Underpriced Attention

Edition #456

We have a guest open this week, underpriced attention, Taboola & Apple partner and Chrome/Safari at loggerheads.

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Back on schedule. This week we have a guest opening from Wayne Blodwell of Impact Media, they’ve been making waves in the attention space. I asked him what he was seeing at the moment in the attention space. Over to him. 

Wayne here, at Impact Media we work with agencies and brands to guarantee attention with ads and only charge when they are seen. It has been an interesting journey leveraging attention measurement to underpin our offering – there are three things I have observed.

1 – Attention measurement is early. Most of my conversations with agencies and brands start with the question ‘what do you know about attention measurement?’ and the responses can be quite wide-ranging. Attention measurement is early given there’s no standards and adoption is low, but the good news is, according to 83% of US media experts interviewed by IAS it is crucial for their companies success.

2 – Standards will be difficult, I recorded a brilliant conversation with Angelina Eng who leads the IAB Attention Taskforce and she said that attention will become a currency but that it had also taken a few months to align on ‘what is attention?’. I don’t foresee a standard for how attention is measured, which may hold it back as a field.

3 – This is the best time to optimize attention, In our early tests the attentive CPMs are incredibly wide ranging. From $3 to $150 for 1,000 ads that are seen for 1 second on a quality domain.

Right now, as so few buyers are doing it, it’s the best time to buy these ads at a discount. If you think ads need to be seen to work, then you’ll get them for a discount before other buyers catch up!

Thanks Wayne, I like that, through valuing media in this way, you can get at advantage in the market. Finding underpriced attention opportunities. Even using historical data, to help find those pockets of opportunity hidden in plain sight.

Loads of datapoints of note this week, enjoy.

Notable stories this week

• Taboola to sell ads for Apple.
• Many people don’t pay full price for their news subscription. Most don’t want to pay anything at all.
• How attention impacts media and creative effectiveness.
• RevContent announces partnership with Local Media Consortium.
• How advertisers can seize attention on the open internet.
• Why brand trust is declining and how marketers can earn it back.
• Future launches branded content studio to tap new budgets.
• BET+ bets on programmatic to boost revenue for its new ad-supported service.
• Firefox implemented their latest privacy changes. And Apple previewed upcoming Safari mode changes, which seek to block Chromes Topics API.
• Brian Lesser returns to GroupM as Global CEO.
• Audible pitches publishers and authors on a new royalties model. Analogous to Kindle reading. To better compete against Spotify.
• ^ This may be the inevitable model for content use in LLMs too.
• Meet the challenger adtech firms competing to grab Oracle Advertising clients.
• Spotify trims ad sales team ad it focuses on smaller clients and programmatic.
• Share of model is the new marketing measure for the AI era.

Deals/M&A

• Teads is exploring sale options as M&A in ad tech heats up.
• Data firm Alliant hires bank to pursue sale.
• PathFactory announces strategic acquisition of Uberflip.

Campaign of the week 

• Regret Less with Viator. Discovered via Skift.

• Also Apples new privacy on iPhone video. 

View all 2024 best campaigns.

Smartest commentary

• “The homepage is having a revival of sorts. That’s because, while it still represents a minority of traffic, it is used by publishers’ most loyal audiences. At a time when depth meets breadth, publishers need to focus on their most ardent audience segments.” –TheRebooting.

Datapoints of note

• Meta is 66% more cost effective overall at building brands compared to an average channel, and it is particularly strong at building brand predisposition.
• Creators made $741m on Roblox last year.
• Google AI Overviews only show for 7% of queries.
• Across the 20 countries where we asked people how much they paid, 41% said they were paying less than full price for their online news subscription.
• Streaming usage hits new US record at 40.3% of total tv consumption.
• 52% of video spend is digital, 48% linear.
• 75% of all CTV transactions are programmatic.
• Average revenue per ad-supported BET+ subscriber is now roughly $2.
• Cloudflare reports almost 7% of internet traffic is malicious. 60% of internet traffic is now API-related.

Events

• Attention Happy Hour, come to the next one, aiming for tail end of summer.

View all 2024 datapoints of note.

That’s it for this week.