Attention metrics, which measure the attention consumers pay to ads, are helping audio companies demonstrate the effectiveness of their ad campaigns to major marketers. The latest example comes from Adelaide which applied its AU attention metric to an eBay audio campaign placed with iHeartMedia, Audacy and NPR during the second quarter and into the third.
“Folks in audio know that their media is undervalued by the market, and they see attention metrics as a way to level the playing field,” said Marc Guldimann, Adelaide’s founder, and CEO in a Digiday story by Senior Editor Michael Burgi.
Idil Cakin, Senior VP of Research and Insights at Audacy, told Digiday the growing practice of measuring attention paid to advertising “underscores the fact that audio impressions are engaged impressions.”
Adelaide gathered info from iHeart and NPR on the type of ad, number of ads running in a break, where in the podcast the ads ran, the podcast genre and whether the player had a fast forward button. The data was fed into an algorithm that was trained over time. “Very quickly, we saw that the assumptions that we made early on … were very predictive,” Guldimann said.
NPR used Adelaide’s AU metric to corroborate other neuro-related research it had conducted to show its sponsor messages resonate deeper with audiences compared to other media. “We just know from years of research and our audience testimonials about how they remember ads, recall ads, take action because of ads,” said Gina Garrubbo, CEO of National Public Media, NPR’s sponsorship subsidiary. “It’s a very different dynamic than other media.”
Adelaide data showed spots that ran on NPR and iHeart outperformed benchmarks by between 11% to 16%, while the streaming campaign for eBay performed 5% above benchmarks, Guldimann told Digiday.
Adelaide’s work builds on research conducted by Lumen Research with media agency network dentsu that measured various audio formats and environments across three unique studies in podcasts, radio, and music streaming. The takeaway: audio performs better than video in grabbing people’s attention and generating brand recall. The dentsu study found that audio advertising drove significant attention compared to other ad platforms. On average, 41% of audio ads generated correct brand recall, compared to the 38% norm for other advertising studied by dentsu. Brand choice uplift for audio ads was 10%, nearly double dentsu norms of 6%.
Meanwhile, Omnicom's media agency OMD and technology platform Teads are expected to announce the results of a neuroscience study devoted to understanding how attention metrics are used in the ad industry. The study, conducted in March 2023 with RK Neuroconsulting and Latin America market research firm Offerwise, includes a new set of measurement tools for analyzing ad attention.