interesting one. So the first book was four years ago, four to five years ago, and it was kind of stepping into what's coming, whereas this one is, okay, it's landed.

1:15What have we learned? Where is it going? So it really sets the tone for the science that sits behind it, the practices of ethics that need to occur in an attention economy, and where kind of the product sets landing and what it will take to be an enduring category. So I'm pretty proud of it, actually. It's an amazing read. The thing that surprised me, actually, was in the beginning, the first chapter, you kind of referred to it as the boring chapter. You need to get through it. Oh, you saw that. But then you talk about the history of attention. I had no idea that attention as a kind of subject matter has been studied for over 100 years, going back to late 19th century.

1:52Yeah, I mean, it's important to talk about that because, you know, this is not new. You know, we're not like jumping in on some sort of whim. it's something that's been important for knowledge for a long time, right? So the boring chapter kind of defines the fact that there is already a definition in place and we're not here to make that up. We're here to see how that then can apply in our category, which is advertising. And just for everyone listening and watching, it's not boring, by the way. Well, we threw in some Kim Kardashian. You did, Kim, exactly. You got some Google in there. Yeah, there's some fascinating references.

2:31I've got some Google, something Kardashian. Yeah, I know. It's very on trend as well. Totally. And presumably now, you know, when a lot of literature was written, we probably operated in a world where you got print and out of home and radio. And, you know, the formats advertising were fairly basic. But as you make the point with Google, the fragmentation now is much, much greater than probably it's ever been. And that must be a big factor in why attention matters more than it has. It was interesting you even raised that because my original PhD was audience measurement, right? But it was at a time when fragmentation was at its highest at the time.

3:04And there was a problem with measurement back then, which was, well, I know, 17 years ago. But if you fast track to today, it's, I don't know, 100x in terms of what implications there are for advertisers. So, yeah, it's an interesting ecosystem. Now, I wanted to get into some basics just to set us up before we get into some of the more complex things. But let's start with the case for attention. Now, this might sound a bit obvious, but does attention matter? Because, again, I've seen some people that go, oh, it doesn't matter. As long as they walk past a poster and they get the key entry points and the branding, it's all fine.

3:37But, you know, what does the science tell us about the role of attention and how, you know, what difference it makes to advertising outcomes? Well, it's interesting you use that example because that to me is passive attention anyway, right? So someone walking past a billboard and getting the distinctive assets in the peripheral, that's still attention. So when someone says to me, you know, is attention important, I often say, well, turn off your ads. I don't want to see you for another six months. I want you to turn off your advertising and then I want you to come back to me and see how your brand's going.

4:06So I think that's the case for attention. This is not new information that people need to see your ads. So I get quite frustrated with people that ask me that. And you mentioned passive and active attention. So can you measure the difference? Well, what is the difference between those? and can you measure the difference between the two? Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because when I set this business up, I mean, you know I have a background in academic. I always wanted there to be some sort of rigour around whatever's next rather than, you know, sell some gimmick because we can. And I based it on history and based it on literature, which talks about active attention being someone sort of stops what they're doing, pushes distraction out and literally focuses on something, right, to learn something.

4:52Whereas passive attention is unintended or, you know, it sort of gets you in an unconscious, subconscious, subconscious kind of way where you don't really realise what you're looking at. So that's kind of framing and things like that. So, yeah, we set it up in our own technology to be able to collect both. Because I was fascinated by Ian McGilchrist's work, isn't it? The kind of left and right hemisphere. It's almost like the right hemisphere is aware of what's around it, but the left hemisphere is engaged in actually focusing on something. And they're two different modes of attention, aren't they?

5:25It's absolutely the same. So that's why we collect what we collect. And it's interesting because both have different value from an outcome perspective. So there's three states and one is active, one is passive, and one is non-attention, which makes up 100 % of your viewing experience across an ad, for example, or content or whatever. So once you understand those three states, it's really interesting to see what kind of outcomes occur as a result of that different state. Obviously, depending on which state you're in determines the outcome, presumably. In terms of active attention. Well, it's nuanced because it can be related to if it's new news or not new news, big brand, small brand, things like that.

