Media Buying Briefing: Omnicom’s OMD takes the next step in turning attention metrics into a valuable KPI for brands

By Michael Bürgi • November 22, 2021 •

Ivy Liu

This Media Buying Briefing covers the latest in agency news and media buying for Digiday+ members and is distributed over email every Monday at 10 a.m. ET. More from the series →

Attention in all its forms has inherent value. A teacher needs the attention of her students to help them learn. A parent needs his child to pay attention when teaching them how to safely cross a road. Likewise, publishers, platforms and all content makers need consumers to pay attention so they can prove the ad time and space sold to marketers can help move the sales needle.

Omnicom’s OMD is on a mission to turn all the intellectual effort that’s gone into considering attention as a metric into activation and a usable KPI. Omnicom Media Group’s newly elevated global CEO Florian Adamski hinted strongly that attention is a vital element in gauging effectiveness for clients in media when Digiday spoke with him recently. “We need a better way of understanding how consumers react to certain formats, platforms and devices,” said Adamski. “So attention planning is going to be one of our core initiatives going forward, and we need to redefine the outcomes of what we do.”

Working with Australian audience measurement firm Amplified Intelligence, led by founder and CEO Karen Nelson-Field, OMD is working to codify attention-related levels of behavior. Amplified Intelligence’s app, AttentionTRACE, which is up and running in 10 countries at between 500 and 3,000 users per country, enables the camera on a phone, TV set or tablet to film the consumer watching ads (and seeks three levels of consent from the consumer before activating the camera). From the observed behaviors, three levels of attention have been determined:

Active, in which the user is looking directly at the ad
Passive, in which the user is looking at the screen but not the ad
Non-attention, in which the user isn’t looking at the screen at all

From that information, the degree of mental availability — the likelihood of a particular brand coming to mind when a consumer is looking to purchase something — can be determined, which is then applied to the brand’s message to help bolster short-term advertising strength.

“One of the big learnings is around how much time it takes to get mental availability, to shift from simply a nudge into something that is more lasting and meaningful, that leads to brand growth,” said Chrissie Hanson, chief strategy office for OMD Worldwide. “And it’s three to four seconds. That is both really reassuring and then also it can be quite startling. It prompts a really interesting discussion with your creative partners.”

The importance of the creative side isn’t lost on Melanie Norris, managing director and head of planning at Omnicom sibling BBDO Worldwide. “It starts with the inextricable link between creative effectiveness and platform performance in helping us get to the right attention,” said Norris. “This data leads us to a depth of insight into attention that… we can activate against and really attract the right attention and think about which platforms and channels are right for which brands. Every client has a different problem.”

Though Amplified Intelligence is working with multiple agencies across several holding companies as well as several publishers, progress with Omnicom has been the most significant. “We’ve worked with [Hanson] and team across not only just understanding how much attention is paid by platform or by format, but also answering some quite big questions around what does the distribution of attention look like? How does this relate to short-term advertising strength versus mental availability, which is the gold standard for brand growth, essentially? We’ve got lots more to do, but yeah, it’s kind of fun.”

Several of OMD’s clients are on board with testing attention out. “Understanding how our messages break through with guests is a critical metric and something we assess to understand the impact of our work across our campaigns,” said Francesca Cardarelli, senior director, marketing planning & digital marketing strategy of McDonald’s Canada. “Evaluating our content and media placements through the lens of attention is a natural extension of this process, and will help assure that our investments are resulting in meaningful attention from our guests.”

Added David Jiménez, advertising manager for Renault Mexico: “Working with OMD and Amplified Intelligence, we’re gaining insight into attention ceilings for different digital formats and platforms — knowledge that’s critical to winning the high early attention that drives both sales and share.”

One caution AI’s Nelson-Field: for attention to affect sales, the messaging still needs to fit the platform and the mission. “Attention might be the metric of the moment. But at the end of the day, if the brand isn’t clearly articulated, it’s going to not have a relationship with an outcome,” she said. “Attention is a way for your brand to flourish in both performance and brand marketing, but it still is up to the creative in the message and the agency to get that right.”

Color by numbers

Horizon Media’s WHY unit, which researches behavioral and social trends, uncovered that consumers’ expectations of marketers and brands are changing when it comes to corporate responsibility. In a report titled “Marketing with Consciousness: How Culture is Redefining Business Expectations,” Horizon urges companies to prioritize raising their consciousness, which translates to pivoting business priorities from corporate social responsibility (focusing on good corporate citizenship after satisfying all other business and economic priorities) to corporate conscious responsibility (becoming an agent of change for collective growth and betterment).

Among the report’s findings:

6 in 10 American adults say, “Recently I have begun working harder at becoming more self-aware.” That rises to 8 in 10 among adults 18-34.
65% of American adults believe “brands must contribute to the greater good of humanity. Those who don’t will become obsolete.”
61% of respondents say it’s just as important to them that a brand uses sustainable production methods as price in their purchase decisions.
85% prefer brands that admit faults with full transparency.
61% believe brands must play an active role in stopping the perpetuation of harmful stereotypes.
And 55% believe all companies will operate in a way that has little to no impact on the environment in the near future.

Takeoff & landing

Dentsu’s iProspect landed global media duties, including buying and planning across brand and performance, for Kering, parent of luxury brands including Balenciaga, Saint Laurent, Gucci, Alexander McQueen and others.
IPG’s Initiative won the $175 million U.S. media business for Intuit’s Quickbooks brand, beating out several Omnicom shops, including incumbents Hearts & Science and Decoded.
Faveeo, an AI-powered newsletter aggregator that aims to focus only on reputable content, formed an advisory board helmed by agency veterans. Colin Kinsella, former North American CEO of Havas Media, will serve as chairman, and joining him are ex-Ogilvy CEO John Seifert and Jordan Bitterman, currently CMO of programmatic firm TripleLift, but a veteran of Mindshare and Digitas.
Data cloud company Snowflake and martech firm Zeta are partnering to create two new products: Zeta Connect, which melds Snowflake’s data tools with Zeta’s consumer data platform; and Zeta Enrich, which uses Snowflake tech to clean unstructured data into targeted audience segments.

Direct quote

“It’s a democratization of what too often can be very slow and very expensive customer segmentation. That’s where analytics is going. It’s like media mix modeling: some people are out there selling that thing for a million dollars, you get two Powerpoints a year and it takes 3,700 days. That’s not where the market is. The mid-market especially doesn’t have time to wait for Moses’ tablets/Powerpoint decks to come down from on high.”
Jared Belsky, CEO of Acadia, a new agency seeking out mid-market clients, talking about the new priorities around data and customer segmentation.

Speed reading

Digiday’s senior news editor Seb Joseph uncovers Procter & Gamble’s quiet but steady moves to keep bringing more of its media planning operations in-house, for cost-containment and control reasons.
And senior media editor Tim Peterson tracks the slowdown in subscriber growth among the major streaming platforms in his latest Future of TV briefing.
AdExchanger looks at the new tools Snap is rolling out to help media buyers with multi-format delivery, including adding augmented reality elements.