Putting the Viewer First - A Look at Freewheel’s Viewer Experience Lab

The secret to compelling advertising is an ongoing project but, thanks to advanced research techniques, it is possible to more fully understand which ad experiences best engage viewers.

 FreeWheel has developed such a technique using MediaScience, a company that mines insights to improve the quality of ad experiences through FreeWheel’s Viewer Experience Lab.

Launched in 2023, this initiative is designed to help address, as Chris Glover, FreeWheel’s Vice President of Marketing explained, “an incredibly complicated industry. We're focused on very minute aspects of advertising technology but when we go home and watch TV we get annoyed, just like every other consumer.” Some of the biggest annoyances, he noted, include ad repetition, latency and, “unnatural creative breaks” that interfere with the content narrative. Such annoyances diminish not only the enjoyment of the programming but also the engagement of the advertising.

Although it is called a Viewer Experience Lab, it is not a lab per se. Rather it is more of a research approach. “We've partnered MediaScience which is an expert in neuro-marketing audience research and technology,” he explained. This includes viewing sessions where they can control the variables such as pod duration, latency and repetition both in home and at a mini lab facility. Testing includes, “Neuro metrics like heart rate, eye tracking, facial coding to truly understand how viewers are experiencing, how viewers are feeling when they view advertisements,” he stated. From there, insights are gleaned such as viewer sentiment on ads and branding KPIs, for example.

The results so far have led to both micro and macro insights according to Glover. On a micro level, with ad pods, for example, “we found that when ad pods were built with ads all of the same lengths, either 15s or 30s, viewers found the ad breaks shorter,” he shared. “So if they saw a pod with four 30s for a total of two minutes or they saw one with a 30 then a 15 and then another 15, the inconsistent pod would have felt longer to them.”  The finding that pod consistency across ad formats leads to better viewer experience can be immediately applied in the field and should deliver better results.

On macro level, Glover has found that while advertising in general, “gets a bad rap,” it's not totally true. “Advertising has traditionally been thought of an annoyance and no one likes advertising breaks but we found there's actually a lot of positive sentiment for advertising particularly when the ads are relevant to the consumer.”

The ultimate takeaway upends a media shibboleth. “The ads themselves don't hurt program enjoyment. It's the bad ad experience. Our study found there was no change to program liking among viewers when there were ads present versus when there are no ads present and that alone is a very interesting data point,” Glover concluded.

So it’s not the ads that are the problem, it is actually the experience that gets in the way of ad enjoyment. “It's the ad repetition, the latency, the blank slate that viewers sometimes see. Those are the real problems of the industry and that's what we're shining a light on,” he noted.

Ultimately, the Viewer Lab has been designed to improve three major areas of advertising – Quality of ads, Quantity of ads and Relevancy of ads. For each of these important pillars of research, FreeWheel has designed whitepapers, the last of which, Relevancy, is due out soon.

The goal through all of this research effort is to help guide advertisers and content providers as to the most effective and engaging ad delivery methods. “We're never going to be prescriptive to a publisher, saying, ‘Hey, you should do it exactly like this.’ It's more insights to help them as they look at their own ad strategies,” he explained and added, “What are some things they can do, such as creative diversity, remain really, really important. But any light that we can shine to provide best practices about how they're ultimately delivering advertising to consumers and planning and selling their advertising, we think is very valuable.”

For Glover, “Advertisers have a lot of choices and they can buy advertising in a lot of different environments. I would advise them to not lose sight of putting themselves in the viewers’ shoes. We advise advertisers to work with trusted partners who are putting this issue first.”

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Artwork by Charlene Weisler

 

Measurement Metric: Attention vs. Inattention

Attention is one of those measurement metrics that is important but difficult to quantify. What is attention? How is it measured? “Attention is more elusive than people realize,” noted Duane Varan, CEO, MediaScience, “similar to how we use the term engagement, which is often misused.” His firm recently partnered with Google to help answer some of attention’s unknowns. “Attention may be eyes on the screen … but not paying attention. Or looking away but actually listening,” he posited.

Varan believes that it is important to go back to basics and conducted an extensive literature review that underscored his belief that attention is heavily researched but there are still a lot of blind spots. “It is remarkable how little time is spent on inattention,” he added. To that end, Varan believes that inattention is not the same thing as low attention, especially when it comes to advertising. But the difference between passive and active attention is another matter. “Lean back attention is not a bad thing. It is relaxing,” he explained, “Same too for lean forward attention.” It may depend on the content being viewed.

Using the standard neuroscience measurements like eye tracking to monitor for fixations per second, is eye moving or not, Varan started to identify the good stimuli in a test of 105 short video clips identifying the degrees of attention.

Claire Charron, Research Manager,Market Insights, Google offered the following conclusions:

• Attention and inattention are two sides of the same coin.
• The best way to capture attention is through inattention.
• The absence of inattention is attention.
• The most accurate measure is blink duration and this is not usually used. It is the time it takes to blink. It drives levels of inattention.
• Fixations per session is another high measure.
• So the two main measures of attention – blink duration and fixations per second – have to do with the eye.
• In this test, “eyes on screen” didn’t have much variation because the test required participants to keep their eyes on the screen. So it is possible that in a natural setting, eyes on screen may supplant two metrics from lab test. At this point, we don’t know.
• Other measures, such as alpha waves and heartbeat, also correlated with self-reported attention and also picked up inattention. But skin conductance only garnered a mild correlation.
• All of this indicates that there is not much overlap between measures. Each contributes something different and which one you use depends on what you are trying to achieve.

“Attention is the absence of inattention,” concluded Varan, “And inattention can be accurately measured. Attention is not one kind. It is many kinds with many measures.”

The testing continues. Next step: apply to ads, and tease out different dimensions.

This article first appeared in Cynopsis