Attention is not impact, so what next?
There’s a lot of buzz about attention being a potential proxy measure for mental availability and it’s commendable that we as an industry are taking a much closer examination of how media delivers quality and reach: however, what you see is not always what you get, writes Peter Pynta.
Visual attention only correlates with 15% of long-term memory encoding; which seems to be a consistent finding across neuroscience studies. Science has told us that marketers need to keep searching for the other factors that contribute to the remaining 85 % like context, creative, emotion, salience, clutter, frequency, sonic branding, storytelling and of course the role of the subconscious. The industry needs to refocus its attention on more finely tuned metrics of mental availability and importantly effectiveness.
Awareness leads to growth
The industry is coming to terms with the fact that there are better ways to measure effectiveness and as marketers know, real-world results will always be the end-game. Measuring eyes on pixels is a far more verified measure of a human view than reach and impressions. If we can get heads and eyes moving towards an ad, it’s far more likely to work. However, award-winning cognitive scientist, Dr Ali Goode, worked together with Thinkbox in the UK to look at whether there is a little more attention needed on attention.
Always ask questions
Just because something is commercially viable at the time, doesn’t mean that it’s the best answer within the big picture. Goode summed up the scientific literature of attention recently on stage and pondered whether the approaches that are born out of eye tracking and the digital age work in other forms of media.
It amazes me how the marketing world has embraced monitoring eye movement to recall memory, as if it was based in real, neuroscience.
Even if it could, at best it would account for a miniscule percentage of System 2 information processing and wouldn’t be able to tell you what the memory was, or what emotion was associated with that memory.
If you think I’m wrong, please respond with a link to any peer group reviewed articles published in a serious Neuroscience journal. The last thing we need is another one of those flakey, gibberish-science thought bubbles used to justify the over-reach claims; the sort that wouldn’t stand-up in any Court of Neuroscience.