What learnings did we take away from Memex Conference US 2023?

In a stimulating and visionary presentation featuring immersive augmented reality Michael Schiessl, Founder and CEO of eye square opened new horizons for the audience.

Speaking of digital communication as an immersive act, Schiessl showed how digital technology can work not as a distraction but rather a tool to focus attention. He explained a model eye square developed during the Covid Crisis and adapted it to the current digital deluge. Meaning in this context is directly related to human nature: Relation. This is being symbolized by order and beauty, truth and sense, balance and sustainability, trust and generosity. These compassionate attributes are what the industry should be striving for in their creation and communication. Advertising that keeps people in the center, will address relation and connection and help transmit meaning.

Coming from another angle, Max Kalehoff, VP Marketing Growth at Realeyes, presented his company’s approach to marketing analytics, which contains powerful tools for supporting the concepts explained above.

Stating the obvious but important fact, that money is a minimum level of meaning in commerce, Kalehoff gave a highly interesting presentation of Realeyes’ own research methods while defining attention as awareness to a stimulus while ignoring other stimuli. From opportunity for attention to attentive reach is the journey that needs to be understood. Realeyes uses human attention data (from cameras and other bio-devices) as well as impression proxies (such as scrolling or key stroke data) for their measurement. Both need to be combined in order to gain the benefits of both – human data being of high quality, while impression proxies deliver necessary scale. Different data sources can be trimmed to deliver predictive, probabilistic, observed results as well as information about input and / or output efficiency that can help identify “profitable attention”.

In the next presentation, Horst Stipp, EVP of Research and Innovation for the Advertisement Research Foundation, gave insights into ARF’s latest project: the “Attention Verification Project”. This project reflects the increased interest that is being shown in attention and will hopefully produce comparable standards for the measurement of attention.

Stipp ran the audience through the three planned phases of the project, first producing a “Market Atlas” followed by studies on Creative Testing Apps and Media Valuation Apps. Work on the Market Atlas is underway, with ARF collecting information on use cases, products and services in the marketplace, their methods, definitions and theoretical underpinnings as well as cases and papers published on the issue. In order for attention to become more than an idea and market slogan, this is a very important issue that is relevant for the whole industry. Results will be presented at ARF’s Annual Conference on April 26 and a lively and productive discussion should be expected.

Philipp Reiter, who is COO and Partner at Eye Square, focused on sustainability of the advertising environment. He elaborated the distinction between meaningless and meaningful attention as it pertains to the usefulness and satisfaction users derive from using digital communication.

From its own research into social media use, eye square has learned that information which is seen as useless and non-elective, creates negative emotions, which in turn hinder the overall receptiveness to stimuli seen in the context. Therefore, attention is not always a good thing, which is why the industry needs to strive for more. The question arises not only how to get attention but what to do with it in a way that is seen as meaningful by the audience. Instead of an empty stare or a crazy fire, a warm glow is what communication should aim for. Until recently digital advertisers were not very aware that attention is not only limited in a given situation, but also finite in terms of the whole viewership.

Jeff Bander, Eye Square’s CRO and President of Eye Square Inc, Eye Square’s U.S. subsidiary, kicked off the afternoon session with an enlightening presentation on changes, challenges and cases in the business of attention measurement. As a dynamic state influenced by exogenous and endogenous factors, meaningful attention typically produces higher scores in the fields of engagement, processing (comprehension), retention – and ultimately (inter)action (relation).

Jeff focused on meaningfulness in the case of retail media – all the way through to the step of putting items in the shopping cart. He therefore showed how the “Ad-to-Cart Effect” tool delivers a reliable measurement of meaning in a commercial context and helps advertisers learn about their ads’ effectiveness beforehand – while answering most questions about placement or creative of ads as well as design and packaging of products before investments are made.

The “MEMEX NY Conference” experience was wrapped up by a talk from Krzysztof Radecki, CTO & Head of Discovery, DAC.digital / Poland, and Jay Schweid, CEO & Producer ephelants / New York. This unusual duo of tech entrepreneur and serial entrepreneur / media producer introduced the audience to the concept of “gaze estimation”, which takes media research and eye tracking “into the wild”, meaning: out of lab environments and into real life wherever this takes place.

For this concept to become reality, both are working together with Eye Square on developing the technology that will allow attention research to be done via devices’ inbuilt cameras. Gaze Estimation would be the next step into giving researchers and media companies insights into consumers’ real experience. All for making media truly useful and cutting out waste.