It’s about attention… not eyeball
Response / Research
The Challenge: Make performance marketing perform better
How do we significantly increase the ROI on our performance marketing in a saturated market? Multiple priorities and KPIs – creative can quickly become too busy for social and display environments.
Consumer attention is finite – if people don’t look at an ad or recall what it said – it can’t possibly affect their behaviour, meaning your media spend is wasted.
Ad recall is 25% if viewed for under 2 seconds, but once the 2 second threshold is reached recall jumps to 52%. This means all your creative must deliver the key takeout within the first 2 seconds.
A Simple Solution: If you want to sell… ‘attention’ is the new metric
In partnership with Three and Samsung, BPL initiated an ongoing optimisation with our research partners. Utilising bespoke eye-tracking technology, we acknowledged the real value of an impression, working alongside the usual metrics – reach and frequency, and engagement, traffic and conversion.
Testing revealed:
a) greatest total dwell time, combining viewability versus percentage of the audience who viewed
b) the survival curve of each creative – that is the percentage of the audience still viewing over time
c) consumer takeout.
Pre-test, all creative executions were already outperforming display and social norms, but we were able to identify the variations that delivered statistically significant marginal gains, before setting creative live.
This demonstrated that:
– simple, subtle movement works well at drawing attention
– single-minded messaging boosts audience recall
– lifestyle imagery performs better than product imagery
– a linear structure to messaging improves brand perception
Powerful Results: Improved CPAs across the board
The exact results were significant improvements in all areas but are commercially sensitive. However, when the optimised creative went live, Three experienced:
-substantial increase in CTR
-significant drop in CPA
These principles are still put into our creative briefs as good practice in the sector.
