Just a 5% increase in attention can double gains in brand perception: Amit Chaubey, Head of Marketing Science, APAC, Snap Inc.

Attention is significantly superior to exposure metrics in predicting business impact, is the crux of the findings made by Snap Inc in a research study in partnership with Lumen and WPP media. Speaking to businessline, Amit Chaubey, Head of Marketing Science, APAC, Snap Inc., and Mike Follett, CEO, Lumen, break down the findings that focused specifically on India’s Gen Z population to help marketers understand how increased attention impacts their ad efficacy. Officials view this cohort as a huge opportunity, considering India is a $5 billion digital AdEx industry.

What are the new metrics you have created, and why did you move away from the old ones?

Chaubey: We considered three questions: Does attention matter, and does it create better outcomes? Does adding new, attention-based metrics add and create new insights for advertisers? Can we give some playbooks to advertisers? If you increase attention by five percentage points, it leads to up to twice the brand outcome versus the baseline. APM as a metric adds to the metrics that are currently available. Attention outperforms traditional metrics in terms of being able to predict brand outcomes significantly. The research showed that attention created a real impact. So we came up with new metrics: Attention Per Mille and Cost per Attention Per Mille.

Follett: If you were to buy a thousand impressions and 800 of the impressions get looked at for an average of, say, five seconds, that would be 4,000 seconds of attention per thousand impressions. This allows people to link the APM (Attention Per Mille) data with the Cost Per Mille data to determine the cost of attention. This concept of using visual attention to measure the efficacy of media is well established in Europe and North America.

What’s the sweet spot that advertisers should be looking for in this new metric?

Chaubey: Different levels of attention do different jobs for the advertiser. For reminders of a previous message, short durations of attention can do the job. For longer conversations to drive brand favourability, 3 to 9 seconds come up as the sweet spot for advertisers. It depends on what you need to do with your communication. You can then choose the platforms and formats you want. A more than 5 per cent increase in attention can lead to twice the gains in brand perception. Attention is significantly superior to exposure metrics in predicting business impact.

Follet: The key thing for advertisers is to use this metric to ask: what’s the right level of attention for me? The golden learning we found was that formats like full-screen immersive video and AR lenses, which immerse people, capture the largest amount of attention.

Will any particular vertical benefit from this new metric?

Chaubey: Categories like direct-to-consumer fashion and beauty, which are heavily visual and heavily engage with the Gen Z community, would be suitable for such research. We have also started conducting research with verticals like gaming and FinTech, where you want to provide more information or engage people in a playful manner. Those industries will find value in thinking about how they can gain more attention, especially from Gen Z.

What role do you think influencers are going to play over here in advertising?

Follet: From other studies, we have found that influencers can be really powerful voices for brands. Brands should learn from influencers that no one has to look at your advertising. Every influencer knows that they have to compete for attention, and since no one is obligated to look at their posts and content, they must make their content truly engaging. However, an awful lot of influencer content fails. For every massive success they achieve, they might have 10 failures, making it a bit riskier. Standard advertising is very much like playing it safe. 

What makes Snap the most compatible with this style of metric?

Follet: The nature of the formats and ads themselves, especially something like lenses, where when you voluntarily enter into a lens, you are inside the ad. We conducted research among 3,000 people in India, with a control group of 200 people, and found that people are very good at looking away when ads appear. If an ad is at the top of the screen and there is text at the bottom, people will likely look at the text first. However, if the ad is comprehensive and voluntary, then it receives a lot of attention. People also seem to use Snap in a very different way to spend quality time with the content and advertising. It is not treated in the same way as a mini TV channel. Content that seems to have a user-generated feel, native to the platform, seems to do very well. 

From a global perspective, was there anything you found unique to India during your research?

Follett: India has a massive Gen Z crowd, who have a superpower in avoiding advertising. They’re very good at not looking at ads. This puts Snapchat’s strength in context. If you want to capture 3-5 seconds of attention, then perhaps Snapchat is the only platform where you can achieve that. Millennials are less likely to spend time with advertising in any media, which means that the potential and advantages of Snapchat ads make it a unique long-form environment for Gen Z.

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