CANNES – Today’s consumers see or hear dozens of advertisements throughout the day among a growing variety of media channels, challenging marketers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. Attention metrics have become more significant, especially for any insights into driving business outcomes such as sales.

“We can now trade on Attentive CPMs [cost per thousand], which is really powerful,” Michael Law, chief executive of Dentsu Media’s Carat US, said in this interview at the Beet Villa during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. “The next piece of this is going to be to say,  ‘Hey, I found this user, did they actually drive sales? Was that attentive person more valuable than the less attentive person?’”

Carat’s parent company Dentsu has focused on developing attention metrics in the past decade while consulting with marketers that buy advertising and the media companies that sell it.

“This is not something we’ve been talking about for six months,” Law said. “Dentsu has been committed to the attention economy and thinking about attention inside the media plans and consumer experiences for at least five years.”

Diversity and Inclusion in Advertising

As part of efforts to measure the effects of advertising, there also has been more discussion about the social responsibility of marketers, agencies and media companies. That includes creating advertising that resonates with diverse audiences as the U.S. population becomes more multiethnic.

“We can’t put one blanket message out when we know exactly who we’re talking to and expect the same result. I would say that authenticity in that messaging and consistency of that messaging is what’s really critical in terms of breaking through,” Law said. “It does put a lot of pressure on the brands, but the brands have to speak through the voice of the customer that they’re trying to reach.”

You are watching “Attention Matters: New Ways to Build Community & Drive Engagement”, a Beet.TV Leadership Summit at Cannes Lions 2022, presented by WMX in partnership with dentsu.

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