The MMA Impact MENA webinar, moderated by mobile ad network AdColony's General Manager EMEA & LATAM Warrick Billingham and featuring L’Oréal Egypt CMO Shaima Ismail, P&G at Starcom MENA Strategy, Insight, and Data Lead Donnacha Kinsella, and Lumen Research Managing Director Mike Follet, explored the importance of attention in advertising and how the right attention metrics can be measured.

Billingham said, “It is no secret that advertising has always been about attention. For the brands, it is important not just to understand but directly know if their ads are creating attention on their target audience. It’s just now that it can be measured much better in the digital world compared to before with the advantages of eye-tracking and other digital tools. Brands have the opportunity to leverage this once-in-an-era transformation by leading the imperative for marketing change and adopting proven, peer-driven, and scientific best practices, without compromise.”

Importance of the attention economy
80% of the advertisement is now digital, which brings the importance of actual attention on driving sales and brand metrics. Posts, newspaper advertisements have always been an issue. But with digital advertising, there is this assumption that the inventory is infinite. So, you can have as many ads as you like. Thousands, millions, billions of ads are served but lots of serving doesn’t mean that users have looked at it. With ad verification, brands can understand metrics such as valid, viewable, brand-safe, quality.

Measuring attention
Measuring attention is never easy, and verification is important but still, many marketers in many regions don’t use verification tools. With ad verification, brands can understand metrics such as valid, viewable, brand-safe, quality. In terms of effectiveness, a lot of advertisers use media brand lift studies or track panel analysis to engage or measure their campaigns. This allows brands to see which digital advertising they should move with to get a better business impact. If brands stick only to the ad verification and what it gives in terms of ad viewability, that would be one example of the silent measurement. We need to look beyond, to the impact this ad had on the consumer.

Tips for marketers
When the campaign is running in the different digital touchpoints you cannot really confirm if the results of the brand studies you are getting are specifically designated platforms for your video campaigns because the campaign is running on multi-platforms and cross-channels.

Another challenge is scalability. How much of a quick and large access to consumers can brands have to really understand the impact on them and to be able to get the assessment of the campaign impact?

Marketers ultimately want to know what their return on ad spend is going to be with advanced data solutions and customer data platforms being developed. They are actually getting closer to understanding the customer value and or maybe even the customer lifetime value. All advertisers and marketers are thought to be heading in this direction.

The attention metric was not known and could not be measured so far; no one actually knew what kind of actions to take. But now, thanks to companies like Lumen, which can measure attention, brands both know what to do and are aware of consumers' behaviors and reactions. From this point on, it will be important for brands to take action, not just talk about consumer attention anymore.

Watch the full webinar here.