What can eye tracking tell us about attention? Richard talks to Mike Follett, CEO of Lumen Research, about how the attention economy has evolved and how tracking eye movements can tell us more about where people place their attention. Mike discusses how human attention has always been managed, whether for survival in the jungle or the urban landscape. The conversation explores how eye tracking can help understand the attention process and how long a person looks at a particular element to assess how much attention to assign. With appropriate tests, eye tracking helps determine what marketing elements get attention - so your message can be heard!
Brandon Wehn (00:08):
Welcome to the show. This is Brandon Wehn and you are listening to the Understanding Consumer Neuroscience Podcast brought to you by the folks at CloudArmy. In this episode, Richard talks to Michael Follett, CEO of Lumen Research, about the attention economy and how eye tracking technology can be used to understand where potential customers place their attention.
Richard Campbell (00:36):
Hi, this is Richard Campbell. Thanks for listening to Understanding Consumer Neuroscience. Today my guest is Michael Follett, who is the CEO of Lumen Research and a professional in the area of attention economy. Mike, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Mike Follett (00:50):
Ah, thanks very much Rich. Very pleased to be with you today.
Richard Campbell (00:53):
This idea of the attention economy doesn't seem that weird anymore. I think the modern society and a continuously connected society's just made it apparent that you never have to be bored at any moment. There is a device on you at all times that wants to stimulate you and that people have to ration their attention these days.
Mike Follett (01:12):
Yes. I think we're becoming more and more aware of the fact that, in Herb Simon's words, a wealth of information presupposes a poverty of attention. There is just so much stuff out there to look at and listen to and to engage with. That necessarily means that there's a lot of it that gets ignored. And we have to, you said we have to become better as human beings about rationing our own attention. But in a sense we just have to be aware that attention is a finite resource-
Richard Campbell (01:46):
Yes.
Mike Follett (01:48):
And understanding that can help us as marketers. But could help us just as people to understand how we really engage with the world.
Richard Campbell (01:58):
Yeah, back when we were a non-technical society, your attention was on the edges of the bushes and the trees for a pair of eyes of a large creature that was going to eat you. And that was a good place to put your attention because if you didn't do that, you weren't going to be around to reproduce and so much for that. But these days it's more, it's only a Chevy and you can kind of see it coming.
Mike Follett (02:19):
Well, absolutely, and I think this is the most important thing to say, which is that we have always lived in an attention economy. There's always been too much to look at or too much to listen to. And a natural fact, that's what attention is. Attention is selection.
Richard Campbell (02:34):
Right.
Mike Follett (02:36):
That's what when we talk about attention, we're talking about selective attention. There's too many things to look at in the world. We can't engage with them all. We only have two eyes. Our head is only so big, we simply can't process all of the information out there.
Richard Campbell (02:52):
And never have.
Mike Follett (02:53):
And never have, exactly.
Richard Campbell (02:55):
That's why it... We are actually well calibrated to be selective.
Mike Follett (02:59):
Absolutely. The William James, when he defined attention in the Principles of Psychology talks about selection as its primary quality. So when we're talking about the attention economy, we are really just sort of financializing-
Richard Campbell (03:16):
Right.
Mike Follett (03:17):
Something that's very, very core to being human or being an animal. Apes of this size, six foot, five foot to six foot tall, are both predator and prey, that means that we have to attend to the world so that we can achieve our aims and objectives, but also have the ability to respond to it so that we can get dinner, but also can avoid being dinner. And this isn't unique to humans.
Richard Campbell (03:44):
No.
Mike Follett (03:44):
All animals have to have this ability.
Richard Campbell (03:45):
Pretty much all the way up.
Mike Follett (03:46):
Exactly. We have our own version of it. In a sense actually, we're not even particularly good at it. And I've got a new puppy in the house. His hearing is much better, his smell is much, much better. You go out for a walk in the forest and you'll see that the attention patterns of deer or cats or something are far more honed than our ours.
Richard Campbell (04:08):
Yes.
Mike Follett (04:08):
But we have this sort of limited human type of attention and we can expend that in lots of different ways. We've gone from the real jungle to the urban jungle and the skills and the habits that we learned in rationing attention out in the jungle, are sort of deployed in modern life in much the same way. And so we equally have this sort of selective attention for all of the things that are coming to us right now.
