Consumer attention is in short supply. From TikTokers to early education teachers to adults in general, it seems that few demographics feel like they (or the people around them) can stay focused for as long as they used to.
In this context, advertisers must contend with the challenge of consumers paying less attention to ads. To advertise effectively in today’s saturated digital environment, marketing teams must have an attention strategy—a game plan for leveraging the confines of attention-related constraints to outperform their competitors.
Perhaps the most important tool advertisers have at their disposal for capturing audience attention is personalization. But in addition to tailoring specific ad placements to capture attention, advertisers must also consider how to capture attention in a broader omnichannel context. Attention gained over time, via various interactions on various channels and platforms, is what garners the brand equity that leads to lasting connection, trust, and action from target audiences.
Ultimately, by empowering their teams to achieve both personalization at scale as well as a sophisticated omnichannel approach, advertisers can outperform their competitors and earn lasting audience attention despite shrinking attention spans and a saturated digital environment.
Multiple studies have tracked decreasing attention to the same tasks over time, appearing to confirm the idea that attention spans are shrinking. But the reality is likely more nuanced: The very concept of attention is hard to define, and attention spans can vary based on environment, activity, and mood, as well as channel, platform, and content.
Experts also challenge the idea that attention is fundamentally shrinking, attributing shifts in focus to increasingly distracting environments, rather than neurological changes. And others argue that attention spans haven’t changed at all, pointing to examples like gamers who play for hours in a single sitting (one 2022 survey found that PC gamers most commonly averaged 1-2 hours per session).
“I don’t think media is responsible for shortening people’s attention spans,” says Lauren Johnson, Client Strategy and Effectiveness Lead at Basis. “I believe what holds someone’s attention is what’s relevant to them. That’s a big reason why so many people, especially younger generations, are spending so much time on TikTok and YouTube: The content on those platforms is highly relevant and personalized to them.”
What is clear is that consumers have grown more discerning of ads. This is especially true for younger audiences, like Gen Z, who tune out of ads after just 1.3 seconds. “If you’re not relevant, younger audiences don’t care,” says Johnson. “It’s a learned behavior that these younger generations can filter digital noise out better than earlier generations, because it’s native to them.”
While advertisers may only have a second or two to capture audience attention, it remains possible to retain that attention for any number of seconds or minutes—that is, if the content is captivating and relevant enough.
Given that consumers typically only pay attention to advertisements for the first couple of seconds (especially in skippable or scrollable environments), marketing teams need a “first second strategy” to hook audiences within that time frame. Some proven tactics include:
Personalization can further strengthen these approaches, while helping retain audience attention past the first couple of seconds.
One of the best ways to capture and retain consumer attention is to serve the right message to the right person at the right time. (It may be an adage, but it’s an adage for a reason!)
Today’s marketing teams have both the advantage and the challenge of being able to hyper-personalize their marketing approaches based on consumer data. The best way to out-personalize competitors’ creative and media placements is through data—namely, by having the most efficient processes for collecting, organizing, pulling insights from, and activating data.
This is not always an easy task, with marketers citing finding and maintaining quality data, managing data and privacy regulations, and centralizing data/removing silos as some of their top challenges to executing a data-driven strategy.
The right platform, designed to streamline campaign workflows, increase interoperability, and expedite the process of collecting, organizing, storing, and activating on consumer data (while maintaining privacy compliance), can give marketers a considerable competitive advantage over their peers in terms of being able to achieve personalization at scale, and thus more effectively capture consumer attention.
At the same time, personalization doesn’t just mean tailoring the creative and media placement to the individual, but also to the context. “Our job as brands and advertisers is to try and make sure we are relevant to whatever environment consumers are in and that whatever content we serve them is interesting to them, or at least makes them pause,” says Johnson.
To achieve this, advertisers must plan around the environment and experience of each platform they advertise on. For example, tapping into popular trends and relevant influencers are effective ways to capture audience attention on TikTok, while digital out-of-home is well-suited for capitalizing on context and leveraging dynamic, showstopping creative. Marketing teams must use these insights to tailor bespoke ads for the platforms they run on, as study after study confirms that this draws more attention from viewers than generic ads.
At the same time, advertisers should be sure to maintain a level of cohesion across platforms—different, tailored ads within the same campaign have a higher impact on brand equity than using the same ads across platforms, or employing separate campaigns on separate platforms.
