Most of you probably know about CPM or Cost Per Thousand Impressions (where M stands for 1000 in Roman Numeric System). The numbers that you see as impressions tell you how many times the ad was shown or digitally served; however, this does not necessarily tell you:
- whether the ad was really seen
- how much attention time the ads generated
- whether the click was made by a real person
- whether the ad got sufficient attention before click
Advertisers need a technology that can help them get data for:
- CPMEo (Cost per 1000 Eyeovers)
- Total Gazing Time (Quantitative attention data)
- Gazing time per user (Ad’s qualitative factor)
There has been no bio-metric technology till now to track eye movement and to really get the eyeover or gazing data for the advertisements. If you are reading or watching too much technology news recently, then you may know that I am lying. Samsung Mobile already introduced their eye tracking technology and integrated it for their Smart Pause and Smart Scrolling technology in their S4 Series. Smart Pause can detect whether an eye is away from the screen and the Smart Scrolling can detect device tilting and head tilting. The video below will clear things up.
At this moment, this technology is just an on/off option and lacks many interactive features. I hope it will improve in near future. This technology can tell you whether you are looking at the screen or not, but it does not tell you which part of the screen you are looking at (you still need to tilt your head or device). It cannot tell you how much time you are looking at a specific area of the screen.
This ground breaking technology has its sustainability in advertisement, if it can get improvements like:
- eye movement tracking
- eye positioning tracking
- gazing time tracking
Till date, advertisers mainly focuses on CTR or Click Through Rate to assess the effectiveness of the ad. Once most devices start to adopt the eye tracking, movement, and gazing technology, the web advertising technology will take another leap. It’s then that CPM will no longer be relevant and CPMEo and Gazing Time will be the mainstream advertising culture. This will help advertisers to get answers to problems, like:
- How many times eyes were on the ads (eyeover) not how many times the ads were digitally served?
- How much time people spent gazing over the ads (both collectively and individually)?
- How effective was the ad copy in terms of grabbing attention?
- How effective is your ad in real life in digital media? (Which will depend on high eyeover rate and gazing time)
- If advertisers are promoting multiple ad copies, then which copy has been really performing well?
- If they have segmented the campaign for different types of audiences, then which type of audience should be their target market?
- Which ad copy works better for a specific audience? (Intelligence for modifying ad copy strategy based on target audience and/or brand positioning)
- If it is video advertising, then what % of the audience actually saw the whole video (what % of the audience that had their eyes on the video for more time than the whole length of the video)
- Whether the click was from click-frauds and clicks from bots? (They will have no eyeover data)
Will this impact TV Advertisement as well? I bet it will because when this technology becomes mainstream, you will not see any traditional broadcasting TV that you see today. With more and more internet giants fighting to rule your living room, Internet TV will be the future. The channels will broadcast on demand with interactive choice-based advertisements, like AdChoices by Google. The real future is that your TV, laptop, and mobile phone will converge into one single device. Guess where the audience will be in future? There is no future for traditional advertising, rather web advertising will be known as advertising.
