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Is there a correlation between high attention scores, low emissions scores and business outcomes?
Brands, including Mars and Nestle-owned Nespresso, are testing technologies to find out, including two new private marketplace (PMP)-based products developed by attention metrics provider Adelaide that were announced last week.
Using attention metrics as a proxy targeting signal for reducing emissions by avoiding wasted impressions makes logical sense, said Ron Amram, senior director of global media at Mars.
“The belief is that a cleaner, more focused media placement is both more effective and more green,” Amram said. “It’s a hypothesis that seems to be playing out.”
Attention and outcomes
Attention metrics may be newly popular, but Mars has been experimenting with them in various forms for years, Amram said.
In addition to Adelaide, Mars collaborated with Realeyes to launch the Agile Creative Expertise tool last year, which optimizes ad creative using attention to drive brand sales lift. Mars has also worked with Lumen, Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify to test their attention offerings.
The overarching goal for all of these attention-focused partnerships has been to help Mars improve its “media-buying hygiene” by optimizing for sales lift, Amram said.
Although viewability has been a valuable media hygiene signal, it typically doesn’t correlate to an increase in sales, according to Amram. But Mars has seen promising signs that attention scores are highly correlated with sales, he said.
Nespresso, meanwhile, started testing attention metrics in 2019 while looking for real-time measurement signals tied to brand lift, said Vince Tran, manager of media strategy and activation.
In Q2, Nespresso began optimizing for Adelaide’s Attention Unit (AU) as an optimizable KPI.
More seen, more green
But beyond driving performance, brands also want to know whether attention-based targeting can help reduce the carbon emissions produced by their digital ad campaigns.
Tracking emissions is valuable, but actually doing something to reduce them “is a critical piece,” Amram said.
And it helps if sustainability is also aligned with a business objective, like media effectiveness. “Then it’s a double whammy,” Amram said.
Consumer-packaged goods and direct-to-consumer brands are especially concerned about being sustainable. Consumers increasingly want to buy products that align with their own ideals.
Like other luxury coffee brands, Nespresso sells disposable coffee pods, and there has been plenty of negative press highlighting how unsustainable these pods can be. Nespresso now makes a point of using sustainable materials to manufacture its pods, and it views its efforts to cut down on digital-advertising-related emissions in the same light, Tran said.
There are two schools of thought for how attention-based targeting reduces emissions.
The first, more intuitive, argument is that prioritizing ad placements people are likely to interact with means brands end up serving fewer wasted impressions, which is more efficient from an energy-usage perspective.
The second, less proven, theory is that publishers whose websites have less ad clutter tend to be more energy efficient. And since there’s less noise on the page – and a better user experience breeds more consumer trust – their ads tend to get more attention.
“A correlation between low-emission inventory and high-attention inventory makes a lot of sense,” Tran said, “because you’re not on a page that has seven different banners and a video overlay loaded up where you’re just one of [multiple] brands.”
Mars has tested this theory by layering attention metrics alongside the sales lift panels it conducts with Nielsen Catalina Solutions. Early results point to a correlation between publishers with higher sustainability scores and higher attention scores for ads on their sites.
“I can’t say there’s a holistic study on this, and we’re kind of stapling stuff together,” Amram said. “But there are some green lights.”
PMP curation
Both Mars and Nespresso are now testing Adelaide’s new private marketplace products, which use Xandr’s Curate platform to package inventory from Xandr-affiliated SSPs into a PMP.
High-Attention Low-Emissions PMPs combine Adelaide’s AU attention metric with Scope3’s carbon emissions standards to identify which inventory sold through Curate meets predetermined benchmarks for attention and sustainability.
These PMPs isolate the top 33% least “emissive” inventory, based on Scope3’s standards, as well as the top 50% according to Adelaide’s AU score. The resulting pool of inventory is assigned a deal ID that can be used as a targeting signal within any DSP so brands know they’re only purchasing inventory that meets benchmarks. Advertisers can add more granular targeting parameters to the PMPs through the use of a custom bidder.
Adelaide’s other product, High-Attention CTV PMPs, is specifically for CTV inventory sold through the Curate platform. This solution packages the top 50% of inventory, as per Adelaide’s AU metric, into a PMP, but as of yet doesn’t also factor in Scope3’s sustainability scoring.
The point of the PMPs is to automate the process of buying high-attention (and, in the case of the display and video solution, low-emission) inventory by making those metrics available as a targeting parameter in ad buying platforms, said Marc Guldiman, founder and CEO of Adelaide. Previously, this process would involve a lot of manual measurement and optimization work on the part of the brand, he said.
For a more luxury-oriented brand like Nespresso, a PMP-based approach makes more sense than using attention as a targeting metric in open auctions, Tran said. PMPs make it easier to target premium publisher inventory, which has better potential to attract long-term customers with high lifetime value.
But Mars would like to see more attention-based targeting capabilities in open auctions, as well as within walled gardens, which mostly don’t allow third-party attention measurement.
“We want to have [attention] measurement as a pre-buy option in DSPs,” said Amram, who noted that being able to compare attention scores across many different types of media is preferable to buying an off-the-shelf, prepackaged PMP.
