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Adelaide’s Attention Unit ‘follows data science best practice’, according to audit

Adelaide’s Attention Unit ‘follows data science best practice’, according to audit

Adelaide’s Attention Unit (AU) scores are effectively designed to serve as “strong proxies for a placement’s likelihood to drive outcomes”, according to an independent audit of the attention measurement company conducted by global media advisory MediaSense.

The audit found that Adelaide’s AU methodology is “outcome-driven and follows data science best practice”.

The AU is a score, scaled 0-100, that attempts to rate media placement quality across channels based on the likelihood it will receive attention.

The score is defined as a probability, estimated based on media environment (e.g., position, coverage, and context around the ad placement) and placement-level behavioural data like eye-tracking and tag-based data.

Another product, Adelaide’s AU Curve Materialist Analysis, then serves as a method for analysing the relationship between outcomes and the AU score, which aims to advise clients on the optimal AU for a given ad placement.

According to MediaSense, the AU Curve methodology was found to be “transparent, reproduceable, and independently verifiable”, with higher AU scores “reliably” correlating with improved performance in key advertiser KPIs such as awareness, familiarity, intent and recall.

Such predictive value was found to hold true across multiple media channels.

“By successfully reconstructing AU curves using aggregated inputs, MediaSense confirmed that AU is not a black box”, a slide deck summarising the audit, shared with The Media Leader, reads. “Its statistical foundations are robust, traceable, and repeatable, providing advertisers with a trustworthy framework for assessing media quality”.

Adelaide had requested MediaSense conduct an independent review of its Attention Unit Curve Materiality Analysis and related products to test their design effectiveness and transparency.

MediaSense couched that its audit did not independently verify data and documents it received from Adelaide for review, nor did it review the source code used to calculate AU scores.

The advisory also noted that the sampled data used to recreate the AU curves included “limited data points at the lower and upper ends of the AU outcomes probability scale”, meaning MediaSense’s ability to draw conclusions for extreme AU values was limited.

Some brand marketers have remained sceptical of the importance of attention measurement efforts in driving effectiveness even as research into the importance of attentive viewing time has been touted in other media circles.

“I don’t find attention very useful as a metric at all,” one brand marketer remarked at VCCP Media’s Hacking the Attention Economy presentation in Cannes last month. “There’s a lot of talk [but] there’s no real measurement framework. […] I struggle with it, generally, as something we should be tracking because it’s not trackable very well today”.

Even attention measurement experts have debated the speed and relative usefulness of making use of attention metrics as a currency in media buys. Adelaide CEO Marc Guldimann has previously argued that attention offers a potential opportunity for arbitrage as a new form of measuring media quality, with new metrics allowing advertisers and their agencies “to define the quality of media placements in advance“.

On the other hand, at the Hacking the Attention Economy presentation last month, Dr Karen Nelson-Field, founder of Amplified Intelligence, warned media and creative professionals: “In my opinion, there are some bad players in the industry that are trying to commoditise the concept of attention”.

Nelson-Field has conducted work to ingrain attention measurement into Media Rating Council (MRC) standards, which along with the IAB released draft guidelines for measuring attention in May.

Regardless of the debate over using attention as a currency, the audit provides evidence of the robustness of Adelaide’s own methodology.

Guldimann told The Media Leader the audit is thus a “big deal” for the company.

“We’re proud that AU stood up to this kind of rigorous scrutiny, especially given the challenges other metrics have faced under review by the same team,” he said.

Claiming AU “remains the most widely used metric in the attention economy”, Guldimann added Adelaide is “committed to maintaining transparency around our methodology and the technology behind it”.

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