As a part of OpenX’s Cookieless Deal Library, Stephanie Waldt, Product Marketing Manager, spoke with Moomal Shaikh, Principal Product Manager at Oracle, about how attention drives resonance, relevance, and recall. Thanks for joining us, Moomal!
What book has had the biggest impact on you?
There are countless books that have had a huge impact on me, so it’s challenging to choose just one. But I am currently re-reading Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. Even for my second read, it’s so fascinating to dive into the intricacies of the mind! It’s giving me a moment to pause and recognize how I make decisions and how I may be influenced by cognitive biases – and learn to recognize the same in others. A timely read for the attention ecosystem too!
Attention isn’t just a viewability metric but rather a valuable cookieless solution. Can you tell us more about that?
Viewability is table stakes; it creates an opportunity to be noticed. Over time, incentives and technology have transformed the valuable currency of viewability into a specification that can be gamed by the unscrupulous. While well-intended, viewability alone doesn’t fully capture the complexity of behavioral economics (think: incentives), falls short on keeping the digital consumer journey at the center (think: the increased conversation around on MFA sites), and has led our industry to some unintended second-order consequences.
Attention measurement transcends this foundational signal and provides a window into understanding crucial insights of user receptivity and ad effectiveness. When standing in the middle of Times Square, many billboard ads may be “viewable” to me, but that doesn’t mean I’ve paid attention to them.
How does attention drive resonance, relevance, and recall?
Attention is the gateway to all three aspects of driving impact through an ad experience, and all three aspects are interconnected.
- Resonance: Capturing attention is the first step toward creating an emotional connection with the audience. When users actively pay attention to an ad, they are more open and receptive to the messaging, storytelling, and calls-to-action.
- Relevance: The user attention itself signals relevance, such that when users are actively paying attention to an ad, it implies the ad creative is relevant to their interests or needs. Contextually relevant ads benefit from the positive halo effect of user attention as well.
- Recall: Lastly, that sustained attention (and repeated exposure) toward a memorable ad experience enhances recall and memory retrieval.
Attention is nuanced. Tell us more about the relationship between attention measures and transparency.
Attention can have entirely different interpretations across players in the ecosystem, and understanding and acknowledging these nuances is crucial for building effective and actionable attention solutions. But all of this can, and often does, feel complicated and overwhelming.
Which is why, similar to AI interpretability and explainability, transparency in attention measurement is key to fostering trust and confidence. This transparency will encourage collaboration, drive greater adoption, and allow for attention solutions to scale more effectively.
How do cross-partner collaboration and access to multiple data points result in a deeper understanding of audiences?
Audiences (much like all humans) are multifaceted and cannot be understood with isolated sets of signals. Cross-partner collaboration and combining insights from various data points provides a more comprehensive view of audiences, uncovering nuanced patterns and trends of user behavior. These insights can serve as foundational principles for attention solutions, such as recognizing diminishing returns of attention over time, or the quality or frequency of interactions indicating degree of intent.
Moreover, collaboration across partners facilitates the exchange of diverse ideas and perspectives, and this drives innovation and better outcomes for all.
How does attention help decrease the risk and waste associated with delivery on low-quality inventory?
The beauty of attention measurement is that it takes into consideration multiple data points that indicate media quality and ad experience, as opposed to relying on isolated signals that provide a narrow understanding of user behavior. This gives us the ability for a more nuanced assessment of whether an ad is effectively capturing attention, and enables a more refined approach to qualifying media placements and partners for better decision-making.
How do partnerships like the one between Oracle and OpenX deliver premium, attention-grabbing inventory at scale without the need for incremental contracts?
While having access to numerous data points is invaluable, it can also be very overwhelming for a buyer looking to thoughtfully connect with their audiences in a privacy-conscious way. Two key components to driving adoption are building trust in attention data, and simplifying complex and fragmented workflows.
The partnership between Oracle Moat and OpenX is particularly exciting because it tackles these challenges by delivering premium, attention-grabbing inventory at scale, without adding burden to clients’ operational workflows. Oracle Moat has always been dedicated to attention measurement using a cookie less approach. Our emphasis on precision and accuracy of measurement ensures reliability of attention signals, while our commitment to transparency cultivates trust in the data.
OpenX recognizes the importance of operational efficiency to drive adoption and is dedicated to designing workflows that are streamlined, flexible, and intuitive. The team at OpenX is committed to providing agencies with strategic and turnkey cookieless solutions, and high-attention quality score deals can be easily activated today via OpenX’s Cookieless Deal Library. We’re thrilled by this partnership, and excited to be part of the OpenX cookieless solutions ecosystem!