This month on the Infillion blog, our team is exploring the concept of attention – something that the advertising industry is constantly talking about, that we all agree is important, and yet we’re still struggling to capture. Throughout October, we’ll be sharing creative deep-dives, research and insights, and future-forward strategies for maximizing consumer attention, so make sure you follow us on LinkedIn to know when the next post drops.

We’re starting off by sharing some of the insights that get our team thinking – some fresh knowledge about attention and advertising. Here are five facts that have hooked us lately.

1. A lot more ads are trying to get our attention than we think.

“How many ads do you think you see each day?” is a fun question we at Infillion like to ask our clients and partners. As it turns out, we’re exposed to anywhere between 4,000 to 10,000 ads per day according to clinical tests. Ron Marshall, founder of agency Red Crow Marketing, wrote that he thought the number sounded ridiculous but then started actually counting ads one day – and admitted he had counted almost 500 brand messages before he’d even finished eating breakfast.

Like Marshall, most of us probably don’t think we see that many ads. That’s because we’ve become accustomed to tuning them out. Our attention is scarce, and a lot of brands are competing for it.

2. Interactivity can help marketers keep consumers’ attention for longer.

In a study from IPG Media Lab, MAGNA, and Yahoo found that consumers spend 49% more time with an online ad when it has interactive components. Whether they’re already familiar with a brand or not, interactivity in the form of anything from a product carousel to a quiz can get consumers to stick around for considerably longer with an ad, maximizing their ability to learn about the brand and start considering a purchase.

But effective interactive ads need clear calls to action to pull in that coveted attention. Here’s why: The same study found that among consumers who opted to not interact with an interactive ad, the majority – 54% – said it’s because they simply didn’t know the ad was interactive.

3. Realizing that attention is scarce – and adapting to it – can help drive profits.

Research from Cornell revealed that if a retailer incorporates one-click checkout, that consumers increase their spending at that retailer by an average of 28.5%. In other words, shortening the path to purchase takes advantage of fleeting consumer attention by ensuring that the consumer doesn’t get distracted by something else before making a purchase.

This underscores the effectiveness of shoppable ads like Infillion’s ShopX, where add-to-cart features directly within ad creative can shorten the path to purchase.

4. Playing a game can keep consumers’ attention for longer.

“Gamification” has been a marketing tactic (and buzzword) ever since geolocation “check-in” apps like Foursquare and Gowalla became brand favorites back in the late 2000s. But the idea of earning and being rewarded goes back much further in the world of marketing. Think about just how competitive frequent flyers get about miles, branded credit cards, and status tiers. That’s because when gamification is done well, it works – the natural human impulse to compete is a strong one. Even in unexpected sectors like the HR department at work. Research from eLearning Industry shows that when companies effectively incorporate gamification into their employee training and engagement processes, employee engagement increases by 60% and motivation by 83%.

This extends to ads, too. When Infillion built an interactive streaming video ad for Kraft’s Lunchables brand – which you can hear more about in our eMarketer Tech Talk from earlier this year – viewers didn’t just complete the game. The average user played it twice.

5. Repetitive ads might get attention – but not in a good way.

Research has found that a consumer who sees the same ad between six and ten times is 4.5% less likely to purchase the product in that ad than a consumer who sees it between two and five times. In other news, yes, that ad got their attention. But that attention quickly turned negative when they saw it too many times.

Here, again, is where interactivity can be the solution. As we shared above, consumers spend 49% more time with interactive ads than with standard video ads. They also like a clear path to purchase, and maybe even some fun and playful twists in that interactivity. With an “advertise smarter, not harder” approach, brands can seize upon those elusive pockets of attention – and make a real difference in a consumer’s path to purchase.

Want to learn the secrets to maximizing attention within an ad? Infillion’s Creative Studio is ready to share. Check out Infillion’s Creative Showcase here, and reach out to us to set up a meeting!

Nowadays it’s practically impossible to go to an advertising or digital media industry event without hearing nonstop opinions and predictions about artificial intelligence. These days, much of it is about generative AI – the use of artificial intelligence to produce images, text, code, and more. But AI is far more complex than ChatGPT and Midjourney, and at Infillion, we’re well aware – we’ve been using AI in our ads, targeting, and measurement for years. Given all the industry conversation and controversy around AI, especially in the creative process, the Infillion team is bringing you a series of blog posts that explains our approach to AI and why we see it as a way to enhance what humans do best. 

