With recessions still a risk across the western world and growth in US ad spend likely to decrease from 8% in 2022 to 3.7% in 2023, it is tempting for marketers to jump on the recessionary bandwagon and slash budgets in order to weather the economic storm.

But in fact, this is probably the worst thing brands can do right now. In fact, research has shown that marketers who retain the same budget during a recession – or even increase it – tend to bounce back the strongest.

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Therefore, now is the time to hold strong with advertising. But there’s more to it than that.

1. Do more with less

Of course it’s not as black-and-white as sticking to your guns and waiting for audiences to engage. Putting ads out there is only half the battle.

Part of the problem with online advertising is that until now, a large proportion of impressions have gone unnoticed, thanks to poor placements, as well as bot traffic stealing valuable ad spend.

And even when an ad is viewable, there’s still a chance it won’t engage the user – depending on a whole host of factors such as time of day, position on screen, creative format, or contextual relevance. According to our own data, around 35% of all ‘viewable’ programmatic display ads are in fact ignored.

An ad is only really viable if it is a) viewable by human eyeballs, and b) set up to garner true attention from those eyeballs. If marketers can achieve more viewable impressions – and also more engagement from those impressions – they may even be able to reduce their ad spend over time.

2. Move beyond viewability to embrace true attention

We can see from our data that when users do look at an ad, it tends to perform really well. By using opt-in eye-tracking data – at scale and across myriad channels such as TV, desktop, tablet and mobile – we can measure a whole range of attention metrics.

Of course, Attention Time is crucial because it measures how long a user is physically eyeballing the ad. But we can also measure other user activities happening concurrently, such as clicks, cursor position, touch rate, scroll rate, scroll depth, audio on/off, audio volume and so on.

Therefore, understanding in which ad environments consumers are most likely to be susceptible to a brand’s messaging is key.

3. Bring contextual targeting to the fore

In a cluttered digital world, context is king. Our recent research demonstrates that news sites tend to garner the most ad engagement (attentive seconds per thousands impressions), followed by fitness sites, and home and garden. At the other end of the scale, shopping and education sites do not tend to perform as well.

By combining ‘attentive seconds per thousand impressions’ with ‘cost per thousand impressions’ to buy that particular inventory, marketers can calculate the true cost of attention. They can then look for bargains such as underpriced inventory that actually reaches a larger share of the market than expected.

We’ve seen above how different categories impact attention performance, but there are other factors which will affect the outcome of a brand’s placements. For instance, attention data shows that time spent consuming ‘slow media’ – content that users don’t scroll past, but engage with – correlates with them spending more time engaging with the surrounding ads as well.

Another factor is the publication itself. Opting for premium news brand sites, which tend to offer more original content, also results in slower scroll speeds, and therefore higher ad engagement.

4. Be bold with creative

There’s no better time than a recession to get brave with ad creatives. And if marketers succeed in making their current budgets work harder, there ought to be enough in the pot to splash out on bigger, better ad formats.

Opting for larger ad units will generally garner more attention. Remember, ads should be attention-grabbing, as long as they don’t leave the user scrambling frantically for the ‘x’ button in the corner.

Second, choose a high-impact ad format. A recent study found that Adnami’s Topscroll ad unit is viewed for seven times longer than a standard display unit on desktop; and more than twice the average display unit on mobile.

Overall, high-impact formats drive up to 72 times more attention than standard display units. What’s more, attention is directly linked to prompted and unprompted brand recall, proving that the format of an ad can make a significant difference to performance.

In summary, marketers should combine contextual relevance, premium sites, slow media, large creatives and high-impact units for the ultimate levels of attention.

5. Use attention data to fuel campaign optimisation

By combining all the different types of deterministic data mentioned above with predictive modelling, brands can begin to estimate the likelihood of users looking at ads across a variety of placements. This suddenly gives them a powerful way of optimising campaigns for brand awareness and engagement – all in real time.

Whereas traditional campaign optimization has been largely based on historical data, attention platforms are paving the way for more accurate, in-the-moment testing and optimization that can have a large impact on performance.

Economic uncertainty and a potential marginal decline in ad spend shouldn’t put brands off making the right investments. By mastering contextual relevance, building the right ad creative and leveraging attention data, they can do more with less in 2023.

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