Teads wants marketers to pay attention. The omnichannel global media platform believes marketers should strongly consider the feasibility of attention as a metric in order for brands to be realistically positioned to meet goals.
With cookies becoming increasingly obsolete, “some of the traditional metrics that we’ve used aren’t as reliable anymore,” says Neala Brown, SVP, strategy and insights at Teads. “If we’re going to add a metric to that toolkit, we all want to be thoughtful about whether it’s meaningful. Because of that, we’ve done a fair amount of work in terms of correlating attention-based measures to campaign outcomes.”
Teads has measured attention-based metrics in more than 500 campaigns from 120 brands that delivered 2.5 billion impressions across mobile, desktop and CTV screens.
The programmatic advertising company found the adaptation of creative to the platform and the relevance of placement and context enhance attention levels and improves attention by 20% over the course of a campaign.
In Canada, in association with data company Lumen, Teads conducted attention testing between October 2022 and April 2023 on 18 campaigns with 41 million impressions, 31% of which were on Canadian local sites.
Results of the test showed that ads on Canadian publisher sites garner more attention than those on global sites. Ad viewability was 91% on the Canadian sites versus 80% on global sites. Ads were also viewed longer on local sites (an average of 3.9 seconds) versus global sites (3.1 seconds on average).
Ad recall was 37% for the local Canadian sites compared with 35% for the global sites. Brand favourability was 77% for local Canadian publishers versus 70% for global sites, while purchasing intent was 70% vs. 64%, respectively.
Karen Wang, Teads’ managing director for Canada, says consumers spend more time with the local content on Canadian premium publishers sites like CBC, BlogTO, Village Media news sites, Curiocity and DailyHive than they do on global sites such as CNN, BBC or The Guardian. The increased time spent on Canadian sites leads to higher attention on the ads they contain.
Attention metrics, Wang says, represent a new way for brands to measure the success of their campaigns. “We’ve finally got to a point in this industry that everyone wants to measure attention. Marketers are talking about it a lot more. And because we’ve been doing it for so long, we can actually show them proof that we know how to drive better attention.”
Wang says one of Teads’ competitive advantages is that it sells to marketers based on guaranteed outcomes such as vCPM, CPCV and quality traffic. Instead of saying you only pay for clicks, marketers are only charged for quality visits, which is up to marketers or their agencies to define.
Teads also makes its creative studio available to the brands it works with. “We’re not necessarily looking to build creative that is completely unique. We’re taking their existing assets and optimizing it to create more impactful formats to drive better outcomes.”
If the creative is optimized within Teads’ ad slots, “we know that it will perform better,” says Wang, noting that two-thirds of media effectiveness is driven by the creative. “That’s why we created Teads Studio.”
Wang adds that Teads’ sweet spot is that it understands what users are reading. “It’s not just baking, it’s baking cookies, It’s not just sports, it’s the NBA finals. If you’re a brand, you want to get that granular. Our ability to deeply contextually target is something that marketers really like.”
With Teads’ emphasis on attention metrics, it is launching PMPs in Canada and the US optimized for inventory verified to drive high attention and subsequent outcomes. “It’s a programmatic offering that clients will be able to take advantage of to feel confident that they’re going to market with already validated inventory that has been audited as high attention,” Brown says.
Many marketers are seeking to ensure they’re futureproofing their brands, by understanding how to target consumers once cookies disappear, “and we offer them a very easy way to do that.”
Wang says marketers lean on Teads’ ability to do creative testing and provide post-campaign insights on creatives that resonated. “Measurement matters. We can have campaigns with beautiful assets in premium environments all day long but if they don’t perform, that’s not going to matter.”
