Attention Is the New Currency
Author: Simon Kingsnorth
26 August 2026
In this article, I want to give you something more useful than another argument for spending more on creative — I want to make the case for why the way most organisations are currently buying attention is structurally broken, and what the evidence tells us about the approaches that actually work.
The gap between what brands is spending on paid media and what audiences are genuinely absorbing has never been wider. Understanding why that gap exists — and what to do about it — is one of the most commercially consequential questions a marketing leader can answer in 2026.
Why has winning attention become harder than winning the sale?
The concept of an attention economy is not new. Economists were writing about it in the 1990s, when the internet first made it clear that human attention was a finite resource being competed for by an expanding universe of content. But the conditions that existed then bear almost no resemblance to the environment brands are operating in today.
The volume of content competing for any individual’s focus has grown exponentially, while the average time spent evaluating any single piece of that content has compressed dramatically. On social platforms, users now decide in under three seconds whether to stop scrolling or continue past a piece of content. That decision is made on the basis of a small set of visual and contextual signals: the first frame of a video, the opening line of copy, a thumbnail, the perceived relevance of the format to where they are and what they are doing.
Meanwhile, media multitasking has become the norm rather than the exception. An overwhelming majority of media consumers, across all generations including almost two-thirds of baby boomers, now routinely browse the internet or apps while watching TV. Americans spend, on average, roughly 13 hours a day engaging with media. That is not 13 hours of focused attention. That is 13 hours of fragmented, divided, context-switching engagement, in which any individual piece of advertising content competes not just with other ads but with notifications, messages, streaming content, news feeds and every other claim on the same person’s bandwidth.
The result is what I would describe as a permanent attention deficit environment. And the brands that have not yet reckoned with what that means for their creative and media strategy are, in many cases, funding the proof of that problem through their own performance dashboards.
What does the data actually tell us about ad attention in 2025 and 2026?
The numbers are sobering, and they are worth sitting with rather than glossing over.
Kantar’s Media Reactions research shows a notable decline in ad engagement on social platforms, with only 31% of people globally saying social media ads capture their attention, down from 43% the previous year. That is not a rounding error or a data artefact. That is a structural shift in how audiences relate to paid advertising on the platforms where most marketing budgets are concentrated.
Research from Amplified Intelligence reveals that around 85% of online ads fail to pass the 2.5-second attention-memory threshold — the critical point at which a brand starts to embed itself in a person’s memory. In practical terms, that means the overwhelming majority of digital advertising spend is generating impressions without generating recall. The ads are technically being served. They are not actually being absorbed.
Dentsu’s Attention Economy study demonstrates that even a modest 5% increase in attention can lead to a 40% boost in in-market ad awareness, and that at least 9 seconds of attention are needed to impact brand consideration, with 8 seconds required to influence purchase intent. Those thresholds — 5%, 8 seconds, 9 seconds — are not arbitrary benchmarks. They represent the minimum viable engagement that makes advertising expenditure worth having.
Across attention-powered campaigns in 2025, advertisers who used attention metrics to inform their media planning saw an average 33% lift in upper-funnel KPIs and a 53% increase in lower-funnel impact. That is the commercial case for taking attention seriously, not as a philosophical point about the nature of modern media, but as a measurable performance differentiator.
For context, ad blocking adoption has reached 32.2% of Americans and 31.5% of global internet users. A third of your potential audience has actively installed technology to ensure they never see your ads at all. The attention crisis is not just about disengagement. It is about a growing portion of the addressable market that has opted out of interruptive advertising altogether.
Why are impressions and viewability the wrong things to measure?
This is the question that sits at the heart of the attention economy conversation, and it is one that the advertising industry has been slow to answer honestly because the alternative requires more effort and more nuance than simply reporting served impressions.
Viewability — the metric that tells you whether an ad was technically visible on a user’s screen — has been the industry’s primary quality signal for over a decade. The standard definition requires only that 50% of an ad’s pixels be in view for at least one second. By that definition, an ad can be classified as viewable even if no human being consciously registered that it existed.
Attention metrics go further, capturing how long someone actually looks at an ad, whether they interact with it, and how much screen space it occupies relative to the content around it. These insights help marketers understand what genuinely works, especially in a cookieless environment where third-party tracking signals are increasingly unavailable.
Research from Teads and Dentsu found that attention is three times better at predicting marketing outcomes than viewability alone, and that some traditional drivers of viewability — such as large format size and prominent page position — can actually have a negative impact on attention levels. The implication is significant. Optimising for viewability may actively work against attention, because the formats and placements that score highest on viewability metrics are often the ones that users have learned to ignore most effectively.
The IAB and the Media Rating Council released formal Attention Measurement Guidelines in November 2025 — the first industry-wide standard for attention measurement — which define attention as a complementary signal rather than a replacement for CTR, viewability or conversion metrics. That framing is important. The case is not that impressions and viewability should be discarded. It is that they should be supplemented with attention data that tells you whether the impressions you are buying are actually doing anything.
What is the 2.5-second threshold and why does it matter for your budget?
The 2.5-second attention-memory threshold deserves more detailed treatment, because it is the number that most directly translates the attention economy into budget decisions.
The research from Amplified Intelligence, which has conducted some of the most rigorous empirical work in this space, identifies 2.5 seconds of active attention as the minimum exposure duration needed for a brand to begin embedding itself in a viewer’s memory. Below that threshold, the impression is technically recorded but functionally wasted — the audience does not retain any association between the creative and the brand.
