asiCast 184: The evolution of attention studies
There has been a great deal of interest shown in human attention to communications for very many years and in this asiCast Brian Jacobs of BJ&A talks to Karen Nelson-Field, Founder and CEO of Amplified Intelligence, about how it has taken so long for the subject to be taken seriously. They discuss this in the context of Karen’s recently-published book, The Attention Economy – a Category Blueprint.
Karen explains how ethnographic studies into how people watched television was the start of the process that led to the development of her work. They discuss how active and passive attention both work, but in different ways. Whilst formerly there seemed to be a clear relationship between advertising spend and outcomes, currently there seems to be an enormous gap and we’re no longer sure of what we’re buying and how it affects business outcomes. Essential to this is the recognition that not all reach is equal, and communications complexity is compounded by the perceived value of impressions not being the same on all platforms. There’s no standardisation of measurement across the various platforms aside from ‘viewability’ which has its own issues but, aside from that, determining the number of impressions needed for any given outcome varies a great deal by platform and format.
The work Karen has been engaged in as she attempts to unravel some of this complexity has led her to conclude that the two things at the heart of everything she does are determining how many people view and for how long. She outlines how these tell us what to expect from our spend and how to adjust campaigns accordingly.
Brian asked Karen to reference a favourite example of how her work is being applied currently and she mentioned work being done by Richard Kirk, of Essence MediaCom. You can read an account of his ‘real reach’ concept in The Media Leader.
Karen presented key elements from her book at our International Television & Video Conference in Venice last November which you can view here. This year’s conference will be held in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 5th-7th November.
Karen Nelson-Field talks with Brian Jacobs:
You can also listen to the interview by pressing play below:
Subscribe to our RSS feed for automatic updates to our asiCasts.
This asiCast is also available via YouTube, Spotify and iTunes – just click on the icons:
