Deciphering the 5 Types of Duration in Advertising

When it comes to “duration” in advertising, it’s often assumed that we’re all talking about the same thing: the amount of time an audience spends with an ad. However, duration is more complex than that. In fact, it’s not a single metric at all but a category with at least five distinct types:

• Direct Measure with Eye Tracking
• Predicted Duration
• Adjacent Ads
• Politely Interruptive Ads
• Forced Duration

To help cut through the noise and guide advertisers in making sense of when and how to use duration-based attention metrics, we put together this handy graphic: 

Some forms of duration, such as predicted duration, can be useful in creative analysis, but it’s generally a poor metric for measuring media quality. It’s one thing to maximize the amount of time someone spends with an ad and another to drive meaningful advertising outcomes. 

In this WARC article and a separate blog post, we delve deeper into the potential pitfalls of misusing duration-based metrics, including the unfavorable biases they can create towards over-frequencied audiences and suboptimal creative.

While duration has its place in a well-rounded advertising measurement strategy, it shouldn’t take center stage when measuring or optimizing media quality. When it comes to assessing the quality of their media investments, marketers are better off with a metric that focuses squarely on a placement’s likelihood of capturing attention versus its ability to sustain attention.