Attention economy

The attention economy is the insight that the scarce resource in advertising is not reach but the attention people actually give. An impression that technically counts as a contact may in practice have been on screen for a fraction of a second, half covered or entirely ignored. Attention research therefore measures how long and how actively people look at advertising, revealing large differences between channels and formats that look identical in reach figures. The planning consequence: budget in expected seconds of attention rather than impressions, and be suspicious of cheap reach whose attentive value is negligible.

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