In the latest Radiocentre Ireland webinar, Mike Follett, CEO Lumen Research gave a fascinating presentation on the latest thinking on the attention economy. You can watch the full webinar and download the presentation by clicking on the buttons below.

Mike wrote an article to accompany the webinar and here it is.

How Ireland invented the AttentionEconomy

Mike Follett, CEO, Lumen Research

 Attention is the hottest topic in advertising at the moment: the subject of conferences and controversies, vigorous promotion and vicious backlashes(and backlashes to those backlashes).

But while this may all seem very new to the rest of the English-speaking world, it’s old hat to Irish science. As I was at pains to point out in a recent talk to Radiocentre Ireland, Irish thinkers and philosophers have laid the groundwork for all the key concepts that now underpin the way we think about advertising attention.

It was the philosopher George Berkeley who first posed the problem of viewability. It was the scientist Robert Boyle who suggested the probabilistic methods that allow us to infer a solution to this problem. And it was the novelist Iris Murdoch who reminds us that once we have solved the technical challenges, we’re still left to grapple with the ethics of attention.

 Is anybody watching (or listening?)  

Advertisers buy OTS - the ‘opportunity to see’. But an opportunity is not a guarantee. Just because people could see or hear an ad, doesn’t mean that they will in fact notice it. And if no one notices your ad, can it really be said to exist? We’re reminded of the way Bishop Berkeley put it hundreds of years ago: if a tree falls in the forest, and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a noise?

This gap between what people could see, and what they do in fact engage with, is the fundamental insight of all the attention economy work that’s going on at the moment. As an industry, we have blithely assumed that just because we have bought an impression we have made an impression. But this is simply not true. People are very good at ignoring advertising, and if people don’t attend to your advertising then it might as well not be there. Esse est percipi, at least when it comes to advertising.  

Measuring and modelling attention

Attention technology companies like Lumen try to understand the gap between the possibility and the actuality of attention. We have conducted eye tracking research amongst over 800,000 people around the world to measure the relationship between viewability and actual viewing for ads, and the differences by device, channel, platform and format.

If you do enough research, you can notice patterns in the data: big ads tend to get more attention than small ads; video ads do better than static ads; ads with sound get more visual attention than ads without. These patterns are so regular that you can begin to make a predictive model of attention, that estimates how likely an ad will be viewed based on its viewability characteristics.

This probabilistic approach was one championed by the father of the modern experimental method, Robert Boyle. From his vast castle in County Waterford, he conducted controlled experiments to isolate variables, infer causes and construct scientific laws.

Famously, his probabilistic approach allowed him to prove something that wasn’t there: the existence of the vacuum.

And inspired by his approach, an eye tracking company like Lumen has been able to do the unthinkable, and estimate audio-only attention. Working with podcast and radio stations in the US as part of the dentsu Attention Economy project, we were able to use what we knew about the relationship between viewable time, visual attention and ad recall to infer the audio attention that must go to radio ads, based on their audible time and ad recall.

It was an Irishman who invented the inductive method of thinking – but he was good enough to share it with the rest of us.

Ethics of Attention

Lumen’s predictive models of attention, inspired by the thinking of Berkeley and Boyle, are used globally to measure and optimise advertising campaigns. If you know how much attention each of your ad impressions is generating, you can link this to the price you paid for the ad (to estimate the ‘cost of attention’) or to any sales that are generated by the ad (to understand the ‘value of attention’). Finally, you can combine the two to work out the ‘profitability of attention’ – something that we did with media auditors Ebiquity recently.

When you start to trade off this ‘cost of attention’ and ‘value of attention’, an interesting picture is revealed. The best performing media all seem to have one thing in common: professionally made content. Cinema, TV, radio, and digital news media all seem to generated is proportionate amounts of attention vs their social media counterparts.

This is, in part, down to the nature of the media: ads don’t get much bigger than in cinema, or more intimate than within podcasts.

But part of it is down to the nature of the content that the ads accompany. It’s because people are so excited by the film, or enthralled by the phone in that they also attend to the ads on the screen or in their earbuds.

For those of us who love Hollywood blockbusters, or high quality journalism, or hilarious comedy podcasts, there seems to be a virtuous circle: advertisers can do well by doing good, investing in highly attentive advertising that supports high quality local media.

This is, objectively and commercially, true. But it also begs a question: what if it wasn’t true? What if you could get more attention, for less money, on other, lesser media?

This is the sort of ethical question that Dublin-born Iris Murdoch contemplated in The Sovereignty of Good. As a species, we’re always looking for bad (selfish) reasons to do good (moral)things.  Murdoch goes so far as to say that our intentions even affect our attention: we only notice things according to our moral choices.

This ethical complexity is, of course, atypically Irish trait, and one that the rest of the world will have to wrestle with. We have learned from Berkeley and Boyle about the ‘is’ of attention; but it’s Murdoch who can guide us in the coming debates about the ‘ought’.

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