Just in time for advertising upfronts, The New York Times’ Sharon Waxman has this piece on an intriguing test-bed set up by major advertising agencies to measure the degree of viewer/user attention during times of multitasking. The Interpublic Group of Companies, a holding company for ad agencies and media buyers, has established in Los Angeles the Emerging Media Lab, an advanced home petri dish equipped with the latest in communications and video technology.
In the Lab the companies watch test consumers use new and existing technologies, all with an eye toward measuring what’s really going on in their heads when they multitask.
“Multitasking is not quantified yet,” said Greg Johnson, the lab’s executive director. “The metrics of all this is a big piece of what our clients want to know, and they want to know desperately. They don’t know where their customers are, and it’s our job to find them again and what they’re doing.”
One theme that runs through the piece is, I think, a common misbelief and it is this: multitaskers can only truly focus on one thing at a time.
It does seem certain, though, that a viewer who is multitasking is not doing those activities with equal interest. “Terms like multitasking imply equal attention,” said Mike Bloxham, director of testing and assessment at Ball State. “But cognitive science tells us this isn’t possible. You have to give priority to one in order to absorb the messages.”
It’s a fallacy of composition to assume that what’s true for me, or those close to me, is true for everybody. But at the risk of making this common logical error, based on personal experience and observations of adolescents around me, I think people can pay equal attention to multiple activities — they just do it in rapid-fire shifts.
For example, my daughter can write a paper and engage in multiple IM discussions in a fashion that seems simultaneous. But what’s really going on is fast shifting of attention from writing to replying to IMs and back again to writing and so forth.
Still, this ability to engage in multiple activities at once is new stuff and fertile grounds for measurement. That’s why the term “engagement” is gaining stature among advertisers.
For advertisers, the challenge is getting their message across in one medium while the consumer is active at the same time in several others. The buzzword these days is “engagement” — as in how engaged, or involved, the consumer is in a particular activity, a notion that is still relatively new in a media world that has for decades relied on stable indicators like the Nielsen ratings.
Cynthia Brumfield at 8:49 AM|Comments(0)
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