Richard Campbell (04:37):
No, I think the mixture of being your head down in a smartphone and crossing the street at the same time is a totally new level of where you managing your attention well.
Mike Follett (04:44):
Well exactly. And I think that what's happened recently is the proliferation of human artifacts competing for attention, especially the smartphone-
Richard Campbell (04:54):
Yes.
Mike Follett (04:54):
Has just made us acutely aware of how we deploy our attention in different ways. Also, how we waste our attention.
Richard Campbell (05:03):
Right.
Mike Follett (05:03):
I think this is the other thing that's becoming more and more apparent. I think this is a challenge of wealth and of affluence that as a society there are just hundreds of things, hundreds of distractions out there for us. And in the past it may have been that there were only one or two good things to attempt to look at. We were bored a lot of the time. And now that is not a problem.
Richard Campbell (05:34):
No. And there's plenty of things asking for your attention all of the time.
Mike Follett (05:38):
Exactly. Competing for your attention. And now we're sort of more aware of that.
Richard Campbell (05:43):
And what I find fascinating, if you think about how this has changed is the carnival barker approach of being the loudest thing in the room, not only doesn't garner attention well, but it annoys people far more. That once upon a time as a marketer I could, if I just had the right flashy light, that might be the thing that worked. But people have swung the other way where it's like, do not assault my attention.
Mike Follett (06:09):
Well, I think that that's... There's a new book out when we came out last year by Paul Feldwick called, who's a ad man and a theorist of this, called Why Does the Pedlar Sing? And talking about, it's a line from Hilaire Belloc, I think saying pedlars when they go around rural France in the 19th century because he's singing songs trying to get a attention. And when a pedlar comes into your village and starts singing a song, you haven't heard many songs recently. So everyone sort of pricks up their ears and rushes to the door to see what this guy, what songs he's got to sing and what stuff he's got to sell.
Richard Campbell (06:46):
Right.
Mike Follett (06:47):
Two pedlars in the village at the same time on the other hand-
Richard Campbell (06:51):
Not so good.
Mike Follett (06:52):
Not so good. 10, 20, if everyone is bloody well singing that song, then it becomes a cacophony that is deeply unpleasant. And then secondly, I think we have a sort of, this isn't a one time game. You play the game once and the loudest voice in the room might get heard. But we play the same game on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday and January, February, March, we've learned that this stuff ain't going to stop. And so our sort of experience through time also teaches us that not only is this irritating now, but it's going to get more irritating. And so I think we've become, as a society, much less receptive to the loudest voice in the room because it's rarely the loudest for very long and it ain't going to shut up.
Richard Campbell (07:44):
Right. And it'll be back tomorrow anyway, so why pay attention to him?
Mike Follett (07:47):
It'll be back tomorrow. Exactly. And so what we have now is... Nature has or evolution has endowed us with this amazing ability to ignore stuff. You were talking about that pair of eyes in the bushes. It was very important to be able to ignore everything else and just concentrate on those, are they eyes or are they, I don't know, berries or something like that. You expend some attentional resources to confirm your hypothesis there and you ignore everything else and just select to engage with that.
Richard Campbell (08:20):
Right.
Mike Follett (08:21):
Okay. What we do now, I think, with that skill, that superpower that nature has endowed us with means that we can glance at lots of things and go, "Ah, it's not worth my time."
Richard Campbell (08:33):
Yeah.
Mike Follett (08:34):
And I think lots-
Richard Campbell (08:34):
Just graze over.
Mike Follett (08:37):
Exactly that. You expend enough attention, not so much for selection, but for rejection.
Richard Campbell (08:43):
Yeah. Because it's faster.
Mike Follett (08:45):
And you just go, "Right. I've seen it, it's an ad. I've Grown up with ads, I know what they're like. They're a complete waste of time."
Richard Campbell (08:51):
I've seen this on webpages where people are blind on the right side of the page because ads have been there so often that even when you put something they want or important on the right side of a webpage, they cannot see it.
Mike Follett (09:02):
Exactly. We have this sort of learnt behavior, this deliberate saving of cognitive resources that all of our previous experience suggested that little flashing box in the corner is a waste of your time. And so you're not going to miss anything by ignoring it.
Richard Campbell (09:22):
Yeah.
