The industry is moving toward a new metric, "attention," aimed at replacing the "viewability" metric. Using attention as a targeting metric can help advertisers avoid low-quality inventory from sites that manipulate viewability metrics.

On October 8, 2024, Adelaide, a company specializing in attention measurement, announced that attention-based segments are now available for targeting through The Trade Desk (TTD). Advertisers can now target low, medium, and high-attention inventory through TTD’s self-service DSP platform.

Previously, attention was a metric measured only in post-campaign reports. Now, using attention as a parameter for campaign targeting is gaining popularity. This innovation could ultimately lead to higher prices for ad inventory.

Last year, Adelaide launched targeting based on its proprietary Attention Unit in partnership with Yahoo DSP and several SSPs, including Sharethrough. Now, according to Adelaide CEO Marc Guldimann, integration with The Trade Desk — the largest independent DSP — greatly expands the availability of attention-based targeting.

David Nyurenberg, Director of Video Product Development at the agency Rain the Growth, who participated in the beta testing, notes that targeting based on attention instead of viewability should help advertisers avoid inventory from publishers that manipulate viewability metrics. This includes sites that overload pages with ads, sites created specifically for ads (MFA), and outstream videos posing as instream.

According to Adelaide, advertisers testing this solution in August-September 2024 saw a 58% increase in return on ad spend (ROAS) and a 62% increase in clicks compared to control groups.

Attention as Targeting

According to Nyurenberg, Adelaide’s integration with The Trade Desk allows for the use of attention metrics in real-time campaign targeting, not just post-campaign analysis.

Previously, advertisers worked with companies specializing in audience attention measurement, such as Lumen or Adelaide, integrating these providers’ tags into their ads. These providers then offered dashboards that evaluated user attention levels across domains. This helped advertisers and agencies determine on which sites their ads had the highest chance of capturing audience attention.

After analyzing the results, buyers would manually adjust their campaigns, excluding sites with low attention scores.

Now, with Adelaide’s pre-made segments, ad campaigns can be automatically optimized for the desired level of attention selected by the buyer.

Nyurenberg notes that The Trade Desk’s Kokai interface, launched last June, already offers buyers numerous options for compiling site lists, including choosing publishers from TTD’s SP500+ list. Adelaide’s attention-based segments add another layer of targeting for inventory purchases.

According to Guldimann, the expansion of features within the DSP platform reflects The Trade Desk’s growing interest in publisher quality assessment.

Attention Levels

In the initial phase of its partnership with TTD, Adelaide offers three levels of attention for targeting: low, medium, and high. According to Adelaide’s assessment, high attention includes inventory in the top 30% of all TTD’s available inventory. Medium attention accounts for the next 40%, and low attention makes up the remaining 30%.

Adelaide applies different criteria to the attention metric depending on the inventory type, explains Jordan Weiers, Adelaide’s Senior Director of Partnerships and Business Development. Evaluation criteria vary for standard banners, video, and CTV inventory. Weiers notes that video publishers typically achieve higher attention scores than traditional media, so a higher benchmark is set for them. Additionally, TTD will allow advertisers to customize threshold values for each level of attention.

While TTD has recently emphasized its vast CTV inventory and considers it a growth driver for its business, adding attention measurement capabilities for display inventory could have the greatest impact on buyers, says Kieran Geyer, a manager at Prudential Financial. According to him, there is simply more display inventory on the open internet, so buying low-quality or low-attention display media can excessively impact the success of an ad campaign.

Quality Standard

Avoiding low-attention and, thus, low-quality inventory is becoming a key priority for buyers. This is especially relevant given that a large portion of advertising budgets is wasted on sites created specifically for ads (MFA) and outstream videos masquerading as instream formats.

Nyurenberg, whose agency Rain the Grow specializes in video and CTV, notes that optimizing viewability for video ad campaigns often boils down to optimizing outstream formats. These are silent, auto-playing video players that follow users as they scroll, delivering 100% viewability. However, when Rain applied attention-targeting settings, the amount of inventory purchased with sound increased tenfold — a sign of more premium instream inventory placement.

Geyer notes that MFA sites can contain over a dozen video and display ads on a page. These ads meet viewability standards but usually fail to achieve advertiser goals: they do not enhance brand awareness or drive conversions.

“Investing exclusively in placements that attract high attention and correlate with media outcomes should be a prerequisite for every programmatic campaign,” Geyer emphasizes.

But can the attention metric really replace ad viewability in future campaigns?

Guldimann believes that the growing focus of buyers on attention metrics will shift demand, which will likely affect ad inventory pricing. As a result, high-attention sites will be able to set higher prices.

However, Nyurenberg thinks it is premature to use attention as a key indicator without broader market standardization.

“At this point, it’s unlikely that anyone would bill for attention,” he notes, “because measurement methods for this metric vary greatly among providers.”

Nevertheless, the possibility of attention-based targeting “at least gives us a new KPI to optimize for,” he adds. “If you’re optimizing for viewability, you’re effectively optimizing for lower-premium sites.”

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