What started as background noise became an obsession. I’ve watched it twice since then, memorized the soundtrack, and spent more nights than I’d like to admit watching TikTok dance covers of “Golden.” Something about the rhythm, melody, and tension in each scene held my attention longer than any movie I’ve seen this year. It completely pulled me away from another screen.
That’s what every marketer hopes to create: a rhythm that people feel, not just see. This idea is at the heart of the long-awaited IAB and MRC guidelines for attention measurement.
Beyond visibility
For decades, advertising success was based on exposure. The IAB and Media Rating Council viewability standards, established in 2014, provided marketers with a structure and a common language to assess whether an ad had a chance of being seen. Visibility remains the basis of responsible measurements. It establishes the baseline of exposure.
The new attention guidelines build on that baseline. After months of collaboration between measurement providers, publishers and agencies, the industry now has a standardized framework for four approaches:
- Data signals.
- Visual tracking.
- Physiological and neurological observation.
- Panel-based studies.
Unlike visibility, which identifies opportunities, attention measurement adds interpretive value. It helps you understand how people actually experience an ad, not just whether they could have seen it. In this sense, attention builds on visibility rather than replacing it. It should be treated as a diagnostic input to interpret engagement, optimize creativity, and link exposure to outcomes more effectively – not as an outcome in itself.
Dig Deeper: The Real Reason Why Marketing Measurement Keeps Failing
The MRC accreditation process is now open to organizations offering attention measurement solutions. This development is changing the way agencies, publishers and internal teams will buy and optimize media, shifting from the quantity of impressions to the quality of engagement.
To supplement these guidelines, the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) and IAB have released an Attention Measurement Playbook. It provides practical guidance for marketers as they navigate this transition to attention-based strategies. But attention is just the beginning. It is the path to something deeper: emotion.
The art and science of attention
Decades of psychology and neuroscience research show that emotion increases attention, strengthens memory, and increases purchase intention. In short, emotion drives memory, and memory drives outcomes.
Attention measurement does not directly capture emotions. It captures the behavioral and cognitive characteristics of emotional involvement.
- Data signals such as hovering, scrolling, voluntary sound on and social sharing.
- Visual tracking such as gaze duration, facial expressions, human presence and eye movement patterns.
- Physiological and neurological observations such as pupil dilation, heart rate changes and brain wave patterns.
- Panel and survey data capturing self-reported emotional responses and purchase intention.
These are the observable traces of feeling – signals that reveal when emotion is at work. It is the heartbeat that turns an impression into an experience. Attention measurement captures that impulse and helps marketers convert it into measurable action.
Dig deeper: can attention really drive campaign success?
Each methodology offers unique strengths.
- Data signals analyze billions of impressions to identify attention patterns.
- Eye tracking shows exactly where people are looking and for how long.
- Physiological and neurological tools map biological and unconscious reactions.
- Panel research provides insight into attitudes and brand impact.
The real power comes when these approaches work together. Use data signals to measure human behavior on devices. Layered visual tracking to validate visibility and response. Integrate physiological and neurological methods to understand emotional resonance. Verify via panel data to assess message and brand impact. Think of it like stacking instruments in a song: the more harmonized they are, the richer the insight.
The CIMM and IAB Playbook provides frameworks for exactly this type of integration, helping marketers determine which measurement approaches align with their specific business objectives and media strategies. But measurement means little without creative intention. Before writing a brief, answer the following question: “What do we want people to feel?”
Joy and surprise increase social sharing. Nostalgia strengthens brand affinity. Different emotions move through different formats. Video excels at narrative arcs. Audio creates intimacy and imagination. Out-of-home delivers impact through scale. Display and social work are best for surprise and shareability.
What comes next
After months of public comment, the guidelines have been finalized. With accreditation open and the CIMM and IAB Playbook providing practical guidance, marketers now have both the standards and the roadmap to measure what really matters: the moments that move people to care, click, share and remember.
These resources don’t tell you what creative material to create or what emotional chord to strike, but they provide a way to know when you’ve succeeded. They turn intuition into evidence and feelings into data. Over time, these signals will train AI models to predict which creative moments will resonate before a campaign even launches.
Yes, I will probably watch “KPop Demon Hunters” again (and again). In the coming weeks I will be singing along to “Soda Pop” and “Golden”. And somewhere between the melodies and the emotions, one truth remains clear: the future of marketing is not about what people see. It’s about what they feel. And now we finally have a way to measure it.
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Contributing authors are invited to create content for MarTech and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the martech community. Our contributors work under the supervision of the editors and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. MarTech is owned by Semrush. The contributor was not asked to make any direct or indirect mentions of it Semrush. The opinions they express are their own.
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