Advertisers can also capture attention by personalizing content to specific moments—for instance, by tapping into trends on social media.
Brands can use social media trends to their advantage, leaning into pop culture moments and trending audio to participate in the conversations their audiences are having in real time. To do so, they need to be able to move quickly, prioritizing the “messy realness” that characterizes these digital spaces rather than investing in high-end video production. This kind of agility can benefit advertisers beyond social media as well, adding a heightened level of relevance and personalization to advertisements on channels like DOOH.
To achieve this level of agility, leaders should embrace tools that streamline operations and reduce the complexity of working across channels and platforms. Advertising automation, which eliminates manual labor and streamlines workflows throughout the campaign journey, can make it easier for marketing teams to swiftly capitalize on cultural moments. Reporting tools that offer a holistic view of performance can also enhance agility, allowing marketers to assess cross-channel campaign performance in real-time and make in-flight changes if/when necessary.
Speaking of measurement…
Naturally, advertisers seeking to capture attention are interested in how effectively they’re doing so across platforms, formats, and creative placements.
Attention metrics have been characterized as an evolution of viewability—telling advertisers not just whether an ad placement is viewable, but whether consumers are paying attention to it. There are a variety of use cases, from supporting always-on measurement to inform in-flight campaign adjustments and optimizations to helping advertisers better understand which platforms and placements best capture audience attention.
These metrics have captured advertisers’ attention in recent years: 47% of advertisers reported they’d be significantly or somewhat more focused on attention metrics in 2024, up from 36% from 2023, and adoption should continue to rise in 2025.
However, like many measurement solutions, attention metrics are imperfect. A big factor here is the lack of standardization: With each provider offering different metrics, gaining a holistic view of measurement across campaigns can be difficult. Some providers use biometric signals to assess attention, which comes with privacy and compliance concerns. And while attention metrics can provide valuable data around consumer interaction with ads, they still can’t tell advertisers much about those consumers’ motivations or sentiments around those ads—in other words, just because someone interacted with an ad doesn’t mean they feel positively about it, or that they are interacting with it in a positive way.
Given these and other challenges, the jury is out on what place attention metrics will ultimately take in advertisers’ toolkits—or if they will even find a permanent home there. “I can’t tell if attention metrics are here to stay, or if they’re something new that the industry is excited about now but may fade out of relevance in the coming years,” says Johnson. “Until the industry finds a way to standardize it, it’s not going to scale.”
Ultimately, Johnson notes, it’s worth testing and experimenting with attention metrics—especially for brands and campaigns focused on upper-funnel objectives like awareness and consideration—as we know there is a strong correlation between attention and business outcomes. But it’s not currently a “need to have” measurement solution for all agencies and brands. Though perhaps imperfect, marketing teams can always leverage all the other data they’re used to looking at (ex. reach, frequency, etc.) to infer how effective their ads are at capturing attention.
Finally, it’s important that marketers consider audience attention not just in context of specific ad placements, but in terms of their broader marketing strategy. Campaigns that leverage multiple platforms and channels tend to perform better together than separately: According to Kantar, brand impact increases by 234% when the same budget is spent across five channels rather than just one. As such, Johnson notes, there’s a benefit to considering not just the attention garnered by one ad placement, but the breadth of attention across multiple platforms and channels over a longer time frame.
“Do all your ad impressions need to be in the highest attention environment? No—there’s a balance,” says Johnson. “There’s value in display and search ads, where maybe people are catching the logo subconsciously, and that helps with the brand recognition. Then, placements in more high attention environments like social media and CTV can complement that subconscious brand recognition with more direct appeals to attention.”
Enabling this kind of omnichannel approach goes back to an agency or marketing teams’ tech stack. Just like achieving personalization at scale requires tools that allow marketers the time they need to personalize content across channels, so too does effective omnichannel advertising. Managing media placements across a variety of channels and platforms puts considerable strain on teams unless they have software that streamlines the process—for example, a platform that unifies campaigns across channels so that marketers don’t have to waste time toggling between seven or more different platforms.
The complexity of capturing audience attention today mirrors the saturated and fractured digital landscape in which modern advertisers work. However, gaining a competitive edge when it comes to attention—which in turn leads to a competitive edge in terms of revenue and business growth—boils down to a few key strategic approaches:
By investing in the tools and solutions that give teams the agility they need to achieve personalization and omnichannel activation, advertisers can win in this new era of attention.