6:11But yeah, it's important to capture both. Yeah. This is a question I want to ask you, actually, because instinctively, I'd imagine if there's a brand that I'm really familiar with, it's got very strong, distinctive assets. You know, maybe it's Kit Kat, for example. It's red and got the white logo and got the bars. I probably don't need as much reminding to be aware of it compared to a brand I've never seen before. Does that play out in the data? It does, except your children haven't been aware of KitKat, right? So what I often say to brands is that is the truth, that a highly distinctive brand you can pick up as you're walking past or as you're not looking directly.

6:51But you have to make sure that you have this flywheel because the next generation category buyers don't even know who you are. So it's kind of easy to say you don't need as much, but you can't rest on that current group of buyers forever. And I suppose if we take the classic Ehrenberg-Bass principle of light buyers are where the growth comes from, that probably becomes even more true, doesn't it? Well, and if you take their philosophy around the distribution of buying, people are constantly moving through, right? So light buyers are constantly coming through and then become heavy and then maybe get out of the category and there's this kind of literal flywheel.

7:28And that's how we look at the attentive states that, you know, sure, certain campaigns don't need as much because it is expensive to buy active attention. But at the same time, you have to be careful not to rely on passive only, which is unfortunately what a lot of people do by sort of pushing their money into some of the long tail of digital. Yeah, yeah. I'm sure I saw Peter actually presenting at Thinkbox. some attention adjusted kind of cost per millions. And it completely changed how you'd look at the world. I mean, I think TV ended up becoming like the second cheapest media on that basis.

8:06It's interesting you say that. Years ago, one of the first pieces of work I did when I left the university was around the value or the cost or the CPM. Because to be honest, and it's no surprise, in the book, I call it cost per meaningless thousand, right? We'll talk about that in a minute. But the point being that it's interesting because expensive CPMs have pushed their CPMs down to match the low CPMs that are coming out in the digital space. And so when you actually do the analysis and work out not just how much attention, but the outcomes, the CPMs are probably too low relative to their impact.

8:43And the CPMs that are already cheap are probably not cheap enough. So interestingly enough, it got picked up by Wall Street Journal quite a few years back now. And I think I talk about that in the first book. So Pete, the whole concept of CPM is so flawed because it used to be, it used to be that was the unit pricing, right? You could, if you pay more, you get more. But these days you don't know because not all rich is equal. So your perceived value of what you're paying for isn't there. But on top of that, we live in a biddable system. So you're paying what you think you have to bid for for something you don't know what you're getting.

9:23So it's like this double whammy. So CPM, I think, is one of the hardest-hitting metrics given what we deal with at the moment in the measurement ecosystem around attention as well as obviously viewability and things like that. Now, can you also link attention to memory as well? Because that's the other thing. As marketers, we're trying to create memories and associations with our brand. So what's the evidence of the role of attention has in terms of what we remember after this? There's so much evidence in our own, but not just ours. There's this actually effect called switch cost effect, which basically means that the more switching you do, the less likely you are to retain information.

10:05And we see that in our own data because we can track attentive states. So if you're switching between passive and active and non-active and passive, so we can tell. So the more switching you do, the less likely you are to remember. and then there's also an impact on longer play so time is important so the more time you spend processing something the longer time you will remember it afterwards so we've seen that across time as well so plenty of evidence plenty of evidence and i think i've seen a pretty incredible chart from you which talks about is it the memory threshold of around two and a half two and a half seconds that something like 80 % of ads never gets that point.

10:5085. 85. But it's digital. So look, that's an interesting slide because we see that across every single collection. I've never published on it, but we see that across every single collection I've ever seen where there's a point at which under that, this doesn't mean it doesn't, that under that isn't valuable, but from a memory perspective, particularly related to mental availability, that's kind of the line in the sand where people go, oh, now I get it. And I mean, that makes common sense. It does. Yeah. Yeah. But every regression, every study, we sort of see roughly around that point. Yeah. It does vary on the size of the brand, but largely speaking, that's the threshold.

11:31So you can, you can link attention to memory. Can you link attention to kind of advertising outcomes as well in terms of results? Oh, absolutely. So apart from we in our own technology lead people to a virtual store straight after the viewing experience, we, through our ad tech product, which is optimization and verification, we link it directly to a customer's outcomes. So, you know, it's funny because I often talk about outcomes being too directional. One is called meaty proof and one I call marketing proof. So marketing proof is reasonably spurious because, you know, recall, brand uplift, you know, all those fluffy things that if your baseline's not strong, then it's spurious.