We want to start with one unique way that we’ve been working AI into our ads since 2018: voice control. In fact, the AI-powered voice recognition tech in our TrueX ads made us the first company to ever bring voice commands to ads on desktop computers and connected TV. 

Here’s the story behind it.

How We Built a “Virtual Alexa”

Infillion’s TrueX pioneered AI-powered voice control in ad tech with a campaign for our clients at Amazon. Coming to us in late 2017, they had a unique challenge: Early adopters to the company’s Echo devices (and their Alexa voice assistant) had eagerly purchased them and were fully sold on how Alexa made their lives easier. But the next generation of consumers was going to be tougher to win over. 

Voice control was just starting to pick up among consumers; at the time, research showed that one in five consumers was using voice to interact with their TVs, and PwC estimated that only 26% of U.S. consumers owned smart home devices. People who didn’t own voice-controlled devices often said the reason why they didn’t was because they figured they wouldn’t be useful, that they’d be hard to control, or that they’d require a lot of tech support.

Amazon realized that the best way to convince skeptics of the power of Echo devices was to give them a way to try out the product for themselves, at home. Working with the TrueX engineering and creative teams, they devised an interactive ad campaign in which streaming video viewers could try out real Alexa commands in one of several virtual home settings – a kitchen, a living room, and a bedroom.

This wasn’t easy from a tech standpoint. The only voice-controlled ads, so far, had been for mobile devices – which for obvious reasons, people are well accustomed to talking into – like a 2013 JetBlue ad that encouraged consumers to make pigeon noises. Voice tech had never been created for ads on desktop or connected TV. It was also imperative that the technology be just as responsive as an actual Echo device. 

“Alexa and Echo were themselves early examples of AI – specifically natural language processing – at work in our homes well before the AI hype wave crashed over us all in late 2022,” Tom Rothenberg, global business lead for Amazon at IPG, explains. “So, we have always had a high bar for any technology provider that we worked with, in any AI campaigns that gave non-owners a sense of how seamless and natural Alexa – and Echo devices – really are to interact with.”

Our engineering and creative teams infused the TrueX ad canvas with similar natural language processing tech in a first-to-market innovation that allowed the ad to respond immediately to a user’s voice just like a real Echo device would.

“Infillion’s TrueX custom-built software easily cleared that bar, giving us some of our most advanced and impactful Alexa campaigns long before ChatGPT or Bard were on our desktops,” Rothenberg says.

Voice Control Beyond Alexa

The voice-controlled TrueX ads for Amazon continued with an interactive add-on to the company’s 2019 Super Bowl ad, in which astronaut Scott Kelly narrated an Alexa-controlled space station (complete with aliens). Combined, he 2018 and 2019 Echo ads were four-time OMMA Awards winners (including one in the Artificial Intelligence category), a Webby Awards honoree, and an AdExchanger Award winner in the Omnichannel Video category.

But Infillion’s voice activated tech didn’t stop there. It has also been implemented in a campaign for GE’s smart light bulbs, LEGO’s Harry Potter collection (casting spells with voice control is fun!), and most recently a campaign for Visit Britain that encourages users to try out slang from around Great Britain in its varied accents.

“As voice control continues to become more popular among consumers, we see more demand for it among clients,” says Simon Asselin, Infillion’s CTO. “The Infillion engineering team has continued to work over the years to make our AI-powered voice recognition tech easier and more seamless to implement in ads across devices and operating systems.”

Does AI-powered voice control spark your brand’s curiosity? Reach out to the Infillion team and we can tell you even more about it.

There are few audiences more captivated and engaged than live sports fans – they’re excited to be there, they’re less likely to be distracted by work or other priorities, and that’s a huge opportunity for brands to get in front of them. But brands also have to understand the strategies and philosophies of the marketers for the teams and arenas whose fans they want to get in front of.

At Infillion, our InStadium product helps connect brands to flighted advertising opportunities in 97% of the pro and college sports stadiums in the U.S., and we understand how important it is to grasp the priorities and nuances of sports team marketers. That’s why we were excited to sponsor the AMA’s Atlanta chapter’s event “Marketing Is A Team Sport,” a sold-out panel that featured leadership from all of the city’s major sports teams – Melissa M. Proctor of the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks; Adam Zimmerman of MLB’s Atlanta Braves; Ryan Mucatel of MLS’ Atlanta United FC and the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons; and Morgan Shaw Parker of the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream.

