Lots of bigs and lots of littles: Lumen finds cumulative attention drives brand outcomes
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Cumulative attention — defined as the total seconds of attentive viewer engagement accrued across all ad exposures for a given campaign — is a significant predictor of brand outcomes in streaming TV advertising.
That is according to research published by attention measurement company Lumen Research in partnership with Amazon Ads and market research company Cint, which finds that cumulative attention is 8x more impactful at delivering brand lift than mere frequency.
“For years, the industry has optimised towards frequency — a metric our research shows has a limited meaningful relationship with brand outcomes,” Mike Follett, CEO of Lumen, said. “What matters is cumulative attention — building sufficient attention across media environments, from streaming to the open web, to reach the levels needed to drive strong brand outcomes.”
The study analysed 270 campaigns across Amazon Ads Agent (known at the time of the research as Amazon DSP) in the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy and Brazil. The dataset was limited to Amazon’s own inventory, though the demand-side platform hosts a variety of other ad inventory including Disney+, Channel 4 and Spotify.
The research concluded there are four separate cumulative attention “thresholds” that are required to deliver statistically significant brand uplifts.
Brand awareness requires 21 seconds of cumulative attention to achieve a statistically significant lift; this rises to 30 seconds for favourability, 39 seconds for consideration, and 47 seconds for purchase intent (more than double the amount required for awareness).
Importantly, no single ad was found to deliver sufficient attention to meet those thresholds, meaning some frequency is required in a given campaign. As Follett described, the debate for planners then becomes: “What’s the most efficient way to buy enough attention amongst enough customers to achieve my business objectives?”
He continued: “This research gives advertisers specific cumulative attention thresholds to plan against for the first time, providing a clear signal that it is the quality and accumulation of attention, rather than simply the number of exposures, that matters.”
The study thus lends some credence to Dr Grace Kite’s “Lots of Littles” theory of advertising effectiveness — which suggests seeing many low-attention ads can be a substitute for a lack of attention on any one ad — with the caveat that lots of “bigs”, not just lots of littles, are likely required to meet necessary cumulative attention thresholds.
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Lumen is currently working with Amazon to develop a Cumulative Attention Threshold calculator to aid planners in calculating how to efficiently reach different thresholds depending on campaign KPIs. The product is currently in a minimum viable product stage, with testing occuring with “selected partners”.
While the research found frequency counts alone did not appear to impact brand outcomes, it did find that higher frequency of ads without sufficient attention quality is negatively associated with brand outcomes. Brand awareness (-4%), favourability (-7%) and consideration (-6%) were all reduced in this scenario.
The upshot, the study suggests, is advertisers investing in additional frequency without the relevant audience targeting and frequency controls required to generate genuine attention are not just wasting budget, but actually may undermine brand objectives.
Not all impressions are equal
This was demonstrated by examining two campaigns that each delivered five exposures per user. One campaign generated just 8.9 seconds of cumulative attention; the other generated 70.5 seconds of cumulative attention — a difference that would have been “invisible” to frequency-only planners.
What might cause the difference in cumulative attention?
Prior attention research has found that some channels broadly provide higher attentive watch times than others, with the main beneficiaries being TV, cinema, radio, magazines and news brands.
“This research reinforces that not all impressions are equal — how and where an ad is delivered shapes the attention it earns,” commented Amazon Ads VP Piers Heaton-Armstrong.
The latest study examined just streaming TV (Prime Video, in this case) and digital display. Prime Video was found to deliver 17.7 average attention seconds per impression, slightly more than 16.9 seconds for CTV more generally.
Heaton-Armstrong described that the attention levels reported “reflect the kind of advertising experience we are building, one where advertising is relevant and engaging, rather than relying on frequency alone to deliver results.”
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Better together
The study also found there is a significant amplification effect that occurs when streaming TV and digital formats are combined. At matched cumulative attention levels, campaigns that combined streaming TV viewing with open internet channels delivered 3.8x higher brand lift than open internet formats alone.
“When you have two campaigns that have the same amount of cumulative attention, the campaigns that generate at least some of this attention via TV outperform the campaigns that rely solely on open internet advertising,” explained Follett. “It is as if the attention generated by TV works harder or is more efficient at converting into memories than that generated by the open internet”.
While Follett indicated Lumen doesn’t have a “definitive answer yet” for why this is the case, he posited it could be evidence of the idea that TV “is best at encoding memories initially” whereas the open web is “best used for reinforcing or retrieving those memories.”
Importantly, sequencing was found to matter. Campaigns that led with streaming TV before activating open internet inventory delivered 30% stronger average brand lift than those that began their campaign on digital before activating on TV.
“The findings support the age-old model of ‘burst and drip’: an initial ‘burst’ of high-attention (and relatively high-cost) media following by ‘drips’ of lower attention (and perhaps lower-cost) media to reinforce and remind customers of the initial message,” said Follett, adding: “Perhaps the instincts of the Mad Men of the 1960s were not misplaced: you have to establish a memory via high-attention media like TV (in its various modern iterations) to be able to reinforce it via media that deliver more fleeting attention.”