Measuring attentiveness to advertising has become a big deal over the past few years. The ARF helped to fuel this resurgence when they updated their media model.

As I read articles and blogs about advertising attentiveness, most seem to put the challenge of improving attentiveness on the shoulders of creative. Fine, if you want to keep trying to catch lightning in a bottle.

However, the most certain way to get more consumers to pay attention to your advertising on each and every campaign is by targeting advertising to those who give a sh!t about your brand.  

Before I get into evidence, consider this. Every consumer is trying to survive the blizzard of messages they are exposed to each day. To survive, they can’t possibly pay attention to each one of them. How do they decide what gets past their filter? Relevance.  And the main consideration here for marketers is if the consumer considers your brand to be a possible purchase.  It is THEIR choice, not the marketer’s. For example, I drink coffee (a lot) but an ad for Maxwell House is irrelevant to me because that brand is not in my choice set (I like the strong, premium stuff).

So, as you marketers are attempting to measure attentiveness as a function of different creative strategies, know that you might be missing the biggest factor of all.

Evidence from three large scale studies shows that brand preference is a main driver of attentiveness.

Three MMA studies using the “brand as performance” protocols tell the story.  In those studies, we used an analytics partner to track ad impressions and sales/conversion results at an ID level for a backbone of hundreds of thousands of IDs.  We also surveyed 5,000-10,000 individuals for each study from a panel whose IDs were matched to the same identity graph.

So, with this study infrastructure, we can analyze if those who we KNOW were exposed to advertising for the test brand (e.g., based on ad server log files) remember seeing the advertising based on survey results. This was broken out by degree of brand purchase preference (how many points in a constant sum question the respondent gave to the brand of interest).  The hypothesis is that those who gave 0 points (low loyal non-buyers) to the advertised brand would have little recall, even though we know they were exposed.  We expected those who have 1 point (some interest in buying but not the preferred brand) would have more recall.  We expected those who gave 2+ points (Movable Middles essentially) would have the highest level of recall.  We are using recall as a measure of whether the advertising commanded attention from that consumer. The chart shows results were consistent with the hypothesis.

Note that in all three test campaigns, a combination of CTV, online video, display, and social were used so this is independent of media channel.

To support these results that those giving 2+points out of 10 to the advertising brand paid more attention to the ads, we also measured sales lift.  Movable Middles, (the great majority of those giving 2+ points) also exhibited 2-23 TIMES more incremental sales across the 3 brands.

As evidenced by multiple large-scale studies, attentiveness to advertising is significantly higher among those who view the brand as part of their consideration set. Creative strategies can enhance this effect, but without a foundation of relevance, even the best ads risk being ignored. By using a Movable Middle based targeting approach, you’ll not only boost advertising attentiveness but also drive meaningful sales impact.