Not all reach is equal and neither is our level of attention: We know it instinctively, we’re told it, and now we’re getting better understanding into how to apply its qualitative impact to achieve mental availability, brand equity and sales uplift. The good news for digital out-of-home users is that the channel not only commands solid, bankable doses of total attention, it’s delivering the short and long for brands more efficiently than other digital, scrolling formats.

QMS and Amplified have just dropped the latest landmark research in a multi-year program of work to gauge how attention is playing out in the digital out-of-home sphere. And it’s an eye opener for what DOOH can deliver, revealing surprisingly distinctive attributes that are sure to get tongues wagging in our industry. What’s more, the new study maps attention based on the principles of active, passive and non-attention, leveraging models and methodologies to ensure these findings can be understood and applied within the broader digital media ecosystem.

The first and arguably most significant finding: Digital out-of-home has a dual effect, not only helping to build short-term advertising strength but also mental availability. “We found this situation where both metrics moved similarly together, which was very surprising to us, but also amazing,” said Amplified founder, Dr Karen Nelson-Field.

It’s a nod to Mark Ritson’s ‘bothism’ argument – yes, brands actually can get both if they find the right vehicle to deliver them. “This is the first time I've seen where, in fact, it does drive both in the same platform,” said Dr Nelson-Field. “You can get your short and your long.”

In complement, and arguably the stat most likely to upset the industry apple cart: DOOH can do this with just 1 second of active attention. That’s less than half the 2.5-second threshold established for scrolling, “fast decay” digital formats.

Such results certainly had OMD chief planning officer, Thad King, rethinking both the right levels of attention required, and the role DOOH can play against a more diverse set of campaign objectives.

“Think about out-of-home: It's visible from the moment you see you see it. The brand is visible; the message is visible,” he commented. “I think it stands to reason why it doesn't need as much attention. All the stuff that's been established previously around the two-and-a-half seconds to establish mental availability is still true, because it's for formats that storytell; you definitely need that level of attention for those storytelling formats. But it's something we probably haven't thought of before.

“The level of attention that's required to drive outcomes from both a short-term and a long-term perspective is definitely going to help us potentially reframe some of the thinking in terms of out-of-home and the role for the channel at different stages.”

That’s not the end of it either. The study also shows the longer time in view for one of these billboards or street furniture assets, the more active attention it earns, stacking both passive and active attention in tandem and further strengthening outcomes.

“This is not saying that passive converts on its own. To be honest, we feel like there are a lot of publishers who do get a lot of passive attention that say it's highly valuable from a conversion perspective. It's not,” argued Dr Nelson-Field. “What we see here is that passive is leading to more active, and active is related to the outcome; it's related to the sales or related to the equity, the brand equity.”

The power of this new data also comes from the fact this was an expansive study, with large format billboards in Sydney and Melbourne, City of Sydney CBD assets and a mix of pedestrian and vehicular traffic all in the frame.

“We measured everything from overbridge sites to monopoles, sites that were on the sides of buildings, A sides, B sides. We wanted to really make sure we had this wide variety of different types of sites. The reason behind that is to give us a really thorough understanding of our assets, but also to take away bias,” said QMS chief strategy officer, Christian Zavecz. “We didn't want to sugarcoat it and just do our most premium sites. We felt that was really important to understand the contribution and relative performance of all of our assets.”