Question – what was the last advert you saw before you read this?
I’m not psychic by any means, but my assumption is that you won’t be able to recall much about the brand or creative, despite possibly having only just seen the work.
That’s not because advertising doesn’t work, though of course I’d say that, more that many marketers are using the wrong messaging on the wrong platform targeting the wrong devices at the wrong time.
So, a little bit to tackle, then. There are a few reasons for this, so let’s focus on the issue of attention first.
The pros (and cons) of performance marketing
Because of budget constraints, and big promises about ‘zero waste’ and measurement, the past decade has seen a rush to performance marketing. That is, marcomms activity designed to elicit an almost immediate response from the audiences exposed to it, with messaging keenly focused on the product or service being advertised (as opposed to the brand or entity offering said product or service).
This isn’t a bad thing in and of itself. In fact, performance marketing has brought many benefits to those using performance tactics and channels. What used to be difficult to measure is now much more straightforward, and marketers now have the ability to much more easily demonstrate the financial impact of their activity in just a few clicks, theoretically helping marketing look more like the essential business function that we’ve always known it to be, and less like the ‘colouring in department’, as I’ve heard many an in-house team affectionately dubbed. It promises lower costs per lead, and lower costs overall, than traditional above the line channels. From a financial point of view, what’s not to love? More visibility for less spend, and less ‘mess’ than other media forms, I can’t imagine an easier sell to the purse-string holders. That said, it’s not all roses in the garden.
There’s pressure on marketers to do more with less, eschewing broad beam media like press, radio and TV in favour of measurable, low-cost digital media. While this works for some brands trading with their audience at a very transactional level and piggy-backing on things like category search or on the back of rival brands, it can cause some issues when it comes to building the memory structures needed to create mental availability and purchase consideration.
The performance plateau approaches
The rise of performance has, in many cases, turned into an addiction that is starting to cause very real problems for marketers that have overdone it. Perhaps the first place to start is with the work of Tom Roach and noted econometrician Dr Grace Kite on ‘the performance plateau’. In essence, the plateau is the point where a brand’s performance marketing efforts cease to provide effective returns as the brand has mopped up all the available sales that it can from those currently in market, and hasn’t done the sufficient work on building its own brand recall and mental availability to drive audiences directly to it. It’s a scary position, and one which brands are increasingly finding themselves in (ASOS and Airbnb are two high profile examples of business built on performance marketing that have had to change tack and focus on brand for growth).
It’s likely to get worse before it gets better, with the homogenisation of media and creative strategy behind a few performance-centric platforms and media types still being seen in much of the data on advertising investment. Indeed, even as global media spend hits record highs, most of this outlay is concentrated within just five media outlets – including the big social media groups, with a piece of research from WARC earlier this year reporting that Alibaba, Alphabet (owner of Google and YouTube), Amazon, ByteDance (owner of TikTok and Douyin) and Meta (Facebook and Instagram) – will together take over half of global advertising spend in 2024 (I’ve written more about that here)
These platforms, popular though they are, in many instances offer limited opportunity for the kind of rich, emotion-driven creative that has been demonstrably effective over the years and the thing needed to get off the plateau. Indeed, while ‘The Long and the Short of It’ and it’s 60/40 rule are without doubt Field and Binet’s most famous work, the two have also made the case that it’s not enough to get the balance of brand and performance right in your spend – your advertising will also be more creative if you produce emotive advertising that reinforces brand and is delivered via high attention media.
High attention is the key phrase here. While reach is useful, and we can’t be irresponsible with the budgets that we are entrusted with to drive impact, we need to make sure that we’re not just shooting for reach, but attention, as our key metric. By this, I mean that rather than just being content with the idea that your audience may be ‘exposed’ to your ad, can we instead try and ensure that the audience must notice the ad, too? Indeed, how can we expect audiences to act on our messaging if our messaging passes them by in the first instance?
Source: Dr Grace Kite & Tom Roach
ATTENTION – The topic of the next section…
Recent work from Ebiquity shows us that this happens more often than we marketers might like to admit, with some channels being particularly poor at generating attention. Across the report Ebiquity has multiple models that demonstrate that while our marketing reports may look impressive to some lay-people that we report into, where we can demonstrate wide reach in a cost-effective manner, we start to see a different picture when we optimise for attention rather than reach.
