Data and Design
news
Agency News
Published by
Charles Vallance
Date
18/07/2025
Data is a hoary old chestnut. And the bigger it gets, the hoarier it becomes. Nowhere is this more true than in the data-rich field of media.
At root, the problem isn't about the accuracy of the many media currencies at our disposal. The issue is their value.
Take, for example, the definition of viewability in digital media. We are fortunate, as an industry, to have a recognised MRC compliant measure of viewability against which digital inventory can be reconciled.
According to a study conducted by Amplified, for every thousand digital ads served, almost 30% were found to be non-viewable. This leaves 70% as viewable to the audience (and chargeable to the advertiser).
This, however, is where the distinction between accuracy and value becomes important. Because, according to the same piece of research, of that 70%, a significant 13% were technically viewable but received no attention at all.
More worryingly, 63% of the ads were served to people who weren't actually paying attention. Rather they were "looking nearby, but not directly at the ad or content". This is classified as Passive Attention and has considerably less impact than the remaining 24% of impressions that succeed in achieving Active Attention.
Even if your ad gets noticed, it still faces a world of pain in being attributed to your brand.
To summarise thus far. Out of 1,000 ads served, 700 made it past the bots, loaded correctly and/or made it above the screen roll. Of these, 90 weren't seen at all, 440 received no more than passive attention, and only 170 were actively attended to.
It is this gap, or more accurately this yawning chasm, between what is served and what is noticed, that prompts Dr Karen Nelson-Field to observe; "Seen versus served is marketing's version of a magician's sleight of hand, and this gap is one of the most costly inefficiencies advertisers face."
The reason that it is only 'one of' rather than the single most costly inefficiency is because her research goes on to show how, even if your ad gets noticed, it still faces a world of pain in being attributed to your brand. That's because the attention it receives is far from sustained & consistent, varying widely by platform. In fact, in the low attention world of digital, for ads that get noticed the average attention paid to them is 2.5 seconds or less.
So, even for those ads that have crossed the attention chasm, the meaningful awareness battle has only just begun. Because the same research study finds that poorly branded advertising, even if actively noticed, pays a whopping 66p inefficiency tariff on every £1 spent when compared to well branded equivalents. The research demonstrates this through a simple A/B test, where A is the ad with distinctive assets in place, and B is the ad with distinctive assets adapted to be generic. A delivers three times more value than B.
When you can't change reality, then you should design for it.
As an industry, we have two responsibilities; to win attention and then brand it in order to create value. The first is more quantitative, the second more qualitative. But the learning from Nelson-Field applies to both.
Firstly, it shows that not all data is equal. There are, for instance, huge variances between served, seen and noticed. Within this, great value can be won or lost in terms of active attention gained, yet this is seldom measured. When it is, considerable differences in performance are observed between different online platforms. And the two best performing platforms overall in terms of £/active attention aren't online at all, although one (BVOD) is a fairly recent media development. The other, linear TV, dates back rather further but continues to pack an enviable £/attention punch.
The second job is rather more subjective, as it involves gauging the level of branding required in order to ensure attribution. This should not descend into a 'how big is the logo?' debate. More important than individual signifiers is the overall body language of the brand, the way it looks and feels holistically - the world it creates around itself. If this Brand World is sufficiently recognisable, then it will be indelibly branded and effortlessly attributable. Even when you have little more than a few precious seconds of attention. The acid test of success is whether you can put your hand over the logo and still identify the brand that's talking to you.
The task for media planners and brand planners alike is no longer to fight fragmentation. That ship has sailed. The task now is to work with fragmentation and learn how best to build your brand out of the splinters of attention that are spared the thumbscroll and the skip.
When you can't change reality, then you should design for it. And that will require just as much judgement as data.
