Heineken and Playground xyz Partner To Find Optimal Attention™ and Drive Real World Outcomes

Playground xyz, the leading attention measurement and optimisation platform (part of GumGum), today unveils the results of a campaign for Heineken-owned Spanish lager brand, Cruzcampo.

Building on Playground xyz’s proprietary Attention Time metric – the length of time, in seconds, that an ad is directly looked at – the campaign leveraged their new Optimal Attention framework that helps advertisers understand the amount of Attention Time required to deliver increases in brand outcomes and measure their media delivery against this goal in real time.

Cruzcampo is among the first global brands to harness Optimal Attention and share outcomes from its impact. In a digital video campaign that ran across YouTube and Meta platforms between October and December 2023, Heineken was then able to identify the threshold level of Attention Time needed to deliver brand lift for each of its key creative assets.

The Cruzcampo creative was designed for social channels and, per the company’s best practice framework, assumes that attention can be fleeting in these environments. As a result, key branding assets were placed early in the video with the view that this will be more likely to drive Awareness. The Optimal Attention analysis by Playground xyz showed that this creative strategy paid off.

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On YouTube, the Cruzcampo video creative had an Optimal Attention threshold of only 0.5 seconds before awareness started to climb, much sooner than many other brands require on the platform. Those consumers who met or exceeded this threshold saw a 28% lift in awareness (a 3.5x increase against baseline awareness). Meanwhile, Cruzcampo ads that appeared on Instagram and Facebook also drove awareness quickly – with Optimal Attention occurring as early as 0.6 seconds into the ad – and with a lift of up to 20% in awareness (or 2.5x compared to the baseline).

Daniel Glynn, Programmatic Lead at Heineken said: “With this being our first Cruzcampo campaign in the UK, we really wanted to understand the relationship between launching a new product and the required attention to deliver brand awareness. Using Playground xyz’s Attention Intelligence Platform, we have been able to not only measure our attention results in real time, we have also been able to understand what the optimal attention required to drive brand awareness.”

Jimmy Hughes, Social Media Lead at Heineken, added: “Utilising Playground technology across the social media element of our campaign enabled us to uncover learnings around the performance of different creative executions through measuring attention. It was particularly interesting to see user-generated and influencer content outperform our business-as-usual assets and supercharge campaign effectiveness by grabbing users’ attention and feeling native to the platform. We will be utilising these learnings across our portfolio of brands moving forward.”

The campaign was a huge success for Cruzcampo UK, the fastest growing lager in New Product Innovation^[1]. What’s more, the insights gleaned from the study could now help Cruzcampo optimise future campaigns even further. For example, with their actual media delivery on YouTube exceeding the Optimal Attention threshold by a massive 355%, the Cruzcampo team could choose different formats at a lower cost and still clear the required attention while increasing reach.

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“Not all attentive seconds are created equal,” says Rob Hall, CEO at Playground xyz. “Within this picture, our Optimal Attention framework is now able to help brands understand how much attention they need to drive their specific outcomes. These results from Cruzcampo show how differences in creative, format, channel and more can all impact how an attentive second converts into brand lift. They cleverly designed their creative to work hard early into the video and it actively changed the amount of attention required to drive awareness. It’s rewarding to see all this line up and now this insight can be used to supercharge ROAS moving forward.”

In 2021, GumGum acquired Playground xyz, giving advertisers the ability to not only holistically measure attention across their digital buys with decoupled attention measurement from Playground xyz, but also to use attention data to supercharge their contextual campaigns on the GumGum stack.

Playground xyz is on a mission to master the art and science of maximising consumer attention. The company has built the world’s first technology stack that integrates visual attention measurement, analytics and media optimisation called the Attention Intelligence Platform. It powers a suite of leading products that maximise Attention Time for brands. Headquartered in Australia, Playground xyz has offices in Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States.