• Audience & Media Measurement
• Article

Attention in Context: What Real Campaigns Reveal About Media Performance

• ARF Attention Measurement Validation Initiative

What does “attention” really mean in today’s fragmented media landscape—and does more attention actually drive better results? In phase three of the ARF Attention Measurement Validation Initiative, real-world campaign data reveals where attention metrics align, where they diverge and how they relate to brand lift. The findings challenge assumptions and offer a more nuanced view of how attention works across channels, platforms and outcomes.

• Past Event Highlights
• Article

Commerce and Shopper Intelligence

Retail media networks and commerce media are redefining the data and measurement landscape, creating new opportunities—and complexity—for marketers and researchers alike. At Commerce & Shopper Intelligence 2026, brands, retailers, and researchers revealed how they’re adapting methodologies and frameworks to better understand increasingly fluid, data-rich shopping journeys.

• Future States & AI
• Article

Finding Your Brand’s AI Niche: How Prompt Nuance Shapes Product Recommendations

• Psychology of Gen AI
• ARF; MSI

As generative AI becomes a key part of how consumers discover and evaluate products, a new question emerges for marketers: how can they ensure their brands show up in AI-driven recommendations? This ARF and MSI experiment, the second phase of the seventh study in the Psychology of Gen AI series, reveals that even small changes in prompt wording can significantly influence which brands appear—helping non-market dominant brands carve out visibility by aligning with specific product attributes rather than competing broadly for “best” status.

• Research & Data Quality
• Article

What Marketers Need to Know About Retail Media Measurement

• ARF ORIGINAL RESEARCH

Retail Media Networks (RMNs) have become a cornerstone of modern advertising, but measurement practices across networks remain inconsistent and difficult to compare. This new ARF study examines 16 major RMNs to uncover how advertising assets, attribution systems, incrementality testing and closed-loop measurement are actually implemented in practice. The findings reveal that while reporting dashboards may appear unified, the underlying measurement systems often rely on disparate sources of retailer data, platform reporting, modeling and privacy-safe integrations. The report offers practical guidance for advertisers evaluating retail media investments and highlights the growing need for industry-wide measurement transparency and standards.

• Creative & Branded Content
• Article

The Science of Ad Impact: How Minds Process Advertising

• ARF; Cognition Council

This ARF Cognition Council guide brings together the latest research in neuroscience and psychology to explain how consumers process and respond to advertising. It outlines a unified framework connecting attention, emotion, memory and persuasion—showing how these cognitive processes interact to drive real-world outcomes, like brand choice and sales. Moving beyond traditional metrics, the guide highlights emerging approaches to measuring attention and emotional engagement and explores how these signals can be linked to business results. It provides a practical foundation for understanding not just whether ads are seen, but how they are experienced, remembered and ultimately acted upon.

• Creative & Branded Content
• Article

Do People Around the World React to Advertising in the Same Way? This Study Investigates

• JOURNAL OF ADVERTISING RESEARCH

Can facial expressions reliably reveal emotional responses to advertising across cultures? A new study published in the Journal of Advertising Research suggests the answer is yes. Drawing on a massive global database of more than 70,000 advertising studies and nearly 3.8 million frames of viewer facial responses, the authors found remarkably consistent facial expression patterns across 12 world regions. The study provides evidence that certain expressions linked to happiness, disgust, surprise and awe appear universally in response to advertising and entertainment content—supporting the use of automated facial coding as a valuable tool in global advertising research and creative testing.