Mar 21, 2023

The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) this morning announced it has begun “mapping the landscape” of the burgeoning advertising and media “attentionmeasurement” marketplace. The project -- which falls under the umbrella of the ARF’s ongoing “ Attention Validation Initiative ” -- will culminate in an “attention atlas” thatthe ARF said will “add transparent to vendors’ positioning, methods and deliverables.” While the measurement attention paid by consumers to advertising and/or mediameasurement is not new, there has been something of a gold rush of new and emerging suppliers utilizing a variety of methods and models for observing, analyzing and reporting both cognitive andunconscious attention to ad-supported media in recent years. The suppliers also have a wide variety of business models from traditional proprietary, custom and syndicated researchstudies to ones that are really just trojans for selling or reselling premium media inventory the researchers identify as having higher attention value. advertisement advertisement “Attention is one of,if not the most, critical component of the ARF Model of Advertising Effectiveness, but it is also one which has not been empirically studied,” ARF CEO and President Scott McDonald said in astatement announcing the atlas, adding: “As new attention measurement services come to market, the industry has been asking us to help them gain transparency into the validity, reliability andpredictive power of these measures. This Atlas will be the first step in helping marketers make more informed decisions around choosing a method and supplier– clearly outlining thesolutions’ rightful application to advertising and media evaluation.” The initiative comes about a decade after the ARF made a similar commitment to mapping andorganizing the then-promising field of neuromarketing research -- measurement techniques utilizing biometrics, eye-tracking and other technologies capable of analyzing physiological attention paid toadvertising and media. Many of the new attention-measurement suppliers likely to be mapped by the ARF utilize some of those technologies and techniques, while others utilize metadata from the ad-serving process itself, or combinations thereof. The ARF said it will release a “preliminary mapping” of the atlas during its annual audience measurementconference to be held April 25-26.