As a side point, when we’re often targeting more specific, hard-to-reach audiences in construction and manufacturing, surely reach shouldn’t be the be-all-and-end-all, anyway?
One such Ebiquity model is looking at ‘active seconds per 1,000 impressions’ across several channels – principally linear TV (30 secs), YouTube (15 & 30 secs), Facebook in-feed and desktop display. While the difference in the channels may make for an ‘apples and oranges’ comparison, applying the Media Rating Council’s (MRC) viewability standards across all channels shows something quite interesting. Yes, adverts are visible across all platforms, but once we start to look at what portion of ads are ‘actually viewed’ by audiences, and their total dwell time for advertising exposure, previous notions around the affordability of channels get flipped on their head.
Mark Zuckerberg won’t like this, but where desktop display has long been the cost-effective poster child of hard-pressed B2B marketing managers, the Ebiquity data shows that this type of advertising delivers poor returns on attention – with only 9% of impressions classed as ‘actually viewed’. Somewhat surprisingly given oft-quoted best practice, TV’s ‘actually viewed’ metrics stand at just 43%, with Facebook in-feed (81%) and YouTube pre-roll leading the way with a whopping 92% of active viewership per impression.
When it comes to dwell time on ads, however, TV comes roaring back to dominate the other channels, to ultimately remain the most effective channel for attention capture and ‘real’ audience reach, with 5,937 ‘attentive seconds’ per 1,000 impressions. Arguably, YouTube may offer the best overall bang for buck as even with a lower average dwell time of 4.9 seconds (conveniently, around the usual ‘skip’ button time), the platform still offers 4,524 seconds of attention per 1,000 impressions.
For brevity, Ebiquity’s calculations look like this: (% of impressions actually viewed) x (dwell time) x (number of impressions) = Attentive seconds per 1,000 impressions. To that end, here’s the full table as presented in the report:
Source: Ebiquity, the challenge of attention.
Undoing the damage of display
While a popular choice for reaching B2B audiences, it’s fair to say that desktop display performs horribly on the basis of attention measurement in the report. While cost effective and measurable, even if we can reach our audiences, we often can’t make them pay attention – they’re scrolling past content without stopping to notice the brand, creative and messaging, never mind actually acting on any call to action given. On that basis, we can pat ourselves on the back for broadening reach, but not much else.
Let’s assume that TV is out of the question for most of ‘our’ brands (which I’d argue is madness, but that’s a different topic) and say that YouTube is the next most viable high-attention channel – we’re looking at a whopping 99% of our content being classified as ‘viewable’, and 92% actually viewed to the point of either completion or skip. Arguably, even where content is skipped, the user has still had to be tactile with the content to dismiss it – and so as long as we are memorable and that we brand the content correctly, the media should have the desired effect.
It makes sense. While Field and Binet first noted the need for ‘emotional advertising’ more than a decade ago, the likes of Orlando Wood have been doing some great work to unpack the things that brands can do to generate emotion and attention, and many of these work very well in the video space. In his book ‘Lemon’, Wood argues for the use of right brain/broad beam devices in advertising to generate emotion and thus, attention and recall.
Just look at how many of the attributes of advertising in the right-hand column are possible with video that static display advertising simply can’t achieve, no matter how well crafted, well placed and well financed. If we can create assets that harness these attributes, place them in areas that are difficult to ignore, entertain our audiences and aim for attention and recall, we’d be in a great place.
Does this mean the end of digital display, or even performance marketing? Of course not. To steal a Ritson-ism, the word ‘and’ is the most important part of ‘The Long and The Short if It’. The purpose of this isn’t to say don’t focus on performance, it’s to not focus solely on performance. Even if it’s working, it’ll only work until it stops – by which time your peers that have focused on brand building and generating attention may just have achieved their aims – and your next meeting with the FD might be a bit more uncomfortable.
While tactics like this help marketers to manage bottom lines, attractive in the current climate, do they not create tougher conversations later when savvy stakeholders ask what ‘real’ results look like? My prediction is that we’re about to find out.
