The festive season delivered record-breaking sales for major grocery and FMCG brands, with supermarket giants like Aldi achieving impressive results. While some supermarkets surpassed their growth and marketing expectations with effective Christmas strategies, the latest retail data from the ONS paints a less optimistic picture.
As Sainsbury’s CEO suggested in January, when the store cut 3000 jobs, the chain is facing a “particularly challenging cost environment.” With rising wholesale prices and ‘little and often’ shopping, sustainability investments, low-cost supermarket competition and customer retention challenges, many are struggling to adapt, writes Mike Follett, CEO and Founder of Lumen Research.
Faced with these and other internal pressures, including increasing board scrutiny around sales performance, it’s vital to ensure retail advertising strategies are as effective as possible.
While price, product, and placement will always be key factors in driving sales, one element has become increasingly vital: consumer attention. More specifically, attention metrics are now essential in giving retailers a competitive edge.
Attention Metrics: A Key to Greater Profitability
Attention is not just a measure of consumer engagement; it also serves as a powerful indicator of profit. In a recent Ebiquity study in partnership with Lumen, we found a near-perfect correlation between the amount of “attentive seconds per thousand impressions” and the incremental profit generated.
The best advertisement in the world is useless if no one sees it. But, with attention metrics, retailers can truly understand how consumers engage with their ads – and more importantly, how those interactions influence purchasing decisions.
Looking back at the holiday season, our analysis of Christmas supermarket ads revealed that Aldi’s “Kevin the Carrot” campaign garnered the highest viewer attention, followed by ads from Boots and Waitrose. Retailers who optimise like this for attention enjoy not only deeper customer understanding and engagement, but significantly higher profitability.
Measure Attention, Don’t Assume It
In the chaotic and fragmented digital world, metrics like viewability and impressions offer only limited insights, and assuming your ad has captured attention can be a costly mistake. In fact, we’ve found that 70% of digital ads that are viewable are never actually noticed.
By adopting attention metrics, retailers can accurately gauge the effectiveness of their campaigns, leading to more measurable results. Studies like those from Havas show that optimising for attention directly drives key business outcomes such as brand awareness, clicks, and purchase intent.
Attention and Targeting
Targeting the right message to the right customer is as crucial as ever in grocery advertising and beyond. Even the most creative ad will fail if it reaches the wrong audience or is delivered at the wrong time. Attention metrics reveal that there is no “one-size-fits-all” approach to consumer marketing. These metrics offer invaluable insights into how factors like preferences, emotions, values, and personal circumstances affect how different audiences engage with ads.
Understanding what captures attention – and why, enables brands to tailor their messages more effectively. This results in marketing that feels relevant and authentic, strengthening the connection with the right customers at the right moment. By refining their approach with attention data, retailers can ensure that their messages resonate more deeply and align with their audience’s needs.
Attention can also be used to assess ad performance. While creating ads that drive engagement and sales can often feel like guesswork, attention measurement removes much of this uncertainty. This allows retailers to predict how different ads will perform with specific audiences.
Different campaign goals also require different attention strategies. Driving brand awareness for a new product range, for instance, may demand higher ad frequency but less attention per impression. Conversely, increasing purchase intent requires sustained attention on fewer ads. By using attention metrics, retailers can fine-tune their campaigns to match these goals, optimising their media spend for the best results.
The Future of Attention in Retail
As the retail and grocery sectors navigate another year of uncertainty, attention measurement will become an increasingly critical part of strategic decision-making. What truly matters is whether an ad is viewed – and by a real person. By gaining insights into what actually captures attention, retailers can build stronger, more meaningful connections with their customers, and ultimately drive greater loyalty and profitability.
In 2025, brands that ignore attention metrics may find themselves at a disadvantage. But those that harness the power of attention will be better equipped to meet the economic and societal challenges facing both consumers and the industry as a whole.
The grocery industry is under enormous pressure to do more with less, but by focusing on attention, brands can unlock new levels of engagement, relevance, and profitability. Attention isn’t just a “nice to have” – it’s a powerful tool for driving real business growth. Retailers that embrace attention metrics today will be better positioned for success in an increasingly competitive landscape.
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