Advertisers want your attention, but how do they know they have it?
originally published: The Guardian
Your attention is the most valuable resource in the world. It powers the giant consumer corporations of our time, Google and Facebook et al, providing enough profit to let them invest in developing self-driving carsand contact lenses that check your blood sugar. Consider that for a second. The great innovations of Google X are all funded by advertising.
But even before the internet, and the collapsing price of oil, it was always valuable. The media-industrial complex was created to aggregate attention and sell it to advertisers.
The task of advertising is to draw attention to something, from the Latin advertere, to turn towards.
In order to buy and sell something, we needed a currency. We settled on the impression: one person being exposed to something once. Attention is a complex and analogue aspect of consciousness – its most directed form – which makes it a small part of the most complex system in the known universe. The complex, fundamentally analogue, nature of attention, which has many different facets, is converted into the simple, inherently binary, impression.
People in media know this uncertainty is built into the currency. An impression is only an opportunity to see (OTS). Advertisers have always known that people get up during commercial breaks. No one knows which articles are being read in a newspaper. More than one person might read it, which leads to hard to prove pass-along multipliers. Circulation figures don’t represent the total number of readers, but the total possible number. There is a lot of rounding in media maths.
This blurriness also seemingly allows for the opaque reporting that has damaged the reputation of one of the largest media buying agency in Australia, Mediacom. Rates and discounts with media owners are specific to each agency and closely guarded. An Ernest & Young audit showed the agency had falsified reports to clients to conceal additional discounts they had received from broadcasters.
Former Mediacom chief executive Jon Mandel alleged that agency rebates and kickbacks were widespread across the globe at the Association of National Advertisers Media Leadership Conference in the USA, to the extent that he eventually felt compelled to quit. The issue is so significant that a financial analyst at Pivotal Research has downgraded the advertising sector because of concerns over media accounting and rebates. It also seems to have triggered a remarkable number of media agency pitches from some of the biggest spenders in the world – recently dubbed Mediapalooza 2015 in the US. There is currently more than $16bn of spend up for grabs. WPP chief executive Sir Martin Sorrelltold communications magazine Campaign: “I don’t think it’s a coincidence … we can’t remember anything like this.”
In this digital age, the chain of substitutions and rounding errors is extended into the seemingly concrete number of impressions served. People started thinking of the numbers as real, because we can measure every unit served from an server to a browser. Here is where it all gets even messier.
Digital display advertising is increasingly sold and allocated programmatically. This means that algorithms are used to bid for and then serve advertising to websites in fractions of seconds via blind auctions across vast networks of publishers and sites. Additional software is needed to report on how this happens because it is very big data indeed.
Functionally, this means that no one actually knows where the digital display advertising is actually being served. This became obvious when a pornographic advertisement was served into a children’s application in the UK and the company being advertised admitted it was “unable to identify the third party responsible for placing the ad”. If all this sounds familiar, it is hauntingly reminiscent of the high-frequency trading algorithms and subsequent financial meltdowns that Michael Lewis exposed in his book Flash Boys.
According to Comscore, 5.3tn digital ad impressions were served in the US in 2012. Since then, things have become so much more complicated and opaque, that no one seems to know how many are being served anymore, but we can safely assume it hasn’t decreased. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), one-third of all digital ads are fraudulent, where the ad is only ‘viewed’ by software or “non-human traffic”. According to Google, over 56% are not viewable – they never enter the viewable part of a browser window. The fuzzy media metrics remain, it would seem.
Recently a few online media companies, including the Economist, Forbes and theFinancial Times, announced initiatives to sell attention minutes rather than impressions. The emergence of experimental currencies is a harbinger of bigger disruption on the horizon, just as Bitcoin is for the global financial markets. Trust in the finance industry has been fundamentally damaged following scandal after scandal done in the name of shoring up the bottom line and getting that huge bonus. Now the same thing is happening to advertising.
Business cannot be done without a level of trust in the currency of exchange, even when it’s something as hard pin down as human attention.
Faris Yakob is the co-founder of Genius Steals. He is the author of Paid Attention: Innovative Advertising for a Digital World. You can follow him @faris.
Head of Strategy who combines brand and comms strategy.
9y@Tom - I don't think anyone anywhere in this article is suggesting that. I think that with attribution what people are trying to do is imply which part of the ADVERTISING spectrum attributes most. And even the most spreadiest of spreadsheet media planners will not equate one impression to the other - so I understand your pain, just not what the cause of your pain is.
Fractional CMO for cannabis, sustainable and community orientated brands.
9yGreat piece Faris. Ad Tech has brought amazing efficiencies to the media business but it has also made it more intangible, highly complex and with little evidence of being able to move the needle in ways that brand marketers get. Big brand and media success stories like GoPro are more to do with human stories at their core than about the channels and media mix. We will continue to embrace tech for efficiencies but rely more on human utility, curation and defined creative vision. A media agency commitment to bring that vision to life across multiple touch points will win the day.
Buyer for quality womens clothing at THE CARRIAGE TRADE- Better ladies fashions
9yI agree with you Tom , the way things are presented it is a wonder that anyone can read their emails. Apple is confusing and others are not much better. Need new software.
There is so much about modern Media and Advertising that is so overwhelmingly baffling and so obviously flawed that it blows my mind. I think the top is the idea of attribution, that we can find a single element in a pattern of a billion and attribute success to that. The one below this is the notion of a I ( impression) or an M, as if a 60 second Cinema ad that brings people to tears could be the same as a Ad Word banner on a mobile page below the fold. If I could wish for one thing it would be to celebrate maths, to love logic and to reward calculations and measurement, but to do so knowing that all these things and trumped overwhelmingly, and every single time, by creativity, empathy and gut. What was the CPM of the Ferrari F40 poster of my childhood? What was the CPM of the experience of traveling Virgin America after American, or the Dollar Shave club viral? None of our system makes any sense of quality.