Change Agent: Let’s Focus on Attention

At PHM, embracing change and innovation in our day-to-day work is part of our DNA. Enter the Change Agents—thought leaders who are experts in their respective fields, helping to guide PHM and our clients through an ever-changing industry and media landscape. This series aims to highlight these thought leaders and their unique point of view as it relates to health media.

This edition’s Change Agents, Ricky Xue, Vice President, Media Tech and Akilah Blackman, Associate Director, Media Tech, write on how focusing on Attention as a metric can elevate our measurement strategies.

Historically, the majority of media is planned and bought on impressions, reach and frequency. This approach was more relevant when media channels were limited. Now, with seemingly infinite opportunities to connect, impressions, reach and frequency no longer give us the full picture of campaign performance.

To better understand performance, we use additional metrics such as click-throughs, engagement and viewability. Viewability gives us an indication of whether the ad that we buy is actually appearing on screen, but presents its own issues since it does not accurately capture user behavior. An ad may be visible on a page, but that does not mean it was actually viewed or the message was retained by the target audience, making it difficult to know whether an ad has had the desired effect.

All of these factors impact a modern day marketer’s approach when measuring the success of our campaigns. The current metrics that we have at our disposal—impressions, click-throughs, viewability—each tell one critical piece of this story, but don’t show the full picture. To get the full picture of how audiences engage, we need a more comprehensive metric—namely, Attention.

Attention brings together two relevant components—exposure (impressions, viewability) and engagement (clicks, scroll), giving marketers a clearer idea of how consumers are engaging with ads. Measuring this is not an exact science – but representing this behavior through a simple index allows us to aggregate many signals into one that we can overlay over our existing measurement strategy. Attention is not meant to replace our existing legacy metrics, but instead, to enhance them.

PHM Media Tech embarked on a PHM Pharma First and tested measuring Attention with one of our clients in Q4’23. In our preliminary testing of this metric, we have seen positive results, with a high attention index ranking directionally correlating back to increased new patient starts at the campaign level. There is still more testing to be done to generate Patient Outcome Measurement Optimizations (POMO) insights and results at the partner and creative level. However, this initial pilot shows promise for utilizing Attention more broadly.

As consumers become more sophisticated, our measurement strategies must evolve in tandem. The industry is moving towards integrating Attention measurement into existing strategies, and it’s time for health marketers to do the same.

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