How To Grab Attention And Make An Impact

23 Jul, 2021

There's been no greater topic of discussion in advertising this year than that of attention. Julia Burton Brown, Commercial Director EMEA at Inskin shares why creativity and context are vital to a firm's attention strategy.

At Inskin, we’re dedicated to finding and excavating the perfect opportunities for our industry to thrive - and as far as attention is concerned - there’s been no greater topic of discussion in advertising this year. First, a bit about us and what we do...

We specialise in multi-screen, high impact digital advertising solutions - and our top priority is to deliver attention for all the campaigns we work on. We design, build and distribute high impact digital advertising formats for brands through high quality creative.

The fundamental issue with advertising is that if an ad isn’t looked at - it can’t have an impact. There is clear evidence that ad campaigns with higher attention drive strong business outcomes such as ROI, sales, conversions, awareness, brand favourability and perception.

Make an Impact

With attention clearly having such a huge impact on ad campaigns in general - the question remains why current industry metrics are incapable of proving this. Viewability tells us if an ad has the opportunity to be seen - but what we really want to know is if it actually has been seen. Without this information - we’re only getting half the story.

To try and solve this problem, we recently partnered with Lumen Research (the leading attention measurement provider in the UK) to provide objective third party attention metrics on every campaign. While this makes us the first format provider of our kind to implement this form of reporting - we don’t want to be the only ones.

Attention metrics should really become the norm for how digital campaigns are measured. It’s so much richer and more valuable than measuring clicks. As we all get better at this, marketers will be able to measure attention across their entire digital campaign and optimise towards it.

Made to Measure

What we’re pursuing with abundance is a single currency to measure attention. We’ve seen it before when brand safety and viewability were the hot topics; it’s now a case of pulling together on attention. It’s becoming all the more clearer that this is the direction the industry is going in - and we think it’s absolutely the right one.

So what has our partnership with Lumen told us about the high impact formats we deliver?

We’ve found we generate up to 20x more attention compared to standard display ad formats. This is why we believe high impact digital should be a category on it’s own, similarly to social or video for instance. At this point in time, it’s bundled into ‘display advertising’ which diminishes its value and impact.

High Impact Digital is an area we’re keen to help promote and develop, and during the Fireside chat hosted by our COO, Anna Forbes, we went into great detail on the subject with Merkle’s CEO Rob Gold. Rob reiterated on numerous occasions that “staying open to solutions and aiming for simplicity” was vital to wider success in the industry.

Let’s Get Creative

Despite all the science around attention – high impact digital couldn’t work without the essential part played by the creative itself.

Creativity is the number one driver of trust in advertising and just because you have a canvas that delivers a greater opportunity to attract attention, this doesn’t necessarily mean people will look at it. We remind our creative partners on every call that users don’t go to websites to look at their advertising.

Yet the importance of creative in digital has gotten lost along the way. When the industry has been so caught in a short term, click-driven efficiency war - we’ve often left the importance of creative execution behind. 

To summarise, long term brand building, with smart, consistent creative - will drive awareness and sales. So much digital marketing is short term performance based and it feels like the balance should be redressed.

With High Impact Digital and the pursuit for attention at the forefront of all our minds, creativity and context are back on the agenda and now we can properly measure its impact.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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