Introducing the Attention Council

We were at LinkedIn’s New York offices on Tuesday for the launch of The Attention Council (‘TAC’).

The Attention Council is a coalition of advertising technology companies committed to promoting attention as a primary metric for understanding advertising. Its founder members are Adelaide, Avocet, the Centre for Amplified Intelligence, TVision and Lumen – but we hope to expand the membership soon.

The launch event was fascinating, featuring a discussion with venture capitalist Joe Marchese (who runs the aptly named Attention Capital); a sneak peek at the contents of Prof. Karen Nelson-Field’s new book on The Attention Economy; and a panel discussion about the importance of attention as a metric featuring Dentsu’s Joanne Leong, and the CEOs of Lumen, TVision, and Avocet, ably moderated by LinkedIn’s Jon Lombardo. You can read all about the event here. A big shout out should go to Adelaide’s Marc Guldimann for hosting the session – and making everything happen

Attention is a hot topic at the moment, both in terms of theory and in terms of practice. But why are people taking an interest in this issue now?

I think this is probably led by two factors: because we can, and because we have to.

The first reason is instrumental: until you can measure a problem – and do something about it – it’s hard for it to matter. We now have the technology to do eye tracking at scale and speed across media. And we also have the technology to include attention predictions into programmatic buying. And so suddenly it’s worth taking attention seriously.

But the second reason is necessity. Advertisers are beginning to realise that GDPR and CCPA are not going away. In the UK, the ICO is beginning to issue enforcement notices for the use of targeting data in advertising, and is expected to come out with an incendiary report on continued breaches of the regulations by British advertisers before Christmas. The audience targeting data, that was seen as a great asset only a few months ago, is now beginning to seem like a massive liability, with advertisers and/or their agencies on the hook for fines worth up to 4% of global revenues if they are found to be in breach of the regulations.

In the face of this threat, advertisers are looking for other ways to optimise their campaigns. Contextual targeting tools, like the ones provided by Lumen, provide a smart and safe way to drive attention, awareness, and sales that is fully GDPR compliant. We work with leading agencies and advertisers to build bespoke ‘attention stacks’ – predictive models of attention that optimise your media buying to match your marketing objectives and creative work.

Get in touch if you would like to get involved with The Attention Council or get yourselves your own private ‘attention stack’.