Dive Brief:
- Agency network Dentsu International has expanded its partnership VidMob, with the latter's Agile Creative Studio now supporting Dentsu's Attention Ads Lab, with the goal of providing deeper insights about how objects, shapes, words, sentiments, colors and logos appearing in video creative impact view duration, purchases and other consumer actions, per an announcement.
- VidMob uses computer vision, optical character recognition and machine learning technologies to tag every visual attribute of an ad. It has tagged more than 1.3 billion part of ads that have been seen more than 1.9 trillion times.
- The partnership will support brand campaigns on social media, programmatic video, over-the-top (OTT) and connected TV (CTV) channels, per the announcement, enabling Dentsu to expand its efforts to identify ads that capture consumer attention to include measuring the effectiveness of video creative across digital media channels.
Dive Insight:
Dentsu's expanded collaboration with VidMob aims to help marketers determine which parts of their video advertising are most effective at capturing attention and driving other outcomes. With increased fragmentation of the media universe, advertisers have more ways to reach consumers among a wider variety of devices, including computers, connected TVs, smartphones, tablets and smart displays. While audience targeting and segmentation are important in reaching the right consumers at the right time, ad creative is essential in capturing their attention.
Claims that the attention span of the average person is now shorter than a goldfish's have been disputed, but marketers still have a limited window of time to grab the attention of viewers. Emotions in video ads affect their performance within a few seconds, VidMob found in a study of how people reacted to ad creative during the pandemic. Its research showed that surprised emotions in the first three seconds led to a 360% jump in performance from start of the pandemic to lockdown and ads with happy emotions saw a decrease of 64% in conversions. Calm videos boosted purchases by 156% during lockdowns, while ads showing women drove a 325% increase in performance.
Attention has become an important ad metric, per the Dentsu release. Digital platforms as varied as YouTube and Snapchat have developed six-second, non-skippable ads that challenge advertisers to compress a brand narrative in ways that aren't too intrusive while still grabbing attention. Facebook found in a study that six-second ads perform better than 30-second ads, though it's not clear how the ad creative affected that outcome. Per Dentsu, 70% of campaign performance is driven by creative.
