Our Agency Sales Director Natalie Dawson says our recent study with Lumen clearly demonstrates the importance of including quality, high engagement online environments in the marketing mix
Wednesday 1st December 2021 - first published on WARC.com
As anyone who has joined an early-stage start-up will tell you, in order to deal with the frenetic pace, leftfield unknowns and amazing highs this journey will throw at you, you have to be personally aligned with what the company is setting out to do. This is doubly so if you join as a salesperson - you have to have a heartfelt belief in what you’re selling in order to give yourself the best chance of success.
When I joined The Ozone Project in 2018, I was the first salesperson in the company - there were no pre-existing presentation decks, marketing materials or fancy swag. However, what we did have was the vision for a new type of digital advertising platform - fuelled by unique, real world consumption insights and activating only in the most attentive, high quality publisher environments - with great potential to make a huge difference to the effectiveness of advertiser campaigns. It was clear from the outset this high attention would be central to our sell.
PROVING AN ENDURING ATTENTION HYPOTHESIS
Now a reality, sitting at the heart of this platform is a huge swathe of consumer attention, captured by quality content. We have long believed that the more engaged an online user is with premium editorial, then the more attention they’re likely to pay to the digital advertising that accompanies it. This is an intuitive thought process few would deny; one that has been alluded to in studies conducted by organisations ranging from Newsworks to Group M, Magnetic or the IAB. While the common narrative from all of these studies is that quality online environments lead to better advertising outcomes, understanding what actually drives this attention was an area that had not yet been investigated thoroughly - and quickly became the focus of our own study.
And if you’re going to study attention, then there are no better people to work with than the team at Lumen Research, the attention technology company that uses eye tracking to optimise media buying and creative development. Their fully consented, incentivised panel of users download a piece of software onto their desktop or mobile device which allows Lumen to see the attention they’re paying to pretty much anything online.
Conducted between May and September 2021, this latest analysis is based on a robust study of c.1 million advertising impressions seen by Lumen’s 1,000 strong panel - 750 of those on mobile and 250 on desktop. The consistent measurement of attention applied by Lumen across all analysis is the ‘Attentive Seconds per Thousand Impressions’ score - a measure that factors impressions that reach the screen with those that are technically viewable, those that were actually viewed, and how long those were actually viewed for.
QUALITY EDITORIAL IS AT THE CENTRE OF ATTENTION
In order to analyse the key drivers of higher advertising attention in premium environments, we first had to establish Ozone’s credentials in delivering greater ad engagement. Lumen’s analysis looked at the attention received by Ozone’s display and video advertising and compared this to equivalent formats on ‘Other Websites’ - largely the rest of the internet - and across social channels.
Video advertising - specifically outstream and in-article formats - performs particularly well for attention on Ozone websites compared to other websites and social platforms
For display advertising delivered on Ozone sites versus the rest of the internet, the results were pretty clear cut. Ozone delivers ads that are more likely to be viewed and, just as importantly, viewed for longer. This means that display advertising placed with The Ozone Project receives +51% more attention than advertising elsewhere on the web. When comparing Ozone to display advertising on social channels, both were viewed for the same amount of time, however social display ads were more likely to be viewed.
However, the major differentiator comes in attention paid to video advertising, with Ozone video ads receiving more than twice the attention as their equivalents on other websites or social channels. While video ads on Ozone are more likely to be viewed, the major driver is the amount of time they are viewed for - this is significantly more for Ozone sites. Lumen’s ‘Attentive Seconds’ calculation shows that video advertising on Ozone receives +111% more attention than those on other websites, and +140% more attention than those on social channels.
THE KEY DRIVERS OF HIGHER AD ATTENTION FROM QUALITY ENVIRONMENTS
This study highlights three key standout drivers of the greater attention paid to advertising in premium environments; rich slow scroll content, bigger and more impactful ad formats, and less clutter on the page.
Editorial content created with high engagement in mind, bigger ad formats and less ads per page are key to higher attention across the Ozone platform
i. Ozone content is properly consumed, it’s not a fast fix
A previous Lumen study conducted for the IAB in 2018 clearly demonstrated that people engage very differently with ‘task-based’ sites (e.g. checking the weather or train times) than they do with ‘browse-based’ sites, a category incorporating news, entertainment and lifestyle-based editorial. For ‘task-based’ websites, attention is more focused on extracting the information sought - meaning ads are less likely to be seen - while ‘browse-based’ sites people tend to look around a bit more, meaning they are more likely to see the accompanying advertising.
In Lumen’s latest analysis for Ozone, this insight was proven to hold true. Ozone pages are read more intently, which means users consume our content in a slower manner, scrolling more slowly in a way that allows both the editorial and the advertising to receive more attention. For example, on average Ozone users spend 5.7 seconds on each 1060 pixel mobile screen, +14% more than other websites; whereas on the same screen size Ozone uses scroll -31% slower than users on social media.
ii. The bigger the ad, the greater the attention benefit
Another driver of attention success is the fact that the average ad size on Ozone sites tends to be bigger than the average size on other websites. In particular, when looking at desktop inventory it is clear that the larger size of Ozone ads converts into higher levels of attention for client campaigns.
The efficiency of Ozone websites versus the rest of the web at converting ads seen into attention is even more heightened on mobile. For example, while mobile ads across The Ozone Project tend to be slightly larger than the rest of the web, they’re also c.50% more effective at converting this into attention paid.
iii. Less clutter on page means more attention for ads
Given the richness of content across our platform, Ozone sites tend to follow a fewer, better advertising load model. Unlike other websites, and in particular poor quality ‘made for advertising’ websites, our sites are less likely to have multiple ads loading for the user at the same time. This is good news for advertisers, as this analysis demonstrates that for every additional ad you have on the page, the attention received by each diminishes.
In particular, when it comes to mobile, optimum attention is delivered when there is only one ad on screen. Across Ozone sites, solus advertising is delivered on average 90% of the time versus 76% of the time on other websites.
“OK, NOW YOU’VE GOT MY ATTENTION…”
In the words of Seth Godin, the American entrepreneur and best-selling author, “Marketing is a contest for people’s attention.” And while brand owners can help maximise the attention their advertising receives through captivating creative or on-point targeting, this study clearly demonstrates the role of quality, high engagement online environments in that equation.
With Ozone in mind, these results are a potent reminder of the fact that not all online environments are equal - it’s a no-brainer really, you wouldn’t equate the impact of an under the railway bridge 48 sheet with that of an equivalent format on the show-stopping Cromwell Road. We are confident this analysis will go a long way in reassuring advertisers and agencies that our premium platform is a critical element for attention generation at scale, while providing and quantifying the rationale as to why.