Here are four key insights from the panel event.

Marketers for professional sports teams need to accept a lack of control.

As moderator Joe Koufman, founder and CEO of Setup, pointed out: “sports marketers have absolutely zero control over their product.” They don’t have any say over whether the team wins or loses, or who gets drafted each year – the closest they have to an influence over the team’s performance is that higher revenues can mean the ability to draft better players.

How do they best grapple with this? The panelists agreed that it’s all about getting to know the ethos of a city. Get to know who the fans are, and what they want. Listen, learn, talk, and engage – and remember that sports loyalty is deeply emotional. People plan their weddings so as not to miss major football games, for example.

In other words, it’s not just the players who are in charge; it’s also the fans. And this, too, isn’t entirely rational and measurable. Several panelists pointed out that when it comes to content marketing, the “community” content – publicizing outreach to different cultural groups in a city, or local community service on behalf of a team – is often the lowest performing social media content that the team’s channels publish. But it’s that content that means the most to the niche groups they connect with.

Commercial real estate and retail are now key parts of sports marketing strategies.

While sports team marketing leaders have to contend with the fact that they can’t control how well their teams perform, they often have some additional assets that other CMOs don’t. While typical revenue sources for teams have been ticket sales, merchandise, media rights, and sponsorships, commercial real estate is now emerging as a new revenue stream and marketing platform. Stadium space is now regularly booked for conferences and other private events, in addition to concerts and music festivals, when teams aren’t playing.

And gone are the days of stadiums surrounded by parking lots on the outskirts of city limits. In Atlanta, the in-development Centennial Yards project is anchored by several sports arenas and will feature apartments, hotel rooms, and retailers. This isn’t just a revenue source – it’s also a key platform for fan engagement, providing an opportunity for teams to be a bigger part of local life and recreation even when they aren’t watching a game.

Pro sports marketing was always seen as old-school – but data is changing everything.

Just as how TV sports were seen as slow to make the jump from linear TV to streaming, marketing live sports was historically seen as more analog than other sectors of the industry. That’s changing fast. Teams now have “chief technology innovation officers.” AI chatbots are used to drive ticket sales. Brand opportunities in sports arenas are now more flexible and dynamic than traditional full-season sponsorships and naming rights – Infillion’s InStadium, for example, brings branded 3D video and augmented reality experiences to pro and college sports venues.

Then there’s the sheer amount of data that marketers now have. Data allows sports team marketers to know more about their audiences, and also to get closer to the “holy grail of marketing” – reaching consumers with something they didn’t know they wanted. Meanwhile, fans are accustomed to personalized, customized experiences and that extends to what they expect from their favorite sports teams.

The sports landscape is also changing like never before.

Just days before the panel, the ownership of the Atlanta Falcons and Atlanta United announced that it had acquired a team in TGL, the new arena-based golf league that aims to bring the sport to a new generation of fans. TGL is moving incredibly fast; there is not yet a media distribution strategy, several teams in the league have yet to be announced, and yet the first season kicks off in just a few months.

Women’s sports, too – like the WNBA – are growing fast. The WNBA announced a new capital raise last year, and at the midpoint of the 2023 season, viewership was up 67%. What we think of as pro sports is changing, and similarly, the idea of what constitutes a “sports fan” is changing, too. Marketers are learning how to reach more diverse audiences, to tell authentic stories of their players and fans on owned media channels, and to consider themselves stewards of a community, not just a team.

The key trait marketers need in this fast-moving environment? Curiosity.

Infillion’s InStadium is the easiest, most flexible way for brands to get in front of highly engaged live sports audiences. Learn more about it here.

With millions of consumers cutting the cord (and loving it), more brands are doubling down on CTV advertising. In fact, 98% of brands believe that CTV advertising will be bigger than mobile. About 25% of companies believe it will only take 2-3 years to reach that point. In the meantime, companies need to decide whether now is the right time to move forward with a CTV ad strategy. Here are some questions to guide you in the right direction.

How much control do you want over your ads?

