Marketers are overwhelmed by a flood of data signals, yet paradoxically, they are starved for actionable insights. This ‘creative data paradox’ is costing brands millions in wasted or misplaced spend and missed opportunities.
The abundance of platform data and engagement metrics fail to align with the core goals of driving brand equity and sales. As Dr Karen Nelson-Field puts it, “The day the measurement died was the day that they worked that out, that measuring humans through panels and surveys and diaries was not scalable. So they chose a metric that could scale, and the wrong metric, which is time in view. And we know that time in view has a very, very light relationship with whether a human is viewing. Viewability came in and grabbed the marketplace at a time when you were paying for everything, even if it wasn't served. And that became the currency.”
This disconnect has led to costly misinterpretations, with brands optimizing content on the wrong signals (time in view, etc.) and ultimately suffering declining profitability and market share.
The solution lies in evolving beyond simple viewability and embracing attention as a scalable and reliable metric. Historically difficult and expensive to measure, technological advancements like computer vision have made attention a viable signal across every single ad.
Sorin Patilinet explains the power of this scale: “What changes is the ability to not only measure your Super Bowl ad but to measure hundreds and thousands of ads.”
Attention goes beyond basic time-in-view by measuring human behavior, providing the first essential step in ensuring your creative successfully sells your product. By measuring attention across thousands of ads, marketers gain the crucial meta-learning needed to understand which creative patterns truly engage consumers and how to simplify their messages for maximum effectiveness.
The ultimate competitive advantage is realized when this scalable attention data is connected with first-party creative effectiveness insights. This unification moves beyond treating an ad as a single unit, allowing brands to optimize creative messages second-by-second and even guide generative AI models with behavioral data. This focused, connected approach gives marketers a nuanced understanding of what works, empowering them to stop optimizing into noise and start making confident decisions that drive real business growth.
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