12:19But then the meaty proof is what you want, which is profit and cost of goods sold and, you know, acquisition kind of. So the things that CEOs want to see or CFOs want to see versus the things that marketers want to see. And we've done both. So we've done, you know, modelled work around mental availability and short-term advertising strength with baselines. But we've also then connected our ad tech to, as I said, increase in conversion of applications and, you know, more web traffic and reduced cost of goods sold and improved profitability and reduced resources and you name it. So both brand and business effects, both will be lifted by greater attention?

13:05Yeah, I often say the reality is attention and outcomes are not perfectly related. And the reason why that is, is because if the creative is poor, then that attention will be wasted. So if you put a very poor ad, not even from an emotional perspective, but from a poor branding perspective, it can easily be misattributed to your larger competitor. And that's why anyone that sells you the dream that it will always lead to a sale is driving you into this short-term rubbish. No, I don't mean you kind of believe the data and then you're just spending a lot of money on, you know, yeah. Basically what you're doing is – Just getting people to click on something but there's crazy no outcome.

13:48But also you're bringing people that were already going to buy your brand forward, which is not good for profitability anyway. You're not growing your brand. Yeah, and that's probably why the brand element and the business element needs to go together, doesn't it? Because you're also trying to build buyers of tomorrow. I mean, back to our friends, Ehrenberg Bass, in terms of 95.5. I talk about that all the time. So, you know, it is really important to think about the buyers of today and the buyers of tomorrow. Yeah, you've got to do both. You mentioned the creative there, actually. That's quite interesting.

14:15And you introduced this idea when we last spoke about attention elasticity that actually varies, doesn't it, quite a lot on different platforms in terms of the variability, I suppose, that the creative makes. So just to step back, it's probably also a controversial, particularly creative versus media, right? So the way that the user experience works is that it trains you how to use Facebook, it trains you how to use YouTube, it trains you how to use TikTok. So the nature of that user experience defines how much attention you will pay. It gives you this boundary, this ceiling and floor. And what, if you think about an average, which sits right in the middle, good creative from a, you know, emotional, unexpectedness, relevance play will sit slightly above that average, whereas those that are less appealing will sit slightly below that average.

15:13So that's kind of how creative and media sit into the attention equation. I hadn't thought about the concept you introduced there of that the platform's almost training your attention is it that way around then the platform's almost creating behaviors 100 that drive your attention there's lots of books on it yeah there's lots of books on it for fear of our teenagers yeah so it works the same way for ads so most marketers think if we build it they will they will watch it it just doesn't work that way because of the nature of the experience that's built by the engineers that keeps you scrolling and is that is that because they've got the data on on me so they're basically going right we know what's capturing its attention therefore we're going to serve up this kind of thing or is it that way around is it kind of playing with the data or well look at the end i'm not in san francisco to understand the the nuance but there's a science behind keeping you watching the content or scrolling through to see ads for example more ads but less time but they control our user experience within an inch of our lives for example you all think you're in control of your own attention but the way you use facebook is the same as where I use Facebook was the same as where they use Facebook, they use Facebook within a very small margin of error.

16:27And that's not, it's largely because it's designed that way. Yeah. So if you're seeing small margin of error within platform, you're seeing differences between different platforms and how they're doing it. Massively. So to your point about this elasticity, so the capacity of attention is much greater on this platform and much smaller on this platform. And that's why not a reaches equal. Because you could put a 30 second ad on here and half of it will be seen. You can put a 30 second ad on here and it won't, no matter how good the creative is, even if it's a Canlion award winner. So most people don't understand that that is your roadmap to successful advertising or not, regardless of how beautiful and creative the ad is.

17:12Yeah. And this feels like the Holy Grail bit, doesn't it? This feels like the bit that everyone should be talking about. This is literally the Holy Grail piece. Because once you understand that, you can do your job. Yeah. Because you can't change it, right? Everyone thinks, well, I'll just build this beautiful emotive piece of creative and it will change the way that you watch. It doesn't work that way. That makes sense. And we know that because of the technology that we have, we can control for creative over the years. It's been nearly eight years. So we can intercept Facebook with an ad that we want you to see without you knowing in your own personal feed by the nature of our app, right?

