When we’re all swiping, scrolling and skipping, attention becomes a critical commodity. But now VCCP has some good news for marketers: you don’t actually need people to stop and stare at your ad, because just 1.5 seconds of attention will do the job, as long as you have a distinctive brand asset in the mix.
New global research from VCCP claims that brands who don’t have a distinctive visual brand are wasting as much as 66p in every £1 they spend on digital ads. Even the best assets, however, will only perform if creative and media planning work together to bring brand execution in line with platform behaviour.
The research, conducted with Dr Karen Nelson-Field, tested video ads from eight VCCP brands: O2, Cadbury, Domino’s, Old El Paso, easyJet, Sage, Bulldog and White Claw. Together they tracked 20,000 views of 72 digital video ads, and found that well-branded assets were 2.5 times more effective than weak ones. (It doesn’t say which were strong vs weak.)
VCCP has come up with some practical recommendations for brands :1. Know your assets; 2. Balance storytelling with high-reach executions; 3. Make media and creative decisions together; 4. Count the seconds; 5. Boardroom-proof your brand with assets that work in digital.
Dr Karen Nelson-Field, founder of Amplified, said: “Brands are too often focused on the time their ad is in view, but it’s the time that it is actually viewed – active attention – that matters. This study is the first to prove that just 1.5 seconds of genuine attention is enough to encode memory in a real-world digital feed. The good news is, with intelligent asset deployment, you can drive outcomes even in 1.5 seconds. That’s not about doing more, it’s about doing better.”
James Shoreland, CEO of VCCP Media, said: “Marketers are rightly focused on media efficiency, but we’re seeing billions in creative inefficiency go unchecked. This report proves that creative and media effectiveness are two sides of the same coin – and attention is the currency which connects them. Our findings don’t just quantify the impact of integrated thinking—they point to a new paradigm for media planning and buying.”
It’s convenient for VCCP’s media arm to promote the idea that media and creative work best when planned together, but it makes sense. Perhaps the old analogue clients who were stubbonly attached to the pack shot were right all along.
