ARF to study effectiveness of attention measurement tools

The ARF Attention Validation Project will seek to inform the market about the underpinnings of different attention measurement tools and the degree of replicability and convergent validity associated with those approaches.

The project will involve attention and emotion measurement vendors analysing a common set of advertising or programme content and the ARF will compare the analyses against classic lab-based neurometric measures.

There will be three areas of focus, including differing definitions of attention and emotion, their relationship to direct measures of neurometric response, and their validity as tools for creative evaluation and as predictors of market performance of advertising or content.

Other areas of study include the validity, reliability and replicability of synthetic measures of attention, based on artificial intelligence and machine learning approaches.

The final area of study is the validity of attention measures for comparative evaluation of media as vehicles for advertising placements.

An advisory committee has already been recruited by the ARF for the project, and the committee will provide input into the scope and design of the project.

A report on the findings will be published upon the project’s completion, with best practice recommendations to the industry.

Scott McDonald, chief executive and president at the ARF, said: “Recent years have seen increasing interest in direct measures of cognitive and emotional response to advertising

“But we still don’t know enough about the reliability and validity of these measures and their rightful application to advertising and media evaluation.

“It is the ARF’s view that these discussions of attention-based currencies are premature in the absence of better information on the validity, reliability and predictive power of these measures. That’s what this study seeks to address.”