Attention metrics’ play to replace viewability is inching closer to reality. And using attention for ad targeting could help advertisers avoid undesirable ad inventory that games viewability.
Attention measurement provider Adelaide announced Tuesday that attention-based segments are available for pre-bid targeting in The Trade Desk (TTD). Buyers can target low-, medium- and high-attention inventory via the DSP’s self-serve platform.
Until recently, attention was a post-campaign measurement. But momentum has been building towards using attention as a pre-campaign targeting parameter, which could eventually impact how ad inventory is priced – similar to how metrics such as viewability influence pricing.
Last year, Adelaide launched targeting based on its proprietary Attention Unit (AU) in partnership with Yahoo DSP and SSPs, such as Sharethrough. Now, its pre-bid integration with The Trade Desk, the largest independent DSP, pushes the availability of attention-based targeting even further, said Adelaide CEO Marc Guldimann.
The shift toward targeting based on attention rather than viewability should help advertisers avoid inventory that exploits viewability measurement by overloading pages with ads, such as made-for-advertising (MFA) sites and outstream video, said David Nyurenberg, director of video product development and innovation at Rain the Growth Agency, which participated in a beta test.
Advertisers who tested the solution between August and September reported a 58% increase in return on ad spend and 62% higher click-through rates when compared to control audience groups, according to Adelaide.
Shifting to pre-bid
Adelaide’s pre-bid integration with The Trade Desk also changes how attention measurement can be applied in campaigns, Nyurenberg added.
Historically, advertisers would partner with an attention measurement vendor like Lumen or Adelaide and wrap their creative in these vendors’ tags, he said. These vendors would provide a measurement dashboard that assigns attention scores at the site level to help buyers determine which publisher inventory they purchased had the best chance of engaging audiences.
After reviewing the site-level results, buyers would then have to find ways to manually optimize their campaigns toward these high-attention sites for future campaigns, he said.
But with Adelaide’s pre-bid segments, campaigns should, in theory, auto-optimize to the attention level targeted by the buyer, he said.
The Trade Desk’s Kokai interface, which launched last June, already includes many features that allow buyers to curate site lists, such as an interface for selecting publishers from TTD’s SP500+ list, Nyurenberg said. Adelaide’s attention-based segments add another targeting layer buyers can apply to curate publisher inventory.
The expansion of these curation features within the DSP’s platform reflects The Trade Desk’s growing interest in evaluating media quality, Guldimann said. That change in focus, plus TTD’s inventory scale and its popularity with Adelaide’s brand and agency partners, sealed the deal on the partnership, he added.
Attention tiers
At launch, Adelaide is making three different levels of attention targetable within TTD’s platform: low, medium and high.
As a general rule, the high-attention category includes inventory ranked in the top 30% of all inventory available via TTD, based on Adelaide’s scoring. Medium attention includes the middle 40%, and low attention includes the bottom 30%.
However, Adelaide applies these classifications differently depending on the inventory type, said Jordan Weiers, senior director of partnerships and business development at Adelaide.
Display, online video and CTV inventory will have separate attention scoring. Video-based media tends to get higher attention scores than display, so the bar for high-attention video is higher, Weiers said. Plus, TTD will let advertisers customize their own thresholds for high, medium and low attention, he added.
While TTD has lately emphasized its scale in CTV as a driver of its business, adding attention measurement for display inventory could have the biggest impact for buyers, said Kieran Geyer, paid media manager at Prudential Financial. There’s simply more display inventory available on the open web, he said, “so purchasing low-quality or low-attention display media can have an outsized impact on a campaign.”
Currency and quality
Avoiding low-attention – and therefore low-quality – inventory is becoming a top priority for buyers, given the high amount of wasted ad spend that goes to MFA sites and outstream video.
Rain specializes in video and CTV, Nyurenberg said, and optimizing toward viewability for video campaigns often means optimizing toward outstream, muted, auto-play video players that garner 100% viewability scores by following users as they scroll through pages. When Rain applied pre-bid attention targeting, it saw a 10x increase in the amount of sound-on inventory it purchased, he said – which is an indicator of more premium instream placements.
And MFA sites in particular can feature over a dozen video and display ads on a page that meet viewability standards, but which typically don’t boost brand awareness or lower-funnel conversions, Geyer said. “Knowing that you’re only investing in placements that are high-attention and correlated to a media outcome should be table stakes for every programmatic campaign.”
But can attention really replace viewability as a must for anyone setting up a campaign?
As more buyers target based on attention metrics and demand shifts accordingly, it will likely impact ad inventory pricing down the line, Guldimann said, with high-attention placements commanding premium price points.
However, it’s still too early for attention to be used as a currency without more standardization in the market, Nyurenberg said. “It’s not like anyone is going to bill on attention at the moment” because measurement approaches vary across vendors, he said.
However, pre-bid attention targeting “at least gives us a new KPI to optimize to,” he added. “If you’re optimizing to viewability, you’re actually optimizing to less premium sites.”