17:47We've tested this forever. So it is literally the holy grail. Now, you gave me a demo of this earlier, right? So I'm really excited for you to explain this because you showed me on your phone how this all works. But explain how you measure attention. So it's quite sophisticated and it's amazing the data that you can get from your app. It was designed originally as a research tech, which essentially we, if we want to go and collect a thousand views, for example, in Finland, we our tech is connected to a panel exchange and programmatic panel exchange we can tap on the shoulder of 5 000 finnish people and a thousand will say yep next time i'm on facebook i'll get five bucks or whatever it is and what happens is you download our app and then the next time you're on facebook or tiktok or youtube or depending on the setup it allows us you give us it's gdpr compliant in that it gives it's consent based but what it does is it turns on the camera which you know is normal for us now and it films you but then it also grabs the back end of the of the view right so this is really critically important so it's not just collecting facial footage which i can then turn into gaze points but it also collects reference points behind the view so i can tell how fast i've scrolled it can tell how fast i've scrolled it can tell if i've orientated my phone it can tell if i've got earpods in and how high the volume is or not and it does that at a sub-second level, so 0.2 of a second.

19:19So what that does is it gives us a reference point to how to anchor the gaze so whether it's active or passive or non-attention is really accurate because we have the coordinates at the back of the device. The other beautiful thing about that is that's the information that allows us to build ad tech products because ad tech world lives against device data, right, and viewing data. So it's been serendipitous in that we built it that way because now we can move into, which we have, into product which allows us to predict attention across the programmatic ecosystem. And presumably you take all that data and you can train the AI then.

19:58Can you learn from that data as well? We've done that for years. Yeah, start to then predict how people will behave. I mean, we were built as a proper ML business. So we built the stack first and product second. Yeah, that's a great way of doing it. Yeah. One data point I found fascinating in the book as well, and maybe I'll explain it, is the difference between what people think they're buying in terms of you think you're buying lots of impressions versus what you're actually buying as an advertiser. There's a big difference between those two things, isn't there? I mean, served versus seen, right?

20:26Yeah. So, look, that's been a big part of my category growth agenda for a long time. and, you know, as someone who is from the measurement side, I struggle when an impression is supposed to mean an impression is supposed to mean an impression when it doesn't. So basically the reality is you can buy a thousand impressions here and a thousand impressions here and the level of seen versus served is so significantly vast but you'll still pay the same, a million dollars, a million dollars, I don't think a million dollars per thousand, but do you know what I mean? And that is literally the core problem of our entire ecosystem.

21:05So when measurement is not equal, what that has an effect on are things like viewability because viewability is based on this equation that time and view is equal or impressions are equal. It impacts reach-based planning. You know, you talked about Pete. It impacts his pet peeve, which is ESOF. So, you know, my whole agenda for the last sort of eight years has been if we can build signal-based data that makes reach equal again, then my job is done and that's where it's going. Yeah, you're quite right because, I mean, Peter's just saying, like, ESA, we all come to know and love 10 years ago, doesn't work if you can't make an assumption that all reach is equal.

21:44He has literally slides that I've seen and used that describe the point in time when everything changed and it's really, really striking. that it's at the same time that the digital spend increases. Again, not to suggest that digital is bad, but you're buying impressions but not getting the full, you know, 100 % of what you're buying. And that variability depends across all different formats. And I think from the data in your book, you know, you think you're buying around 70%, 80 % impressions and it gets down to about 15 % when you look at viewing more than two seconds. I can't remember the numbers exactly.

22:25But to your point, it's like really... The difference is massive, isn't it? Oh, huge. If you treat two seconds as what's required to actually leave someone. This is true. So less than, around about 15 % to 20 % max get more than this threshold, which is what you speak about. But there's tools now. Like, you know, there are products, including our own, that use human data to essentially normalise this error. So we are definitely, and I call it Fab Four in the book. So there are products for every stage of the ecosystem. So, you know, whether it's planning and strategy or, you know, buying or, you know, whether it's optimization, there is creative testing.