Mike Follett (09:22):
And I think that, like I say, nature has endowed us with this astonishing ability to ignore almost everything. But the practice of marketing has through bitter experience, taught people that one of the things that they should ignore is the ad-
Richard Campbell (09:36):
[inaudible 00:09:37].
Mike Follett (09:36):
Nothing to see here folks.
Richard Campbell (09:38):
Yeah. Move on. And I guess the question is, because we know it's almost mythological at times, but we know there's the breakthrough ad, there's the viral ad, the one that grabs people's attention, that does affect them. It's just a question of how you make that thing. Why did that ad at that time get so much attention?
Mike Follett (09:58):
Well, let's think about that because I think it is a really, really important thing. At Lumen, we're an eye tracking company, so we use software to understand what people could see and then what they do see, we've got some software that turns the camera on your mobile phone or your desktop computer into a high quality eye tracking camera. And so we can see what's on the page. And then crucially, if anyone was looking at this particular element.
Richard Campbell (10:26):
Sure.
Mike Follett (10:27):
We've got tons and tons of data from that. And on a good day we find that people ignore around about between 50 and 70% of the advertising that they are engaged with.
Richard Campbell (10:41):
Wow.
Mike Follett (10:41):
So a thousand ads say, which is not an unreasonable amount, that's a lot. But my math isn't no good, so I'm going to keep it at a thousand if that's all right.
Richard Campbell (10:50):
It's a nice round number.
Mike Follett (10:51):
So 700 of those ads they're entirely ignored.
Richard Campbell (10:56):
You never, you didn't even see them. Yeah.
Mike Follett (10:57):
Didn't even see, didn't even engage them. They might be there, right staring you in the face. But there's a big difference between things being viewable and things being viewed.
Richard Campbell (11:07):
True.
Mike Follett (11:08):
But there's also quite a big difference between looking and then actually really seeing something.
Richard Campbell (11:12):
Yeah. Because I would think if your eye tracking, how do I know to ignore that? Did my brain rapidly look at it?
Mike Follett (11:21):
Exactly. This is the really miracle thing. I think of those, let's call it 300 ads that you are exposed to around about 150 of them will get less than a second of attention. So like I say, around about, the math here isn't precise, but this is sort of in the right ballpark. 700 just get ignored because they're on the right side of the screen. That banner blindness that we're talking about. Another 150 of those, if they get looked at all, it's sort of selected for rejection. Oh, what's this? Oh, it's an ad. Nothing to see here. So that means that there's 150 ads say that you might attend to and of that perhaps four or five that you actually properly engage with per day.
Richard Campbell (12:09):
Right. Half of 1%.
Mike Follett (12:11):
Well about that. And so what is it that makes you look at those things? And I think probably, and this is where this language of the attention economy is quite useful, is that there's something worth seeing.
Richard Campbell (12:24):
Right.
Mike Follett (12:24):
And I think that, English and French in extent, you are lucky in Canada because you have had least two languages, lots of people speak. And then obviously lots of First Nations languages. But I wonder, and this where it would be very interesting to see what Inuit would say about this, but the dominant metaphor in English and in French is a financial metaphor when it comes to attention, you pay attention.
Richard Campbell (12:52):
Right. That's interesting.
Mike Follett (12:54):
You spend time with people-
Richard Campbell (12:57):
Yes.
Mike Follett (12:57):
You can waste your time or you'll never get that time back. And I think that, and in French you have more of a lending, [foreign language 00:13:05].
Richard Campbell (13:06):
Lend me your ears.
Mike Follett (13:08):
Lend me your ears.
Richard Campbell (13:08):
Yes.
Mike Follett (13:09):
Lots of Southern European languages, lots of Latin languages have that sort of metaphor. And then I think this is why I'd be fascinated to hear about the First Nations languages about the metaphors that they use about gifting attention perhaps, or making attention or I don't know what it is.
Richard Campbell (13:26):
Sure.
Mike Follett (13:28):
Anyway, let's go back to the European languages here where you have this idea of your attention being a finite, valuable resource. And so when it comes to the advertising, what you say is, "Well what do I get out of this? I'm going to give you my attention. What do I get back from it?" And usually it's some sort of entertainment or some sort of utility. And this is why of those 1000s of ads that you might be exposed to, it's the beautiful ones or the funny ones or the useful ones that you might attend to.
