Contrary to the belief that the proportion of advertising spend should equate to time spent, the new study, The battle for attention, shows that different media’s ability to hold attention is a critical factor for advertisers and agencies, says Newsworks.
Douglas McCabe, CEO and head of publishing and tech at Enders Analysis, said: “Advertising is increasingly being traded on an audience basis, taking too little into account of the respective qualitative strengths of different media experiences. Consumer immersion in trusted content has a massive impact on awareness, trust and effectiveness of its associated advertising. Attention feels an important step in the right direction.”
As part of the research project, unveiled at an event last week, Newsworks and PwC have created an attention equation that can be applied across different media.
Taking into account two types of attention - both sustained attention on a single media (solus) and alternating attention in a multi-media environment - the equation can be applied to the reach of a media campaign to help assess the potential impact of attention on advertising response.
The equation attributes attention scores to regular consumers of each medium, defining attention as solus media usage plus those who are consuming multiple media simultaneously but give their primary focus to one medium.
Print newspapers top the table with a media attention score of 80% among their regular consumers, followed by regional print newspapers at 76%, short online videos at 75% and national newspaper websites and commercial TV on demand at 73%.
The battle for attention found that regular consumers who are fully immersed in a media are more likely to respond positively to advertising - defined as consumers’ encouragement to purchase, ideas generation, recall, relevance and trust in advertising - than those who are using multiple media simultaneously.
