Skincare brand Ahava sees 10% awareness lift by measuring ad attention

Brief:

Skincare brand Ahava saw a 10.35% lift in relative awareness and four-times greater on-site times during a campaign for its Extreme Night Treatment product, according to materials shared with Mobile Marketer. The campaign utilized the brand's digital agency Stella Rising and mobile performance branding firm Parsec and ran from Aug. 29 to Dec. 30, 2018.
The campaign was used for consideration targeting, resulting in "by far the most engaged-audience that we had seen across anything we had run for that client on that campaign," Stella Rising chief digital officer Brandon Heagle told Mobile Marketer.
The ads ran among Parsec's inventory on sites like Working Mother, Slate, inStyle, The Zoe Report, Buzzfeed and Bustle. Parsec only charges advertisers for the time that consumers spend with their ads, instead of using traditional impression metrics.

Insight:

The success of Ahava's campaign is evidence that taking an attention-focused approach to mobile ads can drive results. Capturing consumer attention on mobile is often a tricky proposition, with 54% of U.S. adults saying brand familiarity is the top reason to pay attention to mobile ads, ahead of interesting creative (52%), good timing (41%) and brand coupons (41%), per a survey by mobile ad platform Aki Technologies. Targeting consumers with these approaches at the times when they are most receptive to ads — like when watching TV or in bed — is key.

With consumer attention in mind, Parsec claims it is better able to align the incentives of brands, creative agencies, media planners and consumers, "just by switching the metric from an impression basis that tries to get as many viewable ads on screen as possible," Parsec founder and CEO Marc Guldimann told Mobile Marketer.

Ahava found that, by focusing on attention, it was able to drive high-impact engagement that continued even after the initial engagement.

"We were excited to find that Parsec excels at driving attention after the click as well — traffic from their ads spends 4X longer on site than standard native placements and are in line with lower funnel tactics," Ahava's VP of global e-commerce Austin Malcomb said in a statement.

Ahava's partners were also able to maximize the campaign's results by optimizing the creative. Ad units that featured a carousel and animation saw 1.01% and 0.88% click-through rates, respectively. Heagle noted that the best performing creative featured motion, activity and "splashes" of video, with more product placement shots, and the campaign was optimized to focus on these units. "Creative is one of the variables, one of the levers we can pull," Heagle said.