23:08There's a stage where people can jump in from an attention perspective. So, yeah, it's becoming quite a category. Yeah, it is, isn't it? And much needed by the sounds of it. And Amara is saying so each different platform will have different definitions of impressions as well, as we were saying before. So impressions on one platform might be different to the definition of impressions on another. It's not as much about definition of impressions anymore because the MRC have kind of come in and the regulations around what that means. The Achilles heel of our industry is this little thing called time in view, and that's what they rely on.

23:44But the relationship between time in view and actual viewing is what's unstable. So it's not that impressions are different because that would be MRC against. Got you. It's more that the relationship between the ad being on screen and so the time in view attention relationship varies. Got you. Okay, I've got you. So you've been able to marry up what people actually respond to versus what each platformer saying is time in view. And those two things differ in terms of the relationship. That's so interesting. So that's why not all reach is equal. So if the error that sit underneath the delivery was equal, so let's just for argument's sake say served and not seen or seen but not served was 75 % across all impressions and you could live with that because it's consistent.

24:42but the issue is that that number changes drastically across depending on the device and the platform and the format and the ad length and that's the problem i really like by the way your definition of served and seen that's really for me as an you know i'm not an expert like you on this kind of thing i go i get that right the difference between the two one is a much more human yeah approach served is an ad tech approach yeah and it's binary did it happen did it not human approach is did it get served and how much time do we spend with it you know that's the reality and i think and well i know that's where the future's going in terms of you know human-led synthetic data now you've spent a long time thinking about this researching it you've built a business around it you've written three books on it sort of thing what are you seeing the industry move in in the direction it should be i mean absolutely what give us a sense of the progress that i'm pretty proud i mean the mrc have stepped in this year and i'm pretty proud of you know the ib has done a great job the arf are amazing and everyone in the mrc now are kind of going okay we need to build some standards around this what i love about that is its validation for its value so i can see it moving and i think they're talking roughly let's just call it middle next year i think that will change the industry again because a lot of people and that's what happened with with uh viewability it took a lot of years for it to be standardized and then it became standardized and then it took off i just see this as the next iteration of that now viewability measures will always need to be there because you need served and seen so yeah i'm pretty proud of the industry yeah to be honest i can see uh media planners getting pretty excited you know um by applying this tool to their thinking and planning what about the platforms themselves because presumably there are winners and losers in the mix.

26:36And it's hard because that is the truth. So if you use a metric like attention or value or if you use a metric like human involvement or whatever it is you want to, when it's not binary, there's always going to be a winner and loser. The trick is that, what you said before, because all platforms have its value, but what this does is it normalises the CPM again. You know, if you get an outcome but you pay relative for that, then it works. So it's less about more attention matters. It's more about, you know, how much do I pay for the outcome relative to the attention I'm buying? So that's where it's going.

27:23Which raises a really good question because, I mean, ever since I started my career 30 years ago, whatever it was now, you know, CPM's been in my lingo, right? You talk about CPM, it's one measure that allows you then to compare lots of different media and how much you're spending in its kind of efficiency measure, I suppose. What could we call? I mean, what do we name the new, what's the new thing going to be? Cost per many less thousand. Where does it go next in terms of, is there a metric we can then create? No, it comes back. I say we, but you know. Well, look, CPM is going to come back, right?

27:52So because at the end of the day, there is a value occasion. John Waite who is amazing in our industry talks about this all the time so the value equation for an advertiser is you know what is from a publisher perspective how much reach can I get you know what does it cost and what is the quality and or attention right so those three things are important and at the end of the day you're always going to need the CPM will come back to be whole again once the reach component is fixed. So one thing that has been interesting with attention is, you know, we're all learning, right? And so I think we're ready for metrics that are simple for advertisers to understand to kind of get their head around what is it that they're buying?

28:47And that's kind of next phase. Yeah, because that feels to me, I think most marketers out there will go, ah, yeah, I get there's this thing called attention. I get seen and served as a different thing. I want to move to that. And it almost feels like we need a language, a bit of help with the language, don't we, to go, ah, now I know what I'm buying. But what is next is metrics around the volume of attention relative to the reach components. So big on our agenda. And also, how do you do it? So if you describe what you do for media planners, how do you go around the planning process? What does that look like?