The (subsequent) consideration revolution is right here, says Dr Karen Nelson-Field

It’s one thing media sorts have recognized for a very long time – a minimum of for the reason that heyday of marketplace analysis – however by no means rather were given a maintain on quantifying or addressing.

Over the decade, a rising workforce of researchers (and, latterly, tech distributors) had been rallying to modify that. They’ve finished so underneath the rubric of ‘attention,’ a motion inside advertising’s ingenious and media analysis fingers to show that easy perception into dependable equipment to know how, when and the place media in fact will get noticed.

The de facto chief of that motion is marketer-turned-academic-turned-marketer-again Karen Nelson-Field, the previous professor of media innovation on the University of Adelaide and, since 2017, founding father of adtech store Amplified Intelligence. She’s additionally the co-chair of The Attention Council and the writer of now not one however two books with ‘The Attention Economy’ within the identify.

It’s now not a struggle Nelson-Field has been waging by myself. Co-conspirators come with the eye economic system’s new stalwarts, comparable to Mike Follett’s Lumen Research, and megavendors from the advert effectiveness global, comparable to Teads, DoubleVerify and Ebiquity.

With the ones distributors already transacting very giant industry with the entire global’s primary media suppliers, consideration isn’t any plucky upstart. But converting the tactics wherein media are purchased and offered takes time and in a up to date episode of The Drum Podcast, Nelson-Field and Follett in combination defined why consideration appears to be like find it irresistible’s having a second in 2025. Major media homeowners have began to promote their advert house for its talent to “drive attention” and longstanding makes an attempt to standardize consideration reporting would possibly in any case come excellent, with business our bodies the IAB and MRC anticipated to collectively unlock requirements for consideration dimension accreditation later this month.

Still, when The Drum sat down with Professor Nelson-Field, she argued that “we’re still in a nascent space.” Here’s the place it’s been and the place it’s headed subsequent.

No, you don’t have a shorter consideration span than a goldfish

The thought of shriveled consideration spans is regularly weaponized in pitch decks and case research to make the case for promoting that hits more difficult, sooner. It turns out true: our brains, melted by means of unending streams of Tweets and TikToks, have atrophied to that oft-cited eight-second mark, the place we’re bested by means of the proverbial goldfish, consistent with an sadly over-cited headline in Time mag from a decade in the past.

For Nelson-Field, the very baseline in working out present serious about consideration is composed in seeing why it’s deceptive to say that any solid quantity may well be placed on our ‘attention spans.’ Two fundamental dichotomies are at play in making this working out. First, fast-decay as opposed to slow-decay platforms and codecs: now not all media environments are created equivalent and the myriad environmental variations between all of them impact the attentive state of the viewer – maximum people, regardless of how second-screen addled we’ve transform, will pay respectable consideration to a excellent film for 90 mins, however would possibly now not pay heed to a scrollable advert for greater than a moment or two. And underneath that moment dichotomy, lively as opposed to passive consideration, we see that even whilst ‘paying attention,’ the thoughts wanders from a extra centered mode and semi-distraction.

Put the ones in combination and we see, Nelson-Field says, now not simplest that ‘we have eight-second attention spans’ is incomprehensible; it might even be lovely excellent information for some platforms.

“It’s probably true that our attention span isn’t eight seconds,” Nelson-Field says, “but I don’t think that matters… and there’s no evidence that eight seconds is bad. On fast-decay platforms, it’s one-and-a-half to maybe two seconds. And even in longform formats with ‘slow’ or ‘flat’ decay, where you’re stuck to your chair and can’t leave the room, you’re still distracted to some degree.”

‘Attention as a design principle’

So, consideration is fluid and platform-dependent. We know this. What Nelson-Field says we haven’t but totally come to grips with is rather how a lot of the eye query is determined at the provide aspect. “What I know about human behavior is that you’re not in control of your own behavior in these formats. The user experience is what defines how much attention you can pay. This isn’t new, but the user experience is designed within an inch of its life for you to do what it tells you to do – keep scrolling, keep being committed, find more things that are interesting. Most people think they’re in control of their own attention on most media platforms, but that’s not the case.”