(14:02):
And that I think is really, I come from, I think is really interesting because I come from a advertising background. I started at a creative agency in London, and then I worked in New York and then in India. And the intuition of all creative agencies is that no one has to look at this bloody stuff. So you have to make it interesting. And then the fight you have with your clients is the clients will often go, "Well, I don't care about making it funny or beautiful. What I want is someone to get the message that there's 25% off that must end on Tuesday." And there's always a tension between those two things, the desire for entertainment from creative agencies and communication, pure communication from the clients.
Richard Campbell (14:49):
But if you can't, there's no point in communicating if you can't get enough tension to communicate.
Mike Follett (14:53):
Exactly. Unless your ads get noticed, everything else is academic, which is a line I would love to have come up with myself. It actually comes from Bill Bernbach, I trained at DDB and there's a Bill Bernbach who's the B and DDB, has a Bill Bernbach quote for everything.
Richard Campbell (15:11):
He's the I Ching of marketing. The whatever you need, just open the page and there it is.
Mike Follett (15:17):
Absolutely. Just open the page and Bill, back in the forties or fifties, is absolutely right here that within this busy, busy environment that we're in, your ads have to compete for attention and to get noticed, no one has to look at it. Frequently they don't. And so you have to earn people's attention. There's another great line from another American adman in LA said that people don't read ads, they read what they like and sometimes it's an ad. And I think that this understanding of the sort of essentially passive character of advertising, that it's not demanding attention instead of it's seducing you into looking at it, I think is really important and has always been known by the great adman, but is now being demonstrated and quantified by things like eye tracking.
Richard Campbell (16:12):
And I guess that's the question is what are you quantifying ultimately. Is the amount of time they spend on a given piece, the important part to know that they've paid attention to it? Is this where eye tracking comes in? It says, "Oh, they looked at this for longer than a second."
Mike Follett (16:25):
Yeah, well I work for an eye tracking company and we've developed this software that does it. And so visual attention is very important. We should remember though, of course, that you have ears as well as eyes you have nasal attention and olfactory attention.
Richard Campbell (16:42):
Oh sure.
Mike Follett (16:42):
And haptic attention. There's more to life than just eye movements. What we do is though is we found consistently that there is a very strong correlation between the ads that people notice at all or look at for longer, and then results in market.
Richard Campbell (17:01):
Right.
Mike Follett (17:02):
So either increases in memory and brand awareness or increases in positive brand perceptions, or definitely increases in sales. So it's very important to be able to link this attention data to the outcomes' data that you are really, really interested in. Whether it might be memory or perception or sales or whatever. One does not necessarily presuppose the other, but that does seem to be a very strong link in general. And I suppose that's what we do as a company is measure the attention, estimate how it's going to work in market, and then link that to sales.
Richard Campbell (17:40):
And working with CloudArmy as well, we're doing a lot of these implicit tests and you're seeing biases that people may not even realize that they spend more time on something, loiter on that. It seems to me that eye tracking is almost measuring the same kinds of things. That the time we see-
Mike Follett (17:56):
Absolutely.
Richard Campbell (17:56):
The time metric seems to be the important one.
Mike Follett (17:59):
Yeah, I think, well, you can't have one without the other. The first thing is you have to notice things. First, cut your hair as Mrs. Beeton says. So you have to get people to notice in the first place. But then the thing that, again, that correlates most closely with recall or changes in implicit response time does seem to be viewing time on things.
Richard Campbell (18:23):
Right.
Mike Follett (18:24):
Well anyway, before I go onto to that, that I think is the most important thing. Being able to link attention data to the outcomes you want, including those implicit outcomes, which are very important. But the CloudArmy way of thinking about things corresponds to the way we do things at Lumen as well, in the fact that instead of forcing people to engage with something and then asking questions about it, the CloudArmy approach presupposes that explicit research methodology may well end up giving you bad results, bad data-
Richard Campbell (19:02):
Distorting results.
Mike Follett (19:03):
Distorting the results. Exactly. Because from what I was just telling you about how people move through the world and read the newspaper and websites, when was the last time anyone actually stopped you in the street and forced you to watch an ad? It never happens.
