Jake Selley and Jason Tonelli present 'Context In a Cookieless World: How Creative and Attention can Empower Brand Advertisers' at Mumbrella360, 2022

1. Using attention signals as a
feedback loop for context-
advertisement alignment

2. Background
Goodbye cookies Contextual resurgence Easy in theory

3. RESEARCH QUESTION
Can we use attention measurement as a signal to
refine contextual targeting?

4. Attention Time
The length of time, in
seconds, the ad is actually
looked at.

5. Attention Time is a
powerful signal
As a human led metric, it better
captures the relevance of different
creatives on the same content.

6. 11% 7%
Additional Awareness for
every extra second of
Attention Time achieved
Additional Recall for every
extra second of Attention
Time achieved
7.5x 5.9x
More important at driving
Awareness than Viewability
More important at driving
Recall than Viewability
The length of time,
in seconds, a user
looks at an ad.
Attention Time
Predictive of brand outcomes
Source: Playground xyz and Kantar Research 2019

7. Attention measurement can be used to refine contextual targeting and
attribute outcomes to humans not cookies
Key learning
Every brand can improve attention and results from advertising by
optimising to the places that have higher attention attributes
Marketers are measuring the
impact of attention
Look to planning and trading
to capture attention
Human-based data vs
browser-based

8. HYPOTHESIS 2
There is a correlative relationship between context,
creative and attention
RESEARCH METHOD
Look at large numbers of creatives over time shown
across many different contexts to identify patterns

9. Methodology
59
advertisers
683
creatives
2,263
domains
26,006 27M
URLs impressions

10. A high degree of variability
Different creative, same
content, different
attention.
Shows the effect of the
priming and context-ad
alignment.
ange.
Mean Attention Time across sample URLs
- Creative execution
- Mean across URL

11. Brands and contexts
Look if certain contexts are
consistently in the top position
for a given brand
Calculate percentage of time
that a brand has the same #1
Context
1
2 3
%

12. How often are the top contexts the same for a brand?
The more creatives a
brand runs, the less
chance that the top
context is the same.
The likelihood of the top contexts (IAB Tier 1) being the same across a brand's
different creative executions

13. How often are the top contexts the same for a brand?
A lot degree of contextual
continuity across all
creatives but ok when
needing to cover 50%+
ange.
The likelihood of the top contexts (IAB Tier 1) being the same across a brand's
different creative executions
Likelihood of
contextual
continuity

14. Creativity counts to drive attention
Key learning
Creative is an important lever for brands to pull to optimise ROI. Understand
what’s working with real human insight.
A
B
When context and placement
are equal, creativity drives
attention
Relevant to context
placement is critical in a
cookieless world
A/B testing is paramount to
creativity in the attention
economy

15. HYPOTHESIS 2
There is a correlative relationship between context,
creative and attention
Can we use context to optimise
attention time for a given creative?

16. How could we effectively optimise the right creative to
the right context?
Categorise URLs into
contexts
Create a virtual
experiment
Investigate potential lift
PERIOD 1
PERIOD 2
vs

17. Using the iAB v2 Content Taxonomy
TIER 1 TIER 2 TIER 3 TIER 4
Food & Drink Sports
Golf
Style & Fashion
Women’s fashion
Women’s glasses
Tech & Computing
Computing
Internet
Web design & HTML

18. Comparison of category performance
We rank the top 3
performing categories
for Attention Time.
Context category
Sports
News
Lifestyle
Period 1
We then compare how
well this holds true in
the future period using
only novel inventory.
Context category
Sports
News
Period 2
We can then extrapolate
the potential Attention
Time lift if we were target
those contexts.
Context category
Sports
News
Potential uplift
Lifestyle
60%
50%
-5%
Lifestyle

19. How often are the top contexts the same for a brand?
For a given creative,
there is a reliable
relationship between
attention
performance and
context over time.

20. Attention provides powerful data about how customers interact with
brands in media
Key learning
The data supports informed investment decisions, and helps us get a greater
share of customer attention for our clients and drive incremental ROAS.
Sport
Ents.
Business
Context Creative Placement

21. Conclusions
Key findings

22. Key findings from our study
Use attention signals & best
contextual intelligence to guide
investment
Attention Time is a powerful feedback
loop for contextual
Measure at creative level for
maximum impact
Quite low contextual continuity
Use real time bidding to maximise the
gains
Huge potential optimisation
Identifying the best contexts is worth
the effort
Context can have a large bearing on
the attention an ad receives

23. Thanks
jake.selley@playgroundxyz.com