Why Purina’s premium brand sees eye-tracking as a viable replacement for third-party cookies

Amid the dragged-out demise of the third-party cookie, marketers everywhere are experimenting with alternative means of measuring campaign effectiveness. Tracking the eye movements of cat and dog owners could be one of them.

Lily’s Kitchen, a premium brand owned by pet food giant Nestlé Purina, has begun to incorporate eye-tracking audience panels into its campaign measurement with the aim of using audience attention — measured in the seconds spent actually looking at an ad — as a proxy for ad effectiveness. The move follows a test campaign launched in the run-up to Black Friday last year that increased sales by 20%, marketers working for the brand told Digiday.

Though eye-tracking isn’t a new technology, using it as one of the primary measures of performance for a brand campaign is unusual. Despite that, Lily’s Kitchen’s “first foray” into programmatic video presented a chance to pilot the technique, said Pablo Lalor, the brand’s head of e-commerce.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.