To measure users’ attention, the Media make use of the quantity of advertising messages (views), the time of the advertising message, and the engagement, i.e. the intensity with which the user interacts with the advertising. These are the Attention Metrics, but 73% of Italian advertising investors know little about them, and 10% have never heard of them. Even the methods of detecting these metrics are little known: only 10% of investors know them in depth, 69% have limited knowledge and 21% do not know any methodology.
These are some of the findings that emerged from the Internet Media Observatory of the School of Management of the Milan Polytechnic.
Le Attention Metrics
According to a research conducted by IAB UK, every day the user is exposed to 4,000 messages and spends 3 hours and 32 minutes online. In response to this situation, the phenomenon linked to Attention Metrics is emerging in the Media industry. According to the Advertising Research Foundation, these metrics can be defined as the degree to which users exposed to advertising are focused on it, in terms of time and intensity of concentration. The perceived interest and potential mainly refer to the investment optimization activity in the Media planning phase. The attention metrics would in fact allow you to better recognize the value of the impressions you buy. A determining element for the dissemination of these metrics will be the ability to measure the correlation between greater advertising attention and business results.
L’addressability
Internet advertising continues to acquire importance in the Italian advertising panorama, collecting a significant share of investments, also thanks to addressability, based on the extensive use of cookies. But the new guidelines of the Privacy Guarantor, and the self-regulation implemented by the big technology companies, have limited the use of cookies because they impact on the user’s privacy. In the last year, in fact, publishers have observed a significant loss of the information in their possession. However, advertising addressability can also take place according to the relevance of the environment in which the advertisement is placed (contextual advertising). In addition, machine learning allows advertisers to move away from keywords and whitelists to rely on AI-based systems, so-called AI-based addressability solutions.
Il “privacy by default”
Measurability is the second area heavily impacted by the ‘privacy by default’ context. For some time now, the degradation of the ‘signals’ that are used to evaluate advertising activities has been the subject of attention and debate, even in Italy. However, the consequences are differentiated according to the measurement tools used. The most widespread tools in Italy are Digital Campaign delivery measurement, adopted by 67% of advertisers, followed by Offline Campaign delivery measurement tools (28%) and Brand tracking/Pre-post test (27%). More limited, the use of advanced tools, such as Marketing Mix Models (21%) or attribution models (7%).
In the near future, however, a stronger use of measurement tools based on incrementality and modeling approaches is expected, which are less severely impacted by the evolution of the context.