The advertising industry has long had a complicated relationship with the concept of attention — mainly because proving that anyone is actually paying any has always been somewhat difficult.
Now Amazon and Adelaide, a data and analytics firm that specializes in attention-based metrics, are offering media buyers a way to place their bets before the cards are dealt, rather than counting their chips afterward.
The integration, announced Tuesday, allows advertisers using Amazon's demand-side platform to filter advertising inventory based on predicted attention quality before they commit to a bid. Previously, advertisers could measure how well their placements captured attention, but only after the campaign had already run and the money had already been spent. (Which is a bit like grading a restaurant after you've eaten the entire meal and paid the check.)
"Advertisers shouldn't have to wait until after a campaign runs to know whether their spend went toward high-attention media," Marc Guldimann, the chief executive and co-founder of Adelaide, wrote in a blog post announcing the partnership.
The integration offers two products. One, called "AU Media Quality," sorts inventory into three tiers — high, average, and low — based on Adelaide's predictive models of how likely a placement is to capture attention. Buyers can then target or exclude inventory accordingly, across display, online video, and connected television formats.
The shift represents a broader movement in programmatic advertising to push quality filters earlier in the buying process, a change that has been discussed in industry circles for several years but has been slow to gain traction among the major platforms.
Not everyone is ready to declare attention the new coin of the realm. Benjamin Lichtman, who oversees performance marketing analytics and insights at Nestlé Health Science, told the trade publication AdExchanger that his company is still in the early phases of testing whether attention serves as a reliable proxy for media quality.
Which is to say: the industry is interested, but the jury remains sequestered.
Original story published in MediaPost: "Amazon Adds Attention Metrics To Pre-Bid Targeting"