Ok it's confession time. When I was a CMO, I made more than a few mistakes but one stood out more than others - dazzled by the promise of shiny new platforms and their hyper-targeting allure, I fattened-up my brands’ diet to include a big dose of online-only channels.
I knew my target audiences were spending more time and attention online so it all seemed to make brilliant sense. But it turned out to be marketing’s answer to carb-loading because, when the results came back, my brands were seriously over-weight online but not growing.
I had failed to fully understand how important attention is and what it really means when it comes to advertising and brand growth.
The same mistake seems to have been made by the Fortune writer who said this back in 2015, and in much of the more breathless commentary about the implications of consumers’ evolving viewing habits.
“Where the attention goes, the money will inevitably follow. And right now, the attention of a large chunk of the population is being diverted away from traditional content and information channels, and platforms like Facebook and Google are busy vacuuming it up.” Fortune, August 2015.
Here’s the thing: just because Facebook and YouTube have attracted more of your customers’ time looking at screens in recent years it does not mean they’re necessarily the best environments to get those people to pay attention to your advertising.
Now, every media plays a role in brand success so by all means use these platforms – many work beautifully in symbiosis with TV - but don’t make the mistake I did and use them at the expense of the media that works best.
As a brand owner it’s important to know where and why your advertising is going to cut through, or get “attention”, so that it can build memory structures that ultimately nudge sales.
But attention to advertising is not the same thing as time spent looking at a screen - particularly if the ad is not fully viewable, not seen for long enough, or takes up a fraction of the consumer’s screen of choice.
When ThinkTV started life just over a year ago we had a hunch that three things - how much of the ad you can see, how much of the screen it takes up, and how long you see it for - must impact attention, and therefore sales.
To test this idea we asked globally-renowned, and fiercely independent, marketing science academic Professor Karen Nelson-Field - who has carried out work for Google, MARS and Unilever among others - to find out.
Her team spent almost a year assessing video advertising on YouTube, TV and Facebook to work out which generates the most attention, and therefore sales.
The findings are clear, and startling. To save time here’s a video on her rigorous methodology. It's kind of cool.
If you have any questions about this research, which is called The Benchmark Series, please comment below or contact us at ThinkTV.
And, more importantly, here’s what Professor Nelson-Field found:
1. Attention
Attention is made up three things: active viewing, which means you're looking at the ad; active avoidance, where your head is tilted and you’re not looking at the ad; and a middle-ground called passive viewing, where you could be looking at the screen but not the ad – which plays a role too.
Professor Nelson-Field’s team found that TV commands almost twice the active viewing of YouTube and almost 15 times that of Facebook, where the focus in your feed is on friends not ads.
Facebook scored highly on passive viewing – and the findings show that this subconscious processing has an effect, as we’ll see - but it’s active viewing that’s best for sales, as we’ll see too.
YouTube’s score seemed to be hampered by its “Video will play after ad” and clock countdown, in the same way TV has always had to deal with the go-to-the-loo, make-a-cup-of-tea, and now the look-at-your-mobile effect that inevitably can affect some viewing of ads.
2. Sales
But what about sales, where it really counts? Professor Nelson-Field’s team found that attention and product choice are very closely related and that there was significant sameness across all sets of data. Significant sameness is the fancy term that academics use to ensure that their tests and experiments produce the same results – over and over – which gives them confidence their findings are valid.
Facebook beat YouTube, which Professor Nelson-Field says proves that passive viewing certainly can nudge sales. But her overall findings, showing TV well out in front, were consistent with work from global attention economy guru and Harvard Business School Professor Thales S. Teixeira, who in Karen’s words, has already established that: “The platform that commands the greatest active attention gets the sale.”
3. Screen Coverage
To get an even clearer explanation of the results, Karen looked at screen coverage – the amount of the screen a video takes up, and it varies dramatically by media. Facebook averaged just 10%, YouTube was 30%, and TV, where there’s no scrolling, was 100%.
So, in simple terms, anything below 100pc of the pixels playing on a full-screen means less attention and fewer sales. And 100pc pixels playing on a full screen has a much greater impact than 100pc pixels playing on a smaller percentage of the screen.
As we pointed out when we released the first tranche of The Benchmark Series, Professor Nelson-Field measured TV viewing on TV sets, desktops and laptops and measured Facebook and YouTube viewing on laptops and desktops. The second phase of the series will reveal mobile viewing data for all three platforms. The Professor and her team fully expect, based on previous, unreleased work she has carried out in this field, that the same patterns for attention and sales impact will hold. But don’t trust us, wait for 2018 when the results will be released.
Look, the temptation to binge on online-only media has never been greater for marketers, I did it so I get it. And it’s not that Facebook and YouTube don’t work – they do, and the results show this. It’s just that TV works best to secure attention and drive sales.
It’s crucial, as marketers come under even more pressure to deliver, that we rethink some of the simple, binary narratives written about attention and reconsider the quality of the evidence about which media actually gets results. Or, as Professor Nelson-Field so eloquently said at ReThinkTV last month:
“Coverage is always maxed on TV across all devices, and until other platforms take that position, TV will always win in terms of attention cut through and sales.”
Kim Portrate is CEO of ThinkTV.