Richard Campbell (19:17):
Doesn't work out well.
Mike Follett (19:19):
Exactly. Exactly. A, if someone ever did that, you go, "You pay me my money and I'll give you my opinion."
Richard Campbell (19:25):
Right.
Mike Follett (19:26):
But B, it's sort of invalidating the research anyway.
Richard Campbell (19:30):
Yeah. It's not how the product is consumed on a normal basis, so why is it relevant?
Mike Follett (19:35):
Exactly. There's a sort of shrouding as ad problem that the test itself screws up the results.
Richard Campbell (19:42):
Yes.
Mike Follett (19:43):
When we work together between Lumen and CloudArmy, what we'll always do is we will ask people and say, "We're testing a Facebook ad or something like that." We will set up a test, a Facebook feed, and then we'll insert the ad inside the Facebook feed and then we'll get our respondents to go through the feed and we won't say, "Oh, welcome to the GM Facebook advertising test." We'll just say, "Have a look at this feed and we'll ask you some questions at the end." And so people don't know that we are particularly interested in advertising, and that means we can get naturalistic, realistic data.
Richard Campbell (20:16):
Basically putting them in a situation of the same way that we normally could see a Facebook feed.
Mike Follett (20:20):
Exactly. And then you can get the realistic eye tracking data from that. And then equally you can see the realistic impact on implicit response time. Now this sort of in context where you of testing things can be done without eye tracking, I suppose. Again, I run an eye tracking company, so I'd prefer it if you did it with eye tracking, but it is tremendously important. It's a revolution in market research just in itself.
Richard Campbell (20:45):
Just in that idea alone.
Mike Follett (20:47):
For the last a hundred years we have been conducting what I believe is to be almost entirely useless research by forcing people to engage with ephemera, advertising. The first job is to gain attention in the first place, advertere, that's where the word comes from. To draw the eye towards, to draw towards. That's the essence of advertising. And instead of monitoring if it does in fact draw the eye towards it, we supposing that people are watching this stuff.
Richard Campbell (21:18):
Right.
Mike Follett (21:19):
Madness in itself.
Richard Campbell (21:20):
Sure. No, it was important to me. So it must be important to you.
Mike Follett (21:24):
Exactly. And then having forced people to watch this stuff or engage with this stuff and we give them a battery of questions rather than to bring what you guys at CloudArmy do, which is to look at the edge cases and the implicit impact of advertising, which we know is the only real value of advertising. So understanding the attention economy in toto, its broadest sense and understanding how we have to compete for attention and have to draw the eye within a busy context has led us at Lumen to sort of two separate innovations. One about eye tracking and the other about in context testing. Both are useful on their own, but put together it's tremendously valuable.
Richard Campbell (22:12):
Yeah, I think that the cool thing about eye tracking is it's inherently a natural and subconscious behavior, how your eyes move. I think most people are surprised if they ever look at eye tracking data on a website for example, we're just talking about usability, that you're surprised where you looked. Because half the time you don't even know where your eyes went.
Mike Follett (22:33):
Well, you don't know what you don't know.
Richard Campbell (22:35):
Right.
Mike Follett (22:36):
I'm going to get this wrong. Whether it's subconscious or unconscious, it's one of those, it's not an entirely direct thing and it can't be because of course we are, as I said, mid-size apes that need to be able to direct our attention but also react to things. And so our eye tracking can certainly, it's an implicit and not always a consciously directed behavior, which I think is fascinating in itself.
Richard Campbell (23:04):
But it must be also challenging. You've already implied this, that you understand the difference between something that the eyes went over and something that was seen.
Mike Follett (23:13):
Yes. Things can be hiding in plain sight and even if things do get some sort of visual attention, there is a difference between attention and perception and then perception and cognition. So those things are separate. And at Lumen we have a lot of data about eye movements, but in a sense we have zero data from the eye tracking about cognition. We can only gain access to that sort of stuff from questionnaires or from implicit response techniques like yourselves or from behavior in market afterwards. Did anyone actually go and do?
Richard Campbell (23:49):
Yeah.
Mike Follett (23:50):
But you know what, I'm cool with that.
Richard Campbell (23:52):
Well, because there's a shape of data element to this. If you can track it all the way up to a completed sale, it's like here's a set of behaviors in eyes that seem to lead to sale more so than this behavior eyes it doesn't seem to lead to sale.
