Sample frameDay 254·Marketing · Attention

Every impression you bought last month was delivered. How many of them were looked at is a different number entirely.

Marketing.

The Attention Threshold

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The question

Take the cheapest line on your media plan — the one whose cost per thousand made the whole schedule affordable — and tell me how many seconds of a real person's eyes each of those thousand impressions actually bought: not how many were served, not how many cleared a viewability threshold, how many were looked at. Almost nobody holds that number. It's the one that decides whether the line was cheap or merely low-priced.

The idea

Karen Nelson-Field was Professor of Media Innovation at the University of Adelaide, and the founder of Amplified Intelligence, when Palgrave Macmillan published her book The Attention Economy and How Media Works in 2020. Her method was to stop asking whether an ad had been delivered and start watching whether anybody looked at it: facial detection and eye-tracking on people's own devices, with every second of an exposure sorted into three states. Active attention means eyes on the ad. Passive attention means the ad's in view while the eyes are somewhere else. Non-attention means they aren't on the screen at all. What she reported is that active attention seconds move with short-term sales response, and that the seconds themselves vary by platform and by format by multiples, because the drivers are largely physical: how much of the screen the ad occupies, and how long it stays there. Now set that beside the industry's own definition of a viewable impression — the Media Rating Council counts one when half the pixels are in view for a single continuous second, two seconds for video. An impression can be delivered, viewable, reported and paid for while carrying no active attention whatsoever. Cost per thousand prices the delivery. It has never priced the looking, which is why the cheapest line on a media plan is so often the dearest thing on it.

The framework

01
Delivered, viewable, looked at — three different events.
Your reporting collapses these into one story, and they aren't one story. Delivered means the ad was served. Viewable means half its pixels sat on a screen for a second, which is a threshold the industry wrote together, advertisers and agencies included, and it certifies an opportunity to see rather than a look. Looked at means somebody's eyes were on it, and that's the only one of the three with a sales response attached. So go through your last media report and mark which of the three each number is genuinely measuring. Most reports measure the first two and then quietly draw conclusions about the third.
02
Coverage and time on screen — the two dials that aren't creative.
Attention turns out to be more physical than clever. How much of the screen the ad occupies, and how long it stays on that screen, do a great deal of the work, which is why the same film delivers different seconds in a full-screen unit than it does in a small tile inside a fast-moving feed. That's a buying decision rather than a creative one, and it gets made by people who weren't in the creative conversation. Before anyone rewrites the ad, list every format you're currently buying and mark both dials against each. The cheap formats are usually cheap on both.
03
Price a second, not a thousand.
Cost per thousand asks what the delivery cost. The question underneath it is what a second of somebody's attention cost, and you can build a crude version of that today: take each line's cost per thousand, apply the best estimate you can find for the active seconds that format tends to deliver, and divide. Rough is fine, because you're ranking lines rather than auditing them, and you should write down where each estimate came from. What comes back tends to reorder the plan, because a low price on something nobody looks at was never a low price.
04
Attention doesn't replace reach — it prices it.
This is where the idea gets misused. Day 43's argument still holds: brands grow by being thought of by more buyers, so a plan that buys deep attention from a small group has solved a different problem, and overpaying for seconds you didn't need is the same waste running the other way. Read attention as a quality adjustment on reach, not a substitute for it. The question was never which line scores highest. It's how many buyers you can reach at a level of attention that does something, for the money you actually hold.

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