290 karma · joined December 6, 2011
>1. Using YT as a proxy for overall attention
'Overall' attention is never a claim. This is simply building upon the views data with what is measured around how far people watch in a video.
>2. Advertising isn't a straight line number of attention to sales
There is no mention of sales in the post. It is comparing the price of the superbowl spot with the number of attention minutes. There are many factors which can serve as a measure of success, in this case it is looking at how people are watching the video after the ad spot.
>most CMO's wouldn't take this type of napkin math very seriously
Attention minutes is a fairly powerful measure. Ex. Upworthy uses it to determine which videos are most likely to be shared. The goal here is to show one way it can be used. In practice, it would be used among other measures an agency or company has- as you describe above.
>The Youtube attention statistics are a nice proxy for it but it didn't take into consideration the likelihood that a potential viewer lost interest before they knew what it was 'about'
Great points, and agreed. This is what the attention plot ventures to take into account
>measure the trending of hashtags / mentions / youtube views of the commercial in the days following
This would definitely be useful to see.
Also, you can see a sort of meta discussion here on the /r/dataisbeautiful subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1jqz3f/redd... It's kind of hilarious because people leave threads of comments to create new branches.
What I find most interesting is that you can quickly get an idea of how much conversation is in one of these discussions by the number of nodes that are colored (signifying users who have posted more than once).