Mike Follett (24:04):
Well, A, there's a simplicity to that. If you keep everything else equal and you try and be as sort of rigorously scientific as possible, if everything else is the same and the only thing that's different is the eye movements, then it's the eye movements what won it.
Richard Campbell (24:19):
That's good.
Mike Follett (24:21):
And you can do that at the sort of scale that we're talking about. Often our studies are thousands of people strong and on that sort of, with millions of data points. And with that sort of data, you can make those sorts of statistical inferences there. But the second reason I like it, and again take it with the pinch of salt, I run an eye tracking company, it's so simple. It's either you looked here or you didn't. I haven't been listening to all of the podcast you've been running, Richard. But one of the things that I have noticed is there's quite a big backlash at the moment about the more invasive and more involved neuroscience techniques out there, such as, I don't know, facial coding or even EG, because interpreting those results requires quite a lot of dodgy science or certainly unproven science, especially something like facial coding seems to be, the basis of that seems to be collapsing around us.
(25:23):
And people like Lisa Feldman Barrett would merrily destroy that as an industry. So that's collapsing. But even if it worked, which I don't think it does, but even if it did work, you'd have to be interpreting brainwaves inside the head that or... What I think is interesting about our stuff is its radical simplicity. All we can tell you is the eyes moved here or they moved there. You can then take that data and interpret it and apply your own other data sets to it or your own intuition to it. But you either did or you didn't. This sort of binary nature to the data that we can [inaudible 00:26:01].
Richard Campbell (26:00):
No, and I appreciate the push on statistical significance. The fact that you're using webcams and smartphones and things means we can build a test of thousands of people and be able to adjust for individual behaviors by getting a larger data set that sort of gives us statistical significance to say, "There's a consistent pattern here with this set of ads versus that set of ads that could represent more effective advertising."
Mike Follett (26:27):
Yeah. And then the nature of that data at the end of the day is just a series of ones and zeros. There's a sort of, like I say a binary nature, literally binary nature to the date. Either they looked or they didn't, at this second to the next second to the next second after that. You have an array of data like that rather than having to have a very, very complicated series of simultaneous values all changing at the same time. So it's very... Simplicity is deeply attractive to me.
Richard Campbell (27:02):
But also I think you've now built up a body of work where I suspect you know the sets of tests that work reliably, that do show fairly consistent results in sort of discriminating the classic scenario of I've got four ads I can put to press, which one should I run with?
Mike Follett (27:19):
Well, you can certainly build up some sort of best practice about what tends to work and what tends not to. I've given up predicting that entirely because while there is, there's always an exception. In general when it comes to actually making ads and things in general, less is more. Simpler, elegant advertising seems to do better than busy fussing, advertiser.
Richard Campbell (27:44):
Keeps the eye longer. Is that the measure you see that...
Mike Follett (27:46):
Well it certainly gets notice more, but it gets rejected less, so it not only do more people notice it, but people look at it for longer.
Richard Campbell (27:57):
Right.
Mike Follett (27:57):
But other things that seem to work are narrative and story engaging people with some sort of characters, memorable characters that are worth investigating. That seems to work much, much better than just sort of-
Richard Campbell (28:10):
Sure.
Mike Follett (28:10):
Talking at people. Deliberately trying to be funny or entertaining is almost always better than not. So again, a lot of the sort of folk wisdom of decades of advertising agencies is born out by this sort of science.
Richard Campbell (28:25):
Which is classic of the scientific methods that eventually it reveals that a lot of that folk wisdom was right.
Mike Follett (28:31):
Yeah, a lot of it's wrong as well.
Richard Campbell (28:35):
Yeah.
Mike Follett (28:35):
There's a lot of rubbish-
Richard Campbell (28:36):
Sure.
Mike Follett (28:37):
Spoken about advertising as well, but I find that tremendously reassuring. There is sort of consilience jumping together of the data.
Richard Campbell (28:46):
We knew that some of those things seemed... There were people above the 50% mark with these sort of folks. So it's like there's-
Mike Follett (28:52):
Exactly.
Richard Campbell (28:52):
A reason for that. I want to jump back to something you said about the eye rejecting an ad. Is there something in eye tracking that shows rejection? Did they look away and they don't look back?
