Irish Publisher sites over index on advertising attention
Attention measurement has become a key digital advertising metric, IAB Ireland’s Brand council has prioritised Attention as one of their top 5 priorities for our industry.
Seeking to grow understanding of Digital Attention’s role in advertising effectiveness and to add to the work undertaken by our member, The National Lottery, on social attention, IAB Ireland commissioned Lumen Research to undertake a study on Irish publisher sites. The sites: irishtimes.com and independent.ie were selected as representatives of IAB Ireland’s Publisher council. OmnicomMediaGroup was IAB Ireland’s agency partner in the research.
The research design consisted of an online news testing environment designed by Lumen. Respondents undertook a 12 minute online survey, they were shown 5 different articles from irishtimes.com and independent.ie and were able to browse the sites as they would normally do whilst having their eye movements recorded. Each article included one test ad as well as some advertising clutter from several different brands and categories. The test ads were for OMG clients: Aer Lingus, Gas Network Ireland, Skoda and Virgin Media. Respondents then answered a questionnaire to measure spontaneous and prompted brand recall, message takeout, brand favourability and perceptions of advertising on these sites.
Key Findings:
Slow Media leads to greater attention – In this study and other Lumen studies, the data suggests that deeper engagement with content – or slower scrolling – leads to greater ad attention.
Creatives tested in this study achieved around 1.3x more attention than UK benchmarks 1.2x more attention than Global and highlight a relationship between attention and recall.
61% feel that ads on Irish news brands are trustworthy and relevant. Lumen panel data has shown a strong link between trusted sites and increased attention.
Some specific findings and learnings:
- Local creative gains more Attention. Specifically in the Skoda campaign which compared local v global creative, the local ad captured more attention and in turn led to a higher brand favourability scores.
- New creative in the case of the Gas Networks Ireland campaign also gained more Attention. The newer creative which was a progression on the popular previous campaign with a distinctive brand character led to increased prompted recall and improved message takeaway.
- Creative design needs to consider the digital format. Both Virgin Media formats (Video and Mpu) had a very strong performance against relative norms. Like other Lumen studies show, video often captures more viewers than static display formats. However, as Video viewing is often front-loaded, ensure ads are ‘frontloaded’ with distinctive assets in order to improve spontaneous brand recall. In general and in this VM case, the static MPUs scored high for spontaneous brand recognition and messaging.
- Attention leads to brand recall, the longer users engaged with the advertising the more likely they were to recall the brand. Both spontaneous and prompted recall results grew with increased attention When people spent longer engaging with the content – such as the seasonal article tested, attention to the Aer Lingus ad increased by 36%.
This study of advertising attention on quality content sites is a first for IAB Ireland. The findings reflect Lumen Research’s global studies demonstrating the power of ‘slow media’ to drive advertising attention and grow brand favourability measurements.
The particularly strong attention results from Irish quality sites outperforming the UK and Global benchmarks is very good news for the Irish advertising industry.
