Leveraging AR to Drive Attention

If attention is the oxygen that fuels the entire advertising ecosystem, then it needs to sit front and centre. Snapchat understands this and how using brand budgets effectively is key - after all the best ad in the world is completely useless if nobody is paying attention to it. To deliver better guidance for advertisers, they teamed up with industry attention experts, Lumen Research, to build on years of lab-based attention research to fully-fledged media measurement solutions that solidified creative best practices and how unique formats like AR Lenses create impact.

This involved developing a scalable attention measurement solution powered by historical, lab-based eye-tracking attention studies as ground truth, biometrics datasets. They went another step further, using the ground-breaking tool to conduct meta-analyses that revealed how attention translates to performance. This led to findings around how capturing attention is a necessary step in driving brand-lift, the ad formats and ad auction dynamics that maximise attention, and how a unique format like AR Lenses breaks the mould on what’s been previously understood about attention being paid to ads. This work bridges the gap from research to real life and is something that no other platform has ever done before. This innovative brand insight wasn’t simply offering research – it was taking the findings and applying them to live campaigns as part of the advertising offering. The results now form the blueprint for Snapchat’s messaging - in particular helping brands to leverage their advertising using AR formats to drive attention and ultimately