Ozone study demonstrates link between quality of content and quality of attention to ads

The Ozone Project, the UK’s leading high attention digital advertising platform, has released the findings of a study carried out by attention technology company Lumen Research, that quantifies the impact of quality publisher content on display and video advertising running on Ozone websites.

Overall, the study highlighted that, on average, display advertising across the Ozone portfolio receives 51 per cent more attention than display advertising on other sites across the web. The impact on video advertising was even more significant, with video ads across Ozones publishers attracting 111 per cent more attention than equivalent formats on other websites, and 140 per cent more attention than video ads on social channels.

A core part of the analysis was to identify the key drivers of this heightened attention for digital advertising on Ozone sites. Three key drivers were identified:

Rich content with slower scroll speeds drives advertising attention – on average the scroll speed was 55 pixels-per-second for Ozone sites versus 63 for other sites, and 79 for social feeds

Larger ads tend to get more attention than smaller ads – Ozone delivers larger ads on desktop that receive more attention, while on mobile, social platforms tend to have larger formats but Ozone is way more efficient at converting ad space into attention

Fewer, better ads receive more attention – the best results are obtained when only one ad is on the screen at a time. On mobile, this happens 90 per cent of the time for Ozone domains versus 76 per cent of the time on other websites.

Lumen’s award-winning dataset is derived from a fully-consented eye-tracking panel across both desktop and mobile. The consistent measurement applied across all analysis is the ‘attentive seconds per thousand impressions’ score. This is a measure that combines impressions that reach the screen with those that are technically viewable, those that were actually viewed, and how long those were actually viewed for.

“Since Ozone’s launch we’ve been incredibly confident of the ability of premium publisher websites to deliver better results for our clients’ advertising,” said The Ozone Project Chief Revenue Officer, Craig Tuck. “While we’ve seen clear evidence of this in the campaigns that we have run to date, Lumen’s analysis takes this a step further and highlights what we’ve intuitively believed for years – that great quality content engages the reader more, which ultimately means more attention for clients’ advertising. In addition, given our focus on our Premium Only Video solutions over the past year, it’s great to see this study highlight Ozone’s video ads receiving more than twice the attention of equivalent formats on other websites or social channels – that certainly got my attention.”

Mike Follett, Managing Director of Lumen, added: “High quality journalism drives deep engagement with the content, which in turn drives high levels of attention to the accompanying ads. Advertisers often say that they are in the business of ‘buying eyeballs’. In that case, they should look at the quality of those ‘eyeballs’ as well as the quantity.”