Transcript

5 minutes with John Waite. Let's talk attention. Can you tell us a bit about your role at Havas? Yeah. So in the global Head of planning for Havas Media Network, it's an amazing role, but it's a very diverse role. So it covers everything from the philosophy of how we plan, the craft of how we do it across markets, so elevating our capabilities in the planning space. And then the role also takes me into new and interesting areas. So if there are new ways of planning, new data sets, new partnerships we need to develop, I'm also focused a lot on that. How do you define attention and why is it important? The brands today, it's a hugely interesting area. So this area of attention probably appeared around 2019 in relation to media and advertising. And if I try and simplify it, it's kind of to try and bridge media that we buy and media that's deemed to be effective. But there's this whole middle ground where sometimes we just don't know what the human experience of media is actually like. And there's a kind of sad reality that lots of advertising and lots of media. Is mist and avoided by people, not only because there's a huge volume of it, but also because people have got quite good at avoiding it. So attention appeared as a way to bridge the gap between media that is bought, media that we is exposed to people they have an opportunity to see. But actually to define whether they saw it and communicated it is really important. Since the launch of our study with Lumen and Brand Metrics in 2024, what progress has the industry made in understanding attention? All the kind of early studies on attention were found out foundational because we were they were they were trying to kind of establish is there a new way to measure the quality of exposures and the impact they're having on people beyond measures like impacts and impressions and what we call the jigs that the joint industry currencies that exist today. So there are quite foundational. So they were, they were, if we can measure it, how we do it and eye tracking kind of kind of came to the forefront as one way of saying this is a way we can. If you define if people have seen the stuff that we're putting out there, but they all focused on comparing 1 placement to another placement. So all the foundational stuff, many brands are saying, yeah, totally get this, I want the media that I buy to be seen, obviously. But there was still a huge number of questions around how much attention brands actually need. And ultimately, what we saw is that low attention can work if you have enough of it and it's kind of obvious. And it kind of goes back to lots of principles. We already know about the importance of frequency and repetition. For brands. This year we launched a new paper on attention. How are we applying these insights across Havas? The paper that we launched actually kind of was a deep dive into three other papers that have been launched following our Luminum brand metrics piece. Karen Nelson Field and Peter Fields work around the cost of Dole media and the need to invest in higher quality and higher attentive media that that has a huge impact on results for brands and and the importance of. Their quality of media on landing a creative message was huge. So no matter how good your creative is, if it's in rubbish media that gets no attention. Doctor Grace Kites, lots of littles, which is very similar to the work that we did with Lumen in terms of its findings that you can achieve positive results for brands using lower tension formats as long as you do it over a long enough period of time and frequency plays a key role. And finally, what challenges still need to be solved for retention metrics? Become a mainstream planning to so many. Our industry moves very slowly on kind of making anything mainstream. And it's, it's heartening for me to see that. I guess we can't six years into this kind of journey that there are many sort of trade bodies and councils looking into both the validation and standardization of potential metrics. So you have like the Anna and WFA and SIM and the attention accounts, there's lots of bodies and the IAB in the US as well looking at validating attention metrics. I think there's a difficulty because. There's lots of vendors offering different attention metrics. Now I don't think that's a bad thing. I think that's a positive thing. But they're all different methodologies. They utilize different language and different ways of approaching attention. So I think clarity rather than standardization and a single kind of taxonomy around naming conventions is, is really important in the space. And although lots of brands understand the importance of attention, they're not yet there by to say that's going to become our key measure of success in in media and they need to. Be more evidence for them that as a kind of media metric, as an intermediary, as an indicator of success, that that is worth worth doing. It's more of that kind of thing that brands want to see before they make the leap to the tension based planning. So I think standardization and the incentive structure that underpins everything that we do as an industry.