Phillip Lomax is Executive Vice President at MediaScience, a leader in media and advertising innovation research, and I wanted to catch up with him to discuss what’s new and compelling in audience research, as well as chat about new ad formats, the value of short and long-form content, and, naturally, the role of AI in the audience response measurement space.
We discuss MediaScience’s origin story and its methodologies for measuring audience response, which include eyetracking, facial expression, and cardiac activity metrics. We touch on MediaScience’s ability to measure audience response on CTV, thus extending the reach of its audience research beyond the traditional lab setting.
We converse about the power of short-form advertising of the type increasingly used on social media platforms such as TikTok. As Phillip notes, “MediaScience was the first to discover the impact of six second advertisements, which is very prevalent today. Very short, it’s 20%, of a 32nd ad. And what we discovered within our research is that we could achieve 60% of the impact in six seconds of a 32nd ad. So I can achieve 60% of the impact and just 20% of the amount of time.”
We delve into the power of storytelling in an advertising context and best practices for getting attention. As Phillip notes, “what we found is featuring the brand’s distinct assets, early in advertisements gives us a greater ability to create memory structures. And this doesn’t necessarily mean that we need to plaster a logo on the screen within the first three seconds, which is what a lot of research companies say we should be doing right, it means we should be looking very distinctly at the shapes and forms and distinctive assets that make up a brand and the associations that we have with these brands, and then trying to find clever ways of integrating those distinct assets early within our advertisements.”
Phillip and I also talk about brand safety, which Phillip regards as one of the greatest problems currently facing publishers today, AI, and touch upon the fact that in-game advertising continues to fail to get its proper share of ad budgets.
