The online ad experience is facing a major overhaul and marketers are looking for new solutions to reach audiences in an impactful way. Can new tools, like attention metrics, change the online ad experience for good?

While most digital media practitioners have spent the best part of two years trying to find a solution to the dissolution of tracking technologies online, the outlook for 2022 seems brighter. With attention metrics, context, and creativity playing a more central part in digital advertising strategies, will the overall digital ad experience be better for consumers and brands?

This is the question that The Drum and Playground xyz, a tech firm specializing in capturing and retaining consumer attention, is discussing with senior marketers in an upcoming roundtable ‘Attention, context, and the future of the online ad experience’.

This session will bring together digital leaders from agencies, such as Denstu, Havas, and Spark Foundry, and brands to discuss this topic and find out what’s in store for the digital ad experience.

The session bounces off a major topic debated by Playground xyz at this year’s Predictions Festival.

Speaking at the event, Rob Hall, the chief executive officer of Playground xyz, said: “Our big prediction is that identification will become a dirty word in advertising in the coming year. We're moving away from cookies and identifiers, [so] consumers clearly don't want to be tracked. This is giving rise to alternate solutions, one of which is ‘context’. In 2022, context and creative are going to be supercharged by attention signals, changing the paradigm in how we think about context and creative coming together.”

The discussion will ultimately seek to understand how the industry can work together to create an improved online ad experience for customers.

“This is all about going after the consumer’s mindset in moments they are receptive. Is this the right context for the ad? Is this the right creative to put into that environment? And, finally, is it actually getting attention? If we can harmonize these factors, then we are going to maximize ad effectiveness” he explained during the session at The Drum Predictions Festival.

Source: The Drum, Charlotte McEleny