How the NBA used a new attention metric to understand advertising impact

Jo Bowman

The National Basketball Association (NBA), the sports league, saw promising results as it tested whether using an attention metric could help it optimize in-flight campaigns.

The National Basketball Association (NBA), the sports league, is optimising its media mix with a new attention-based metric that helped predict viewing when deployed across connected TV and digital in a trial period.

Erik Nylen, the NBA’s data science lead, explained that this “AU” metric – which was developed by New York-based measurement company Adelaide – rated each ad placement based on its likelihood to capture attention and deliver particular outcomes using an index score of between zero and 100.

For the NBA, the most desirable outcomes related to brand lift and “tune-in”, or the number of people who watch...

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