Getting to grips with that dynamic in some way that each one events within the media ecosystem (the platforms, the media businesses, the individuals who make the ingenious) in point of fact perceive is a paradigm shift, says Nelson-Field – one she calls “attention as a design principle”. “We’ve moved on from it being a bit arbitrary, shiny and a bit surface level. The people that we engage with now ask me to write them playbooks for their entire organizations, across the globe. Attention can’t be a one-off thing – you’ve got to design and guide rules around every touchpoint where human interaction is needed: creative, media, planning, optimization, maybe even point-of-sale.”

The subtext right here is apparent. The wish to serve media in ways in which maximize precise reasonably than attainable consideration is by means of now properly understood by means of positive departments that may purchase device integrations to keep watch over that nuance. But for Nelson-Field, the following frontier breaks consideration again out of the area of interest it has constructed for itself, for attention all over the advert ecosystem.

In the ‘attention as a design principle’ paradigm, Nelson-Field says, taking into consideration the contours of consideration will transform an enter query, now not a tuning query after the massive stuff is settled. “The questions on the media side are ‘how much attention do I need? What type of attention do I need? And only then, where can I find it?’ On the creative side, it’s ‘how can I amplify my opportunity with attention above what’s expected? And how can I optimize outcomes – meaning, if I’m getting attention, how can I definitely get outcomes from it?’”

‘Cost per meaningless thousand’

That latter level is crucial one for consideration distributors to simply accept and percentage, for Nelson-Field: consideration is consideration and it’s now not essentially tied to any specific consequence. “Look, if your brand’s shit and you don’t have the branded moment appearing much, or someone’s not in the category to buy, you won’t get the outcome. Any vendor who tells you that attention is perfectly related to outcomes is lying to you.”

For Nelson-Field, as consideration considering has matured, the above isn’t the one position the place nuance has changed walk in the park. When individuals who purchase media first took the pink tablet of consideration considering, she says, there was once a temptation to divide media into high-attention and low-attention codecs: cinema was once ‘good’ since the lighting fixtures are off and our telephones stowed in our wallet; programmatic and show commercials relatively ‘bad’ as a result of they’re reasonably cluttered and aggressive environments.

“We’ve moved on from saying ‘cinema’s the best and Facebook’s the worst’,” Nelson-Field says. “They all play a different role at different levels of the campaign cycle or the brand cycle.”

This coming-into-maturity of the eye house would possibly imply the jettisoning of a few proxies that experience were given us to the place we at the moment are, Nelson-Field says. Chief amongst the ones: ‘time in view’, a measure that does what it says at the tin (as soon as 50% of an advert’s pixels are on show) and has been the default proxy for consideration for a number of years. The drawback, Nelson-Field says, is that we have interaction with all platforms another way, so the usage of time-in-view as a cross-platform measure is (at absolute best) fallacious. “So most people don’t understand the consequences to CPM (which I call ‘cost-per-meaningless-thousand) or to planning. It’s yet another massive gap between served and seen and it has an impact on viewability too. Everyone calls viewability the bad guy, but it’s not. Time in view is the Achilles heel.”

Plenty has but to modify, in different phrases, sooner than Nelson-Field’s dream – a minimum of a decade within the making – of well-understood, common consideration considering and metrics are same old around the business. But there’s nonetheless time. “I think we’re still in a nascent space, in the category itself. My first book was only five years ago and I’ve just dropped my next one. In five years, the gap between the first book and the last book is just huge. In another five years, it’ll be that different again.”

That mature level of the business is rising now, with consideration tech integrations from the foremost avid gamers and platforms, the approaching upward push of “attention marketplaces” and buy-in from the broader ecosystem together with DSPs and retail media. Those requirements and accreditation from the IAB and MRC shall be every other step, Nelson-Field says.

“I didn’t start this business knowing what products people would need. So we’ve had to grow the category, we’ve had to work out the use case and build product around it. Now we have to manage the distribution system. It’s a long road, but it’s working.”