Attention Please! The Power of Pre-Testing Campaigns

Attention has become quite the buzzword in advertising of late, and with good reason. It’s an incredibly useful metric, taking consumers further down the funnel of engagement from simply being able to view an ad to actually interacting with it.

With no current industry standard for measuring attention in place, though, solutions have been cropping up everywhere – creating a saturated market with every proxy for attention imaginable, one that’s confusing and difficult for advertisers to navigate. As industry experts who have been leading the charge in creative ad testing for over a decade, we’ve taken these deep learnings and utilised biometric testing to capture actual human response to content for a true attention read. We’ve also taken things a step further and launched the industry’s first end-to-end solution for Attention Measurement – a solution which involves pre-testing your asset to understand the intrinsic attention measures, activating media through high-attention private marketplaces (PMPs) and post-campaign reporting and measurement (among other elements).

Pre-testing your creative is essential and should not be considered optional. This point is underscored by a Nielsen study which found that when creative is strong, it’s the overwhelming driver of in-market success (up to a whopping 89% for digital advertising!). In other words, it’s arguably the most critical portion of the distribution process, which makes sense considering it’s the only element the consumer truly experiences. Therefore, knowing exactly which elements of a campaign are capturing consumers’ attention – before it’s even run – allows brands and advertisers to optimise their ads and thus drive the strongest results.

Leveraging AI facial coding technology, Nexxen Studio’s Active Attention Measurement helps brands unearth exactly which elements of the creative are capturing consumers’ attention. Our comprehensive solution captures second-by-second attention across ten audience sub-sets, including KPI audiences, e.g., those with high intent to purchase. From there, we provide brands and advertisers actionable creative recommendations for optimisation. For instance, we can tell a brand exactly which frames are resonating with which demographics, and how to cut down or optimise the ad for full attention capture. All of which can be executed by our in-house creative studio, who work seamlessly with our insight experts to create custom builds for all screen-types.

In a world of information overload, consumer attention is prime real estate – which, along with landscaped gardens, is increasingly difficult to acquire. That said, we like to think we’ve fine-tuned proprietary solutions to make attention measurement and optimisation easier and more focused for advertisers. As such, we can guide brands through building advertising campaigns that are not just designed to capture attention, but have the capacity to track and assess how successful they’ve been in this endeavour.