Once upon a time, I was having a beer with an older and much wiser colleague at my last agency job. “Do you know why we use CPM?” he asked, because that was genuinely the kind of thing we spoke about.
I didn’t. It hadn’t occurred to me that there was a reason for these kinds of things. “It’s because of TV and traditional advertising. You paid for the cost per thousand people reached, so broadcasters could charge more for ad slots in popular shows than in less popular ones,” they said.
Makes perfect sense – but not exactly true. In fact, CPM originates in print. I had always assumed it had been invented with digital, but actually we’ve just been recycling the same model for centuries
The problem is that CPM [is problematic]. Paraphrasing Ian Whittaker, it incentivises businesses to prioritise buying the cheapest CPM possible, blurring the distinction between different media channels. CFOs and CEOs then see advertising as a cost, not an investment. No wonder everybody in the ecosystem resents a metric that doesn’t work.
It ensures brands don’t get good advice. I remember my first encounter with a pitch consultant’s spreadsheet, demanding to know the CPM we would achieve for our biddable media channels. I tried to reason with them: “It’s biddable – it depends on targeting and objectives. This is for a bank. The CPM will change between targeting retail and high-net-worth audiences. Yet, you only have one cell for Facebook CPM,” I said. It didn’t matter. We just had to put down a one-size-fits-all CPM or we wouldn’t win the pitch, and we had better guess cheaper than somebody else.
CPM also holds back performance improvements. More than once I’ve presented a new option that would reduce CPM, only to be told, “We can't use that. We’ve agreed to reduce the CPM rate every year. If we improve it too much too soon, we won’t be able to continue delivering the annual improvements – we’ll lose the client in two years”. This mindset prevents innovation and strategic investment.
I recently spoke to a senior investment person at a holding company agency who had had a run-in with a client’s procurement team. He was caught between a marketing team with clear strategic goals and a procurement team that expected CPM to go down – always.
Last month, I sat with the global media lead at a major pharmaceutical giant. They personally disliked investing in social media, knowing it doesn’t deliver the sales KPIs they’re accountable for. Yet, they’re forced to spend more because the CPM looks irresistible to the CFO. As a result, they were out-branded by nimble local challengers investing in more impactful, attention-grabbing channels.
Businesses want to drive results, and we need ways to buy and judge our media strategy. If not the cheapest CPM, then what?
Attention isn’t new – but winning the debate at the CFO and CEO level is. We need to prove that attention is more cost-effective than the legacy cheap above all approach.
We’re a part of this movement. As brand-reliant global companies in food and beverage, beauty and FMCG have started to use attention not as a one-off test but as a benchmark for all activity. We’ve worked with Lumen to develop a unique tracking model that factors in load speed and tracks human eye movements to give a more accurate understanding of what spend works best. Rexona found that attention-optimised campaigns tripled consumer preferences versus competitors. A major global alcohol brand achieved 296% more attentive seconds compared to per thousand ads on Instagram.
Another global F&B brand has now set a “minimum attention” benchmark against all digital ads they run. If you’ve ever swiped past ads in your feed or ignored the YouTube pre-roll ads wedged between your Ms Rachel stream, you know the problem. Attention offers a way to measure what people truly engage with. It’s time to join the brand advertising leaders in quantifying not just the cost of attention, but more importantly, the cost of spending on low attention.
Test your suppliers and media providers: can they sell their campaign on a cost per attention basis? If they think their ads work, they will.
Tom Jones-Barlow is a Singapore-based digital marketer and vice president APAC at SeenThis.
Source: Campaign Asia-Pacific
