How to get more ad attention

5 Key Things We Learned

The way consumers are paying attention is changing

There has been some mention that, due to the use of digital media, human attention spans are getting shorter. There is no real evidence that this is actually the case. Humans are capable of concentrating as well as in the past. But what is happening is that consumers are getting more easily bored and are less willing to accept boring content. Instead they are constantly shifting their attention to find content worth paying attention to. So how do you make sure that it is your content that gets their focus?

Low attention processing does not work for all ads

You may have heard of low attention processing – the fact that some adverts work even when consumers don’t pay explicit attention. In fact sometimes ads have been proven to work better if people don’t pay direct attention. So why should we worry about attention? Research has shown that low attention processing works well for certain types of advertising and certain product categories – but not for all. Campaigns for example to change brand perceptions or direct response adverts do require audience attention and have to make people think in order to be effective.

New techniques explain how ads really work

A wide range of new techniques is available that help us measure the implicit effects of advertising. Rather than just having to ask consumers whether they remember or understand the advert, those techniques can measure the effects of the advertising directly. This includes exposure tests, eye tracking, biometric measures and brain scanning. Our presentation includes an introduction to those techniques including their benefits and drawbacks. Some are established tools now with reliable outputs, others still more in the development stage or too expensive for wider use. Download the deck to get up to speed on all of them.

Human instinctive reactions can help us get attention

Emotional Logic has been running advanced ad optimisation for over a decade. As such we have seen certain effects over and over in our testing – some things always work. This is because as humans we have hard wired ways of paying attention – and advertisers can tap into those. For example people will always look at faces in adverts because that is what we are used to in real life. We also follow the gaze of the subject – a trick you can use to lead attention where you want it in your ad (for example on to the product).

Context drives attention

What we pay attention to is driven by what we are thinking about in that moment and also by the context of the advert. Ads that stand out get attention – ads that match the mindset of the audience in the moment and the context are more likely to keep that attention. So make sure your ads are different but in a relevant way.