The news: The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Media Rating Council (MRC) released their Attention Measurement Guidelines draft on Thursday, a first step toward establishing standards for measuring “attention” metrics and certifying vendors.

• The Attention Measurement Guidelines are open to comment from agencies, brands, platforms, and others until July 12, per a joint statement. A final version of the standards will be released by the year’s end.
• “Right now, there are too many different ways to measure and define [attention], which creates confusion and makes it hard to compare results or build trust,” IAB vice president of measurement, addressability, and data centers Angelina Eng said in a press release. “These guidelines are about bringing order to the chaos.”

Zoom out: Attention has become an increasingly important metric for advertisers and is beginning to replace “viewability,” which measures how visible an ad is to consumers and had been the dominant digital advertising standard for nearly a decade.

• Despite that growing importance, what qualifies as “attention” varies from vendor to vendor. Attention measurement generally pulls from three input categories: Biometric data like eye tracking or heart rate, survey data, and contextual signals like cursor placement or scrolling speed.
• However, not all vendors use the same input signals, meaning each attention measurement can result in different conclusions.

Establishing standards: The IAB and MRC are attempting to create a framework for attention measurement to reduce reliance on vendor-specific methodologies and create consistency across different offerings.

While the groups aim to standardize methodologies for individual signals like eye tracking or surveys, they don’t intend to dictate what input signals can be used, which will allow vendors to maintain proprietary offerings.

Our take: The IAB and MRC’s effort is a significant step toward standardizing a metric that is of growing importance in digital advertising.

Advertisers have complained that in sectors like retail media, where metrics and processes vary significantly from company to company, it’s difficult to compare performance across platforms. The Attention Measurement Guidelines aim to prevent a similar dynamic from emerging in the attention space, while still embracing the wide array of signals that are a hallmark of the metric.

Editor's note: A previous version of this article incorrectly spelled Angelina Eng's name. We regret the error.