Mike Follett (29:06):
Yeah.
Richard Campbell (29:08):
You can in the dataset see they saw this briefly and rejected it? Because that's really an interesting implication.
Mike Follett (29:14):
Yeah. Like I say, around about 50% of the ads that do get looked at have exactly that experience of just a very brief passage of, its only less than a second. But people clock that it's an ad-
Richard Campbell (29:28):
Move on.
Mike Follett (29:29):
And that there's nothing to see here and then move on. There's a lot of that sort of bounce rate as it were when it comes to things. But I think you were talking about patterns and regularities in the data. You went straight to this sort of semantic level of the creative work and what draws the eye and earns attention, which of course is tremendously interesting. But actually one of the most valuable bits of our data isn't really about the creative, but it's about the media. If you collect terabytes of data as we do, you can begin to see patterns in that data that say big ads get more attention than small ads or that video ads get more attention-
Richard Campbell (30:11):
Than static.
Mike Follett (30:13):
Than static ads or video ads on this platform do better than video ads on another platform.
Richard Campbell (30:18):
Right.
Mike Follett (30:19):
Now that information is tremendously useful for media buying.
Richard Campbell (30:23):
Yeah.
Mike Follett (30:24):
So probably the majority of our work at the moment is actually in media evaluation, helping media agencies and clients themselves work out where the bargains are in the market.
Richard Campbell (30:36):
Where should I run this ad?
Mike Follett (30:37):
If you know that on website A, the video ads tend to get noticed 60% of the time for 10 seconds, and on website B, they notice 30% of the time for five seconds on average say, but their two websites cost the same.
Richard Campbell (30:54):
I think I know which one I'm going to be buying.
Mike Follett (30:56):
Exactly. But it works both ways because as the market is changing and as this data is used more and more as sort of ratings agency for media, that means that the media sellers are coming to us and saying, "How can I improve my website or my TVs say we work for the out of home industry, TV, press, the all forms of digital media?" And we often work with media owners as well to help them understand which formats they should be selling, how they should be laying out their publication of their site to maximize attention while also making it an enjoyable experience for readers or for viewers.
Richard Campbell (31:40):
Yeah, absolutely.
Mike Follett (31:41):
There's no point in creating a ad rich environment where you are constantly looking at the ads if in doing so you annoy the readers so much they don't come back to your site.
Richard Campbell (31:52):
No, no, I've noticed your ad now I'll have nothing to do with you. Well done.
Mike Follett (31:56):
Yeah, exactly. And again, I think this language of sort of an attention economy is really, really helpful there. When you go to the New York Times, when you go to CNN, there's, there's a deal here, I'll look at your bloody ads and I might even pay attention to them, but there has to be a limit.
Richard Campbell (32:14):
Yes.
Mike Follett (32:15):
And I've come to this news website for the news, not for the ads, so I will do it but you have to be respectful of my attention. And I think finding that sort of ecology of attention, a sort of happy medium between the needs of the website and the advertisers and the sort of attentional needs of the actual users of that is really important. You don't want to kill the golden goose by putting too many ads on the page.
Richard Campbell (32:46):
Well, that's a very Canadian thing, a show called This Hour has 22 minutes. It was a comedy show just sort of acknowledging how much detresse that surrounded the content.
Mike Follett (32:59):
Well, it brings us to an interesting point actually, because one of the things that we've noticed in that sort of ecology of attention. So we've gone from the economy of attention where people are buying and selling attention and trading it to perhaps this sort of metaphor of the ecology. But that got us finding a happy balance between all the needs of these things. And when the ecology gets out of whack, bad things happen. And you might be saying that that might be happening right now. That metaphor sort of led us on to start thinking as well about the real ecology of things. You may not be aware of this, but certainly digital advertising produces a lot of emissions, carbon emissions, all of those ads that are constantly being bought and sold and trading, all of those, all the electricity that is required to send all of those ads to your phone or to your computer. It all adds up.
(33:51):
And in a sense, you can see the carbon cost of advertising by the fact that your phone needs to drink up a whole load of electricity at night or that they have those enormous great data centers that are doing all of these sort of programmatic calculations and you see them outside of big cities and you can see the fumes coming off and those fumes that are entering the atmosphere that's advertising.
