Out with Viewability, In with ‘Share Of Attention’? It Could Become Advertising’s Next Metric
According to Marc Guldimann, CEO at Sled Mobile, viewability might not be all it’s cracked up to be.
Though it has gained a lot of currency as of late, paying for viewability is never going to be like buying 10 gallons of gas, says Guldimann.
“Advertising’s “thing” is more nebulous, but at its core the advertising industry is about buying and selling attention, so it makes sense that the metric of sale for advertising should attempt to measure attention,” he writes in AdExchanger. “Today display advertising uses the impression, but it does a poor job of yielding a consistent amount of attention. As a result, it’s no wonder that the industry is rushing to anoint new currencies metrics of sale.”
Viewability, this CEO contends, doesn’t “have the granularity required to be the pricing metric for a transaction in its own right.” Neither does time in view.
But what Guldimann calls “Share Of Attention” could change the landscape.
“Technological means can be used to quantify the amount of attention paid to an ad,” he says. “Chartbeat, for example, measures attention in large part by tracking movement or interaction via a mouse, according to Gigaom.”
There’s also a case to be made for interruptive ads.
“A simpler, albeit potentially less accurate, way to measure attention is to use interruptive ads,” notes Guldimann. “If an ad is interruptive, it captures 100 percent of attention paid to the medium while it’s in view. Interruption has worked for TV, radio, print, video, social feed and even Snapchat ads.”
Interruptive ads, which still give readers control of how long they want to spend with the content, could offer the granularity and specificity required to be a metric of sale.
Yes, we’ve come a long way from “the click” as a measurement of impact.
“Now, measuring share of attention down to the cost per second could do for digital brand advertisers what CPC did for the direct-response industry: revolutionize it by removing buy-side risk,” concludes Guldimann.
