Latest / The CMO Podcast with Fexingo: Marketing Leadership, Budgets, and Executive Strategy / How CMOs Measure Attention Beyond the Click
Transcript
- Lucas: There's a number floating around right now that should terrify any CMO who's still reporting impressions to their CFO: 54 percent of digital ad impressions are viewed for less than 2.5 seconds. Luna: Two and a half seconds? That's barely a glance. But I feel like we've known for years that viewability thresholds are a joke. Lucas: Right, the old standard was one second, 50 percent of pixels in view. That's basically a bot's blink. But a coalition of brands — Procter & Gamble, L'Oréal, Unilever — are now pushing their agencies to buy on attention-adjusted CPMs instead of just viewable CPMs. Luna: So they're not just asking 'was the ad served?' but 'did anyone actually look at it?' What does that look like in practice? Lucas: Companies like Lumen and Realeyes use webcam eye-tracking to measure whether someone's gaze actually landed on the ad, and for how long. Then they assign an attention score. When P&G tested this for a Tide campaign, they found that the ads in the top 20 percent of attention scores drove 80 percent of the brand lift. Luna: That's a classic power-law distribution. So most of their impressions were essentially waste. Lucas: Exactly. And when they shifted their buy to target high-attention inventory — like premium long-form video rather than pre-roll skippables — they reduced their overall impression count by 30 percent but saw a 22 percent lift in brand recall. Luna: But here's the thing I keep circling back to: attention feels like a proxy for engagement. Is it actually a causal driver of sales, or just a better metric than impressions? Lucas: Great question. There's a Lord & Taylor study from 2024 that tracked attention scores against in-store and online sales. They found that a one-second increase in average dwell time on a display ad correlated with a 9 percent increase in conversion rate. So it's not just a vanity metric — it's predictive. Luna: But dwell time can be a function of creative, not placement. A boring ad that someone stares at because they're confused doesn't count. Lucas: That's why the more sophisticated firms also layer on emotional response — facial coding, heart rate, even skin conductance. L'Oréal uses EEG headsets in some test labs to measure neural engagement with beauty ads. They've found that ads scoring high on 'cognitive load' — where the brain is actively processing — outperform on purchase intent by 30 percent. Luna: So we're moving from 'did they see it?' to 'did they feel it?' That feels like a much harder sell to a CFO who wants a single number. Lucas: It is. But the argument that's winning CFOs over is waste reduction. If I'm the CMO of a company spending $100 million on digital, and I can prove that 40 percent of that is going to ads that get less than 2.5 seconds of attention, I can redirect that $40 million into channels that actually work. That's a conversation CFOs understand. Luna: You know, it's funny — if these marketing conversations have sparked something you've actually used in your own work, that's exactly the kind of signal that keeps us going. Lucas: Honestly, if today's episode was worth a coffee to you, that's the link — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. No pressure, just a way for listeners who find real value here to help keep it ad-free. Luna: Yeah, it's a small gesture that adds up. And we genuinely read every note. Lucas: So back to attention metrics. The next frontier is cross-platform attention weighting. Google and Meta have both started offering attention-based buying options in their DSPs, but they use different methodologies. Luna: Which means standardization is still a mess. A CMO can't compare an attention score from Lumen with one from Realeyes. Lucas: Right. The Interactive Advertising Bureau, the IAB, is working on a common attention measurement framework. But it's voluntary, and the platforms have little incentive to standardize because it could commoditize their inventory. Luna: So what should a CMO do today? Abandon CPC completely? Lucas: Not entirely. But start running parallel tests. Take 10 percent of your display budget and buy on an attention-adjusted CPM. Compare the downstream conversion rates against your standard buy. If the attention-optimized cohort shows a higher conversion rate, you've got your internal proof. Luna: And then you take that to the CFO and say 'I can reduce waste by X percent'. Lucas: Exactly. One CPG brand I spoke with did exactly that. They reallocated 15 percent of their digital budget to attention-targeted placements. Their return on ad spend improved by 18 percent within two quarters. Luna: That's not marginal. That's a board-level number. Lucas: It is. And it's why I think attention metrics will become table stakes within two years. By mid-2028, I'd be surprised if any major brand is buying digital ads without an attention-adjusted floor. Luna: So the CMO who gets ahead of this now has a real advantage — both in media efficiency and in credibility with the finance team. Lucas: Exactly. Because the worst position a CMO can be in is defending a big budget with a metric that everyone knows is broken. Attention gives you a defensible story. Luna: Alright, I'm sold. But I still want to know: does attention work for brand awareness campaigns, or just direct response? Lucas: Ironically, it works better for brand. Direct response has click-through rate as a built-in feedback loop. Brand awareness has always been the black box. Attention gives you a read on whether your brand message is actually landing. Luna: That's where the real value is. Because if you can prove your brand ad actually gets attention, you can start to tie it to downstream metrics like search uplift and store visits. Lucas: Exactly. And that's the conversation that changes how the whole marketing budget is structured. Not as a cost center, but as a measurable investment. Luna: One last thing — any tools you'd recommend for a mid-size CMO who wants to start testing this? Lucas: Lumen has a self-serve platform starting around $5,000 a month. Realeyes offers a pay per campaign model. Even Google's own Brand Lift studies can give you a basic attention proxy if you tie them to viewability thresholds. Start small, prove the concept, then scale. Luna: Good advice. And a much better conversation than arguing over last-touch attribution. Lucas: I'll take attention over attribution any day. One tells you what happened. The other tells you why.