Talk:Attention (advertising)

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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 2 September 2020 and 9 December 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Jamr978, Knoseworthy, Sonnyliang, Jcastro1999, KiingOlu.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 17:40, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 1 September 2021 and 7 December 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Oluwafemi2, Swallowandrew8, Amaari1, Jtorilus.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 17:40, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Comments on Article
I doubt that this article can be redeemed. It contains too little information and only one incomplete reference which lacks sufficient bibliographic information to enable the original source to be tracked down. Almost every sentence has a problem and the entire article doesn't seem to have any purpose. After reading the article, I really have no idea what it is about.

 Title of article is potentially misleading

There are several different ways to think about attention in advertising:


 * Attention - as one stage in the consumer's information processing activities (i.e., how consumers absorb and retain the information provided in an advertising message). There are several models of advertising effects that incorporate attention, but arguably the most well-known/ widely cited is the AIDA (marketing) (Attention, Interest, Desire and Action (i.e. purchase or acquisition)
 * Attention tactics - that is; media and executional (ad copy) tactics employed by advertisers and marketers to increase the likelihood that a message will be noticed (i.e. attended to) and that it will be encoded in the way that was intended by the source or sender
 * Attention effects - i.e. advertising metrics that attempt to measure advertising effectiveness or copy effectiveness after audiences have been exposed to the message. There are two broad approaches to measuring adv effects - pre-testing (testing ad copy prior to a campaign/exposure) and post-testing (testing whether the ad copy was seen, recalled or noted during or after a campaign/ exposure) (See Rossiter and Bellman, Chs 10 and 14)

Based on the article's current content, it is not at all clear what is meant by attention in advertising. It looks like it might be trying to discuss attention effects (i.e. metrics) but even then there are problems because the method described is just one example of a number of tests that can be used to capture attention. But no mention is made as to whether the attention measurement is part of a pre-testing, post-testing or tracking study. Clearly, the heading "attention (advertising" is not about attention in advertising in a general sense, but is skewed towards measures of advertising effects and even then, takes a very narrow perspective by mentioning only one of hundreds of different types of test. Arguably, the title should be amended to reflect the article's actual contents.

Specific issues and problems with the article that need to be addressed include:

Opening sentence contains a circular argument

"In advertising research, attention is the direct measure of a commercial's ability to win audience attention" which is a long-winded way of basically saying that attention measures attention! This is a circular argument. Go figure? However, this statement might give a clue that the article is primarily concerned with advertising effects.

Broken/ Non operational links The second sentence has three internal links that do not lead to anywhere. See attention, brand linkage and motivation.

Use of Jargon

The third sentence contains an unfamiliar word/ term, namely "a commercial "pod" on television" which is not defined and is likely to be unfamiliar to many readers. I have no idea what it means.

Reference to Young, pp 56-57 This reference fails to provide sufficient information for the original document to be located. I have looked around and found several articles by Young, but sadly none with a page 56 and 57. The name, Young, in association with advertising effects rings a bell and I wonder whether he was the person who first came up with the AIDA model??

Research Method The research method described in the last paragraph appears to be describing 'dummy advertising vehicle tests' (a technique used in pre-testing copy). But this is only ONE way to measure attention. There are many other pre-testing methods which have not been mentioned and these might be considered major omissions in the article. Moreover, the world has moved on - these days researchers are using neuromarketing techniques such as eye-tracking, fMRI, EEG and a range of bio-metric sensors to study the way that consumers attend to advertising messages during exposure.

Where to from here?

 1. Develop into Article on Measures of Advertising Effects. One possibility is to develop the article into a fuller, more complete account of metrics used to measure advertising effectiveness - of which attention effects would be just one metric. Other metrics might include such things as attitude to the ad, ad liking, recall tests, association tests, comprehension and reaction tests. In both advertising practice and theory, this is a major topic - and in recent years there has been a big shift in thinking. In terms of advertising awards, for example, the emphasis has moved away from evaluating advertising on the basis of its creativity and towards evaluating advertising on the basis of how well it achieves the desired advertising objectives. As part of this transition, judging criteria almost always insist on the submission of a case study that includes detailed metrics on advertising effectiveness, media effectiveness and copy effectiveness. As a consequence, this has put the spotlight on metrics used in advertising research. These trends have contributed to a renewed interest in measuring advertising effects - as discussed by Young and King (2008)

The topic of advertising effectiveness is a complex topic - because there are many considerations - the advertising message execution (copy and message strategy), the medium in which the message is placed and the consumer's momentary situation. There are different techniques for measuring attention in different media alternatives, giving rise to literally hundreds of metrics. An additional layer of complexity is that there are two broad approaches to measuring advertising message effectiveness - pre-testing and post-testing. Pre-testing is designed to assess the likelihood that consumers will attend to a proposed ad. Post-testing attempt to capture just how many consumers actually attended to the ad and were able to recall some of the copy points. To do justice to such a large and complex topic, it would require an editor with more than a passing familiarity with advertising and would need a full-time focus for at least several weeks. Some of the literature in this area is quite technical - and there are many tests being invented all the time, but few of them make it into the standard repertoire of effectiveness tests. It would be very easy for someone without appropriate experience to become hijacked by some obscure academic's new 'you-beaut' metric - even though it had not had time to be picked up by the advertising research agencies or academic works on the subject.

