By Alex Martínez, Chief Strategy Officer at EXTE

Attention has never been at more of a premium, and brands are in the midst of a great battle to capture the eyes and minds of consumers. To help garner the interest of audiences, an increasing number of ad tech vendors are touting attention measurement as a surrogate for brand success.

However, gaining a consumer’s attention means very little if they don’t find the ad captivating – just because they’ve seen the ad, it doesn’t necessarily translate into brand recall or conversion.

Individuals come across many ads every single day and those instances, coupled with all the other content people consume, means that standing out is becoming increasingly difficult for brands. Therefore, just striving for crumbs of attention isn’t enough to create effective campaigns.

Advertisers need to utilise creativity and contextual targeting to ensure they are delivering high impact campaigns to the right audiences, at the right time, and truly driving attention and engagement.

Re-embracing creativity

Creativity has always been the most important part of advertising, but many brands lost their way on its use with the emergence – and then over-reliance – on hyper-targeting using data and technology. Now, as the industry becomes more privacy-centric and waves goodbye to third-party cookies, this level of targeting is no longer a possibility for advertisers.

While data and technology will still play a massive part in digital advertising, it’s time for advertisers to once again recognise the importance of creativity alongside those elements. Because, ultimately, reestablishing creativity as the heart of digital advertising will not only drive the attention that brands crave, but also make sure they hold on to that attention.

Creativity no longer has to be devoid of technological backing, so its effectiveness has been elevated to new heights. The emergence of generative AI (GenAI), in particular, is driving creativity forward and, if used in the right ways, can deliver the highest levels of attention and engagement for brands.

The industry may be grappling with the potential impact of the deprecation of third-party cookies, but it presents a tremendous opportunity for advertising to get back to what it does best, and do so in a way that delivers better results.

This opportunity becomes even more apparent when advertisers utilise GenAI as a tool to capture and maintain consumer attention. Creative activations, such as 3D and augmented reality (AR) experiences, can be leveraged alongside GenAI to deliver relevant, immersive content to audiences that garner their attention.

For example, EXTE leveraged 3D ads to encourage engagement and interaction with UK consumers through a campaign for the Costa del Sol tourism board. The backgrounds of these ads featured tailored imagery generated by AI dependent on the time of day the consumer was seeing the content, and the campaign included an interactive Costa del Sol adventure series users could play to peak their interest in the destination.

Finding a format

Creativity may be the most important factor in effective advertising, but it has to be delivered with the right creative formats and in the places that maximise attention. These formats should be impactful, and help to instantly encourage engagement with the brand.

Skins and interactive display formats, for instance, provide the perfect way for brands to generate recognition at the top of the funnel. And these can be paired with the aforementioned 3D and AR experiences to meet consumers with attention-grabbing creative.

Furthermore, connected TV (CTV) presents the opportunity for advertisers to experiment with their creativity, utilising ad slots of varying lengths in different ways to hold the viewer’s attention beyond whatever content they’re watching.

Another approach that is often overlooked in favour of the more “traditional”, is the leveraging of branded content. Branded content provides a platform for advertisers to be even more creative than other formats, while guaranteeing ads are being served in the right context.

Via branded content, brands are able to deliver eye-catching images, videos, infographics, and games to audiences, benefitting from near-endless creative possibilities to suit their needs.

Creative in the right context

While the creative and the mode of delivery are incredibly important, full effectiveness can’t be reached without considering targeting.

Of course, with third-party cookies and identifiers fading away, targeting can no longer be achieved in the same way. Instead, advanced contextual targeting has emerged as the most effective means of reaching audiences.

By once again harnessing the power of AI technology, advertisers are able to tie specific content and context to predictive socio-demographic data around age, gender, income, household threshold, and education level. And these can gain added contextual relevance from real-time relevant elements, such as weather, sports scores, or geolocation.

The driving force behind garnering the attention of consumers lies in creativity, but this has to be coupled with the right formats and contextual targeting to maximise the effectiveness of ads.

Advancements in AI technology have opened up the ability for advertisers to deliver relevant, creative-driven ads that capture – and retain – the attention of audiences, without leveraging personal data or sacrificing scale.