5 rules of attention success, according to the IAB

Attention to online advertising is a numbers game. Every time someone is exposed to an ad there’s a chance that they might look at it – but there’s also a chance that they might ignore it. So, how do you give your ads the best chance of being noticed and remembered?

This was the question that the IAB UK asked us and our friends at IPSOS MORI to investigate. And together, we have developed five rules of attention success to guide your digital marketing. The findings, published this week, offer practical help to advertisers and publishers alike:

1)      Attention to content drives attention to ads: sites that generate lots of attention to the content also generate lots of attention for the advertising. Buy ads on well read sites rather than sites where visitors are in and out quickly.

2)      Think about location: ads that are in line with content get more attention than ads that are on the side. And there is ‘gold beneath the fold’: ads that are nestled in the content, rather than at the top of the page, get more attention.

3)      Clean up clutter: you can have lots of ads on a page, but they need to be served one at a time. More than two ads firing at the same time means that there’s a chance that people will look at neither.

4)      Tap into smart targeting: relevant ads can get up to 107% more attention – and are six times more likely to be remembered.

5)      Be creatively fit for purpose: ads that have been optimised for mobile are 89% more likely to be noticed, and 37% more likely to be remembered.

You can learn the full story here, or read Tim Elkington’s article about the project on WARC – or even listen to our very own David Bassett talk about the findings on the asi podcast.

If you would like us to come in and give you a face to face debrief of these important learnings, get in touch.