Dive Brief:
- Recent research published in the Harvard Business Review on when and why people watch video ads found getting an audience’s attention is based on the context of how ads are viewed.
- The study looked at four specific context criteria for video ads – cinema, TV multitasking, mobile multitasking and peer-to-peer sharing – and determined advertisers should focus on engaging or persuading in each setting.
- The main finding was that the more captive the audience, such as in a cinema, the focus should be on persuasion, and engagement becomes more important as attention level drops.
Dive Insight:
Want to maximize the impact of your video ads? Take into the context of how the audience will view those ads, according to research recently published in the Harvard Business Review. The study looked at the importance of focusing on persuasion, entertainment, or some combination of both in order to grab viewers’ attention in four specific contexts: cinema, TV multitasking, mobile multitasking and peer-to-peer sharing.
The takeaway from the research was the more captive the audience, the more likely they would provide full attention, such as with cinema video ads. On the other end of the scale, peer-to-peer sharing video ads received less attention, and engaging the audience through entertainment should be the ad’s focus. With multitasking TV and mobile ads, the focus should be a blend of persuasion and engagement because both groups offer partial attention to the ads.
From the HBR article, “In this ferociously competitive environment, companies need to know the best practices for capturing and retaining consumer attention. My research suggests that there is no universally applicable approach — what matters most is tailoring advertisements to the appropriate context. The positive side is that the amount of attention that consumers are likely to give to ads, regardless of brand or product, is quite predictable. For instance, people in the cinema tend to pay high attention to ads and trailers. On the other hand, media multitaskers — for example, people who watch TV with a computer in their lap — tend to pay less attention.”