One of CTV advertising’s greatest advantages is the level of precision targeting it offers. Rather than sharing a mass message with millions of TV viewers at the same time, brands can gain more control over where, how often, and to whom their ads are shown. Narrow your focus on households or viewers of a certain geographic location, income range, viewing habits, interests, or other factors. Targeting gives you a better chance of showing your ads to the people who will most likely want to see them.

How important is real-time reporting?

Traditional TV advertising is a monster to measure. Learning the impact of a TV campaign is often a long and daunting process that can take weeks to collect, analyze, and report on the data. 

CTV advertising offers almost real-time insights on reach, brand lift, completed views, and engagement. At any given time, you can check the data to see how your campaign is progressing. This lets you adjust your spending, tweak your creative, or make other impactful changes before your ad budget runs out.

Do you prefer low-lift ad optimization?

Remember the “old days” of manually figuring out bids and placements? CTV ads have largely automated this process, allowing you to skip the typical hassles of media buying. Automation bridges the gaps between inventory quality, costs, and your business goals. This is made possible largely due to the availability of real-time data, which helps ensure your campaigns reach peak efficiency.

However, if you prefer more control over your placements and bids, then CTV ads might not be right for you.

Where do you most want to be seen?

CTV focuses on streaming services, such as Hulu and Amazon. This means that advertisers are left out of primetime shows, news, sporting events, and other content found on mainstream TV. However, the tradeoff is that there’s plenty of content available for streaming that isn’t shown on cable or satellite. It’s up to you to decide where you want to be seen.

Find Out If CTV Ads Are Right for You

Going all in on a CTV ad strategy just because everyone else is doing it isn’t the best reason to move forward. But learning about CTV’s advantages now can give you ample time to perfect your approach before it blows up even bigger. At Infillion, we’ve designed our suite of CTV technology to help you develop, measure, and improve your CTV advertising with ease. Contact us today to learn more, or visit our blog to explore more of the CTV landscape.

Connected TV (CTV) is turning traditional television advertising on its head, allowing more brands and businesses to tap into the benefits of meeting audiences on their couches. As more consumers are cutting the cord in favor of streaming options, CTV creates new opportunities to connect with target customers in a way that’s actually welcomed by viewers. 

Let’s explore the benefits of CTV advertising and why it belongs in your strategy for 2023.

CTV Advertising Has a Massive Reach

If you’re looking for a way to reach a large audience with your marketing message, CTV advertising is definitely worth considering. CTV devices are in nearly 80% of U.S. households, and that number is only going to rise.

People are spending more time than ever streaming content on their TVs, with the average American now watching eight hours of video per day. It’s the perfect place to make an introduction and build top-of-mind awareness.

It Offers Precision Targeting

One of the key benefits of CTV advertising is that it offers a level of precision that linear TV can’t match. Rather than aiming for mass marketing messages hoping you reach some of your target audience, CTV advertising makes it easy to split up your ads and programmatically connect with profiles that fit your criteria.

Successful advertising is no longer just a numbers game. It’s about expanding your presence to the right people, and CTV takes the guesswork out of showing your ad content to the people you want to reach.

You Get Measurements and Reporting That Linear TV Doesn’t Offer

Another benefit of CTV advertising that traditional TV can’t touch is that brands no longer need huge performance reports to gauge the effectiveness of their campaigns. CTV offers more data and more ways to measure your impact almost in real-time so you can make adjustments as needed.

Track both online and offline sales with confidence and see how ads tie into your omnichannel strategy. Infillion provides this data infrastructure on your behalf, sending you straight to the insights.

It Aligns with the Cookieless Future

Cookies are going away, leaving marketers scratching their heads as to how they can collect data on their audiences. With CTV, data collection is done for you, no cookies required. CTV relies on hard data like IP addresses, device IDs, and similar first-party data. This helps advertisers target individuals and households and supply contextually relevant content.

It’s Cost-Efficient and Effective

Traditional TV advertising has historically been out of reach for smaller brands with smaller budgets. Advertisers would have to invest tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in a national ad campaign, and targeting wasn’t nearly as precise.

CTV changes things, giving smaller businesses a chance to compete on a level playing field. There are lots of ways brands can choose to pay for CTV advertising, such as cost per 1,000 impressions or cost per completed view. What’s more, you’re not just limited to one network or channel. This helps you get in front of even more people in a targeted, affordable way.

Get Started with CTV Advertising!

Ready to put these and other benefits of CTV advertising to work for you? Contact us today to learn how.