Richard Campbell (34:19):
Sure.
Mike Follett (34:20):
That's the carbon footprint of advertising. So that's quite a big deal for us to understand. And so we were looking at this about, well, perhaps you could use attention data to work out not just at the carbon cost of advertising, but the carbon cost of attention. And in doing that, we found something really quite interesting, which is that ads that are served one at a time get noticed and get looked at. Whereas when you go to websites where there are six ads on the site, all glaring at you at the same time-
Richard Campbell (34:56):
You see now that none of them.
Mike Follett (34:57):
It's like you can't see the wood for the trees, which is bad for the advertiser, bad for the publisher, bad for the user. And ironically enough bad for the trees because we have to cut them all down-
Richard Campbell (35:09):
You're trying to get through any of it.
Mike Follett (35:11):
So one of the things that we've been doing is working with brands and with publishers to understand how that they can get rid of a lot of this ad clutter.
Richard Campbell (35:21):
Yeah. It seems to me if I'm the ad buyer, or I want to place ads that I'm also going to want to discriminate where my ad's going to appear and what it's going to appear beside.
Mike Follett (35:32):
Would you want your ads to have to compete for attention against five other ads?
Richard Campbell (35:37):
Yes. Knowing that it diminishes all of them.
Mike Follett (35:39):
Exactly. And then there's a really interesting debate to be had about how much you're going to pay for that ad because from a publisher point of view, they've sold six ads. Can they guarantee a price by reducing the ad yield down to one ad rather than six? Can they charge six times more?
Richard Campbell (35:57):
Right. Six times more? Yeah. I don't know. That's a great question.
Mike Follett (36:00):
And so trying to work out the economics of that is fascinating because you can work out, it's clearly there's a environmental impact. One ad produces a sixth of the carbon as six ads. And clearly there's an economic benefit to the advertiser. Finally, clearly there's a sort of attentional benefit to the user. All of those things are clear. The only loser here is the publisher.
Richard Campbell (36:26):
As long as that publisher's working on the basis of views rather than say click throughs.
Mike Follett (36:31):
Or attentive seconds.
Richard Campbell (36:33):
Yeah. Actually attentive seconds. You're not incented to make a quality presentation.
Mike Follett (36:39):
Exactly.
Richard Campbell (36:40):
I don't need your ad to be effective. I just need you to buy it.
Mike Follett (36:43):
Exactly. Now, smart advertisers, sorry, smart publisher, but smart advertisers have been doing this, but now smart publishers are realizing that it doesn't matter how many impressions you sell, it's the impression you make that makes the difference. That's what you should be incentivized on. And by using this currency of attention, they can say to the buy side, they can say, "All right, I'm delivering six times the attention now how about paying me six times the value?" And this language of attention can be a common meeting point between the buy side and the sell side.
Richard Campbell (37:18):
Absolutely. Because in the end, the goal was to be successful with the ad, was to fill the pipeline-
Mike Follett (37:24):
Exactly.
Richard Campbell (37:24):
So as long as we all work on the same problem, we're incented to do the right things.
Mike Follett (37:28):
So potentially a win, win, win, win, win, win-
Richard Campbell (37:30):
For sure.
Mike Follett (37:30):
Win, win situation, it should be perfect. But like many sort of complicated problems or complex or whatever, many difficult problems like that, there's always been lots of additional steps that mean that people know that they should be doing the right thing but aren't. This attention data allows you to all speak in a common language-
Richard Campbell (37:51):
And work us on a common goal as well.
Mike Follett (37:53):
A common goal, and bring everyone together and make sure that the advertisers happy, the users happy, and crucially the publishers happy too.
Richard Campbell (38:03):
[inaudible 00:38:04] as well. Mike, that's really great insight. Now I feel like as a marketer, I want to put more attention into where my media shows up and what format it's showing up with, just because I'm not going to get value from it if I don't. And it's easy to miss those-
Mike Follett (38:17):
Absolutely.
Richard Campbell (38:17):
Pieces. Thanks so much for your time. That was really an enjoyable conversation about thinking more about how eye tracking helps us and helps become better marketers.
Mike Follett (38:27):
Well, thank you very much.
Richard Campbell (38:28):
Thanks again for listening to Understanding Consumer Neuroscience.