Even an editor with extensive experience would still have to contend with the 'deletionist/ challenge everything' mindset that pervades Wikipedia at the moment and which is doing so much to inculcate a culture of fear, especially among new editors. On my part, I am unwilling to contribute any substantive new content to existing articles - other than operating at the periphery by, say, adding a reference where a [citation needed] tag had previously been added or updating a list of external links - but even these minor amendments, have been challenged or reverted in some instances. My own view, is that given the prevailing Wikipedia culture which favours verifiable references over accuracy of content, the the probability that this could be cleaned up and expanded into something worthwile is very low indeed.

2. Treat as a Definition

Another possibility is to go narrow - and simply define attention effects, give a couple of relevant examples and then relegate it to the Dictionary or Glossary. Even this would be a fairly tough challenge in terms of selecting suitable examples that would meet the approval of the WP community. The classic text, Rossiter and Bellman, 2005 has a entire chapter devoted to Pre-testing (pp 212-232) methods and another chapter devoted to post-testing methods (pp 312-344) and also an entire chapter devoted to attention tactics (Ch 9) (See Rossiter, J and Bellman, S., Marketing Communications: Theory and Applications, Pearson Australia, 2005, pp 80-87.)

3. Delete article and/ or merge with Advertising Article

The content contained on this page could be used to 'beef up' the Advertising article. The current page on advertising has many, many problems - one being that its coverage of advertising effects is perfunctory. It is contained in the sub-section on 'advertising research' which consists of just three sentences - and really only mentions pre-testing and post-testing in very general terms. This section has the potential to be expanded to include some of the more widely used metrics used in measuring advertising effectiveness. The main advantage of this approach is that a lot of the context about the AIDA model, message execution tactics are already on the same page.

There is a lot of material spread across other marketing related pages that could be moved to form the nucleus of a solid page on Advertising. For instance, the article on Positioning (marketing) has a section devoted to the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) which really doesn't belong there. It could be moved to the Advertising page. This content on Attention (advertising) could also be moved to the Advertising article. I'm sure that if someone had a good look around, they will find other advertising-related material embedded in pages where it is a poor fit.

Update on Comments (References)
Since writing the comments last week, I have had a lead on the possible source for the reference simply given as Young, pp 56-57

I think that this is most likely a reference to Charles E Young,  The Advertising Research Handbook which has been published in several editions. The first edition, published in 2005, was sole-authored by Young, while the second edition, published in 2008 was coauthored with Patricia D. King. The article does not contain sufficient detail to positively identify which edition was used as the source. Closer scrutiny reveals that the online version of these books via Amazon and/or Google Books does not permit previewing of relevant pages (i.e., pp 56-57) so that it is impossible to ascertain with certainty that the reference specified in the article is this work. However, in the first edition, the chapter on pre-testing spans the relevant pages and this is the chapter where readers would expect to find a description of the 'dummy advertising vehicle tests' as described in the article and this chapter also mentions attention. On this basis, and also noting that the reference in the article includes just a single author, I feel that the 2005 edition of preceding reference is highly likely to be the original source for the content in this article.

None of this alters the fact that the article is of very poor quality. It is still a mystery why the editor described just one of the many possible tests of consumer attention to advertising messages. It is also a mystery as to why the description of a test was not labelled with its correct name 'dummy advertising vehicle test'.

The best that can be said for this piece is that it has some potential to become a "stub" for a new page on measures of advertising effects.

BronHiggs (talk) 21:54, 12 November 2016 (UTC)

More than a year on...
So, here we are, more than 12 months down the track, and very little has changed.

