Affiliate Leaders’ editor, Jyoti Rambhai, sits down with Teads’ Neala Brown to chat about one of the hot topics at this year’s Cannes Lions – measurement.
Affiliate marketers are notoriously focused on hard performance metrics like cost per acquisition (CPA), click-through rates (CTR), return on investment (ROI) and direct conversions. It’s a short-term focus.
Meanwhile brand advertising has usually been about the long game: driving awareness and retaining customers.
But in recent years, there has been a shift with more and more brands focusing on attention in the pursuit of short-term clicks and cheap impressions. This has seemed like an easy win to sell to stakeholders and board members.
However, the industry is evolving like never before. What used to work five years ago may not anymore, which raises the question: are attention metrics the right way to measure campaign success?
This was a hot topic of discussion at Cannes Lions this year and I sat down with Neala Brown, global head of data, measurement and insights at Teads to delve into this a bit more.
Challenging misconceptions
Sitting on Teads’ yacht, Brown tells me this is why they’ve been focused on “understanding the connection between attention, attention metrics, how that connects to brand outcomes, sales outcomes and how that translates into a business”.
Teads participated in Dentsu’s ‘The Brand Reset’ study, produced in partnership with Kantar and Lumen, which showed how attention can drive long-term sales.
One of the biggest assumptions in advertising is that linear TV is the main channel capable of driving long-term growth. However, the study challenged this misconception, finding that digital video – both long and short-form – could deliver the same, multi-year brand building effects.
“Seeing the findings confirm that digital video and short-form video can contribute meaningfully to long-term brand building was a huge validation for our formats,” she explains.
“What was particularly interesting is that ‘polite formats,’ which rely entirely on voluntary attention from the consumer, performed exceptionally well.”
Polite formats are less intrusive ads and examples include hovering over banners to expand display ads; muted native video ads that play automatically in social feeds; and ads that load after the content.
Clicks has diminished brand trust
But the biggest challenge currently facing marketers is what Dentsu’s report dubs “the doom loop”. The focus for so long has been on instant gratification and short-term gains.
The relentless optimisation for clicks and conversions could arguably diminish the effectiveness of ads and brand trust. So, while understanding attention has been a major win for publishers, connecting consumer attention to low-funnel actions has remained a hurdle for marketing execs.
“The challenge, historically, has been what this means in practice and how can brands actually make it actionable? Otherwise you get into this cycle where the focus is on brand building, that has some short-term impact, so then you reinvest and reallocate media budgets differently leading to over investing,” says Brown.
This is why it’s important to have an attention measurement that “understands the platforms you’re working with” and how it delivers against KPIs.
“There’s so many metrics in the media ecosystem, we don’t need another one unless it is meaningful, helps us make decisions and has practical applications.
“[…] We’ve done some work with companies like Lumen and Adelaide (another attention company) to correlate the notion of attention with awareness, consideration and intent,” explains Brown.
She adds Teads is in the process of launching dedicated attention thresholds that can help marketers benchmark against KPIs and identify the channels that are appropriate to reach the target audience.
Navigating data signal loss
But the attention metric is just one area in the vast digital marketing ecosystem, which is experiencing continued data signal loss from the deprecation of tracking cookies to tighter restrictions across social media.
Performance marketing channels like social, search, affiliate or display, often centre around diving that click. But with AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini driving less click-throughs, it’s leaving a measurement blind spot.
“We all went through the entire cookie deprecation roller coaster that never happened and that is partly why we started to lean into attention,” she points out, adding that is why Teads built its cookie list translator.
“We heavily invested in attention measurement to guarantee we could still deliver against brand lift and performance outcomes.”
Since then, Teads merged with Outbrain. Through combining their technology and data signals, the firm has built a toolkit that balances owned solutions with third-party integrations to help track consumer behaviour, content consumption and insights.
For marketers still relying purely on traditional or performance-only methods, Brown’s advice is clear: don’t lose sight of the bigger picture.
At the end of the day, “it’s important to understand the health of your brand, the levels of awareness and consideration”.
“You can’t buy something if you’re not aware of it,” she puts it plainly. “All of those things are important because they influence how you might think about your messaging, your media placements and the channels.
“You cannot just look at immediate conversion data; marketers must learn to balance digital metrics with overall brand health to protect and cultivate long-term brand equity.”
In a fast-evolving digital landscape, clicks are one metric part of an equation. And in an “incredibly cluttered marketplace, maintaining strong brand awareness isn’t a luxury – it’s absolutely necessary for survival”, Brown concludes.