At least the article now has a few references, but it still lacks many fundamentals, specifically:


 * a definition of attention within an advertising context
 * some discussion of why attention is important to advertisers
 * the main measures of attention in different types of advertising contexts (currently most of the discussion is about TV ads, but what about print (e.g. STARCH scores), radio, cinema, internet, outdoor?)
 * the distinction between quant and qual measures
 * the distinction between pre-testing and post-testing
 * the relationship between attention and recall; attention and sales effects
 * the problems associated with measuring advertising effects in online environments (Wikipedia has literally dozens of articles about digital advertising, yet none of them discuss the very real problems advertisers face in measuring effects which is, of course, the main reason why advertisers are beginning to move away from online advertising and return to traditional media in their budget allocations)

Other issues that could be addressed include the increasing use of consumer neuroscience in advertising research and marketing.

The tag at the top of the article is even less helpful than it was when it was added in late 2016. It is unclear how which question could be graphed? Even if we had some idea what the question was, why does it need to be graphed?

This is still a terrible article, as is the article on Advertising research. (Measuring advertising attention is a subset of advertising research). If these two articles were merged, there may be some prospect of getting a half decent article up. BronHiggs (talk) 06:11, 30 June 2018 (UTC)

Response to Merge Proposal: Completely agree on the proposal to merge into the Advertising research section, as a start of a subsection discussing metrics and methodologies. However, that would then require an unenviable overhaul and expansion of yet another very poor quality article.

Side Comments: I have recently been inspired (or foolish) to enter the arena of attempting to improve many of the fundamentally misrepresentative and poor quality marketing & advertising related wiki pages. This one is a great example of such a baffling and narrow scope of interpretation that it begs the question of why it even exists. I just started to get my edit chops whet with this little diamond before I am able to edit the semiprotected, higher importance pages in which there are many, many problems.

I have observed a trend in my recent review of several important advertising and marketing related articles in which even the fundamental concepts are being poorly interpreted and represented. I suspect this is primarily due to the foundation of many of these pages being established based on poor quality college textbooks and written by individuals without actual working professional experience in the industry who can provide authority, coherence, and structure to that content. I have been slapping my head at so many articles in the past couple days that it's overwhelming to even think where to start.

Just wanted to say thanks for the thoughtfulness of your talk page comments here as they have been very constructive, substantive, and appreciated. As I am new to editing wikipedia, it was very helpful and inspiring to see this level of thoughtfulness behind the scenes, even if it was in the service of such a poor quality article. Cornmacabre (talk) 08:24, 30 June 2018 (UTC)


 * You are right - this proposal would require a lot of work, but in my view it would be well worthwhile. However, as I see it, there is another issue that takes priority. Firstly, it would be necessary to propose a merge formally, and then seek support for the merge proposal. In my experience, very few merge proposals ever gain the necessary support. It may be a good idea, but is probably futile suggesting it.


 * If you are looking for a place to start, I would suggest that you avoid pages that are heavily watched or patrolled (e.g. advertising, marketing) - such as "high importance" articles or articles that deal with marketing's big themes. For example, the main page, Marketing is arguably one of the worst in the subject area, and not only in terms of what it includes, but also its glaring omissions. It is however, patrolled by several editors who immediately revert almost all new contributions, so that the substantive content changes very little. Even some blatant plagiarism on that page remained in place for more than 8 years, while the patrollers continued to revert new content designed to replace the plagiarism. The plagiarised content was only removed after two different editors lodged consecutive complaints about it.


 * I would also recommend that you avoid editing articles about specific brand names, companies or advertising campaigns. The Wikipedia community appears to loathe and despise these articles and treats them as "spam" or "promotional."  If an article is about a promotion, it will eventually be deemed to be "promotional in character" and have large slabs of its content reverted. Apparently few editors are able to distinguish between an article that is about the subject of promotion, and an article that has a promotional tone or promotional agenda. For similar reasons, I would avoid using examples to illustrate concepts or strategies - these will also be reverted as spam - and in extreme cases can be used to justify reverting entire sections or articles.


 * I would recommend that you begin with editing with short articles that are out of the mainstream or are of "low importance." (Check the talk page or the page history for details of the articles importance status). There is an article, Outline of marketing which lists all the marketing pages. You could use this to help identify target articles. I really do wish you well, but you have an uphill battle. I have written a few notes about my own experiences over 18 months on your talk page. BronHiggs (talk)

@BronHigg I have thought a lot about your responses and your story which is so interesting -- while I recognize this conversation should be a side-bar chat, I think the knowledge that this talk page will never be used by anyone else is a good proxy.

Priority to me is merging shit redundant articles into one cohesive concept, and talking a lot of content out to the back to beat it with a bat. You said the following:

"In my experience, very few merge proposals ever gain the necessary support [...]"

Do you have an estimate of how many people it would take on the unified mission of consolidation and refinement of content; over 8-14 months? Worded another way: How many active obstruction eggs are we dealing? Cornmacabre (talk) 03:20, 3 July 2018 (UTC)