Given that 85% of online ads fall below this threshold, the practical implication for any marketing leader is uncomfortable to quantify but important to face. If you are spending a significant portion of your digital advertising budget on social media placements and you have not examined your creative and placement decisions through an attention lens, there is a reasonable probability that a substantial share of that expenditure is generating no brand-building value at all.
Facebook’s own data shows that advertisers who optimise their creative for the first three seconds see a 23% lower cost per acquisition. That improvement does not require a larger budget. It requires a different creative brief — one that treats the first three seconds as the most important three seconds of the entire campaign, rather than as an introductory preamble before the message arrives.
The corollary is equally important. Influencer reels under 20 seconds receive significantly more likes and shares, but only 12% of users remember the brand featured. Engagement and attention are not the same thing. An ad can generate impressive engagement metrics — likes, shares, views — while failing entirely at the task of building brand recall or purchase intent. Separating these two things is one of the more important analytical disciplines a marketing team can develop.
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How does the attention economy affect technology and financial services marketing specifically?
The attention challenge is acute for every sector, but it has particular characteristics in technology and financial services that are worth understanding clearly.
Both sectors involve complex products with long buying cycles and multiple stakeholders. Forrester and 6sense data shows that the median B2B buying group for deals over £50,000 now involves 11.2 people, up from 9.7 the previous year, with enterprise sales cycles averaging 218 days. Across that journey, a brand needs to earn and sustain the attention of multiple individuals at different stages of consideration — not just generate a single impression event.
That dynamic makes the attention-memory threshold even more consequential. If a financial services brand’s advertising fails to pass the 2.5-second threshold with a CFO who encounters it early in the evaluation process, there may be no recovery opportunity. The next time that CFO encounters the brand’s name — in a proposal, a recommendation, a peer conversation — there will be no residual memory trace from earlier advertising exposure to draw on.
For B2B sectors where buying cycles are increasingly lengthy, tools like webinars, detailed articles and educational videos are becoming essential for keeping potential clients engaged, nurturing long-term brand recall and sustaining presence throughout extended sales funnels. This is not simply a content marketing observation. It reflects the fundamental mismatch between the way social advertising is typically bought — optimised for short-term cost-per-click efficiency — and the way B2B buying decisions are actually made, which involves sustained exposure over months.
Research from Brunswick Group shows that 75% of professionals now use secondary social media platforms alongside LinkedIn as part of their research and evaluation process, meaning professional attention has fragmented across multiple environments. A strategy that concentrates entirely on LinkedIn, however well-executed, is now by definition missing a meaningful portion of the attention journey that professional buyers undertake.
What creative approaches actually stop the scroll?
The evidence on what works is more consistent than the proliferation of creative theories in marketing would suggest. The fundamentals of scroll-stopping creative come down to a relatively small set of principles, each grounded in research rather than instinct.
The first is speed of value delivery. The creative must communicate something worth the viewer’s attention within the first two to three seconds. That is not a hook in the clickbait sense — it is a genuine signal of relevance. For a technology or financial services brand, that might be a specific, named problem the audience recognises. It might be a counterintuitive insight. It might be a piece of data that challenges a common assumption. What it cannot be is a generic brand opener that delays the actual message until the viewer has already scrolled past.
The second is human presence. Images and video featuring faces consistently capture attention more effectively than product shots or abstract visuals, because humans are hard-wired to direct their gaze towards other people. In a B2B context, this translates to a preference for founder-led content, case study narratives with named individuals, and creative that features recognisable people rather than stock imagery.
The third is contextual relevance. Research comparing contextual ads to traditional video and display formats found that contextual ads attracted 87% more viewable time, with average view duration of 3.2 seconds — the highest of any format tested. Attention span for contextual ads was 37% higher than for video or display, and engagement was approximately three times greater. The implication for financial services and technology firms is that placement strategy is not a media buying afterthought. It is a creative decision with direct attention consequences.
The fourth is creative differentiation. Nearly two-thirds of marketing leaders say they need more distinctive, human-centred content to stand out in an increasingly automated landscape. With AI now capable of producing large volumes of competent, generic creative at low cost, the attention premium has shifted decisively towards work that is clearly human, specific and original. The brands that are winning attention are not the ones producing the most content. They are the ones producing the most distinctively recognisable content.
How does context affect attention, and why does placement still matter?
The relationship between context and attention is one of the most robust findings in advertising research, and it is one that media buying practices have historically underserved.
The intuition is straightforward: people pay more attention to advertising when it appears in an environment that matches their current mindset and intent. A financial services ad appearing alongside editorial content about investment strategy reaches someone who is already in a financially engaged frame of mind. The same ad appearing in an entertainment feed competes with entirely different cognitive priorities.
McKinsey’s research into the attention equation identifies resonance — the degree to which an ad matches the focus and intent of the context in which it appears — as a key multiplier of attention effectiveness, over and above the intrinsic quality of the creative itself. An ad that is strong in isolation becomes significantly more effective when it appears in a context that reinforces rather than contradicts its message.
This has direct implications for how technology and financial services firms should think about media planning. Premium publisher environments, industry publications and high-intent content contexts — even when they carry higher CPMs than broad social inventory — consistently deliver higher attention quality. The relevant metric is not cost per impression but cost per attentive impression: how much are you paying for exposures that actually register?
The rise of connected television, podcasts and newsletter advertising in B2B contexts reflects this dynamic in practice. These environments command a level of deliberate, chosen attention from their audiences that social feed formats rarely achieve. For a brand trying to reach senior decision-makers in technology or financial services, the environment in which the message appears is at least as important as the message itself.
What role does influencer and creator content play in earning attention?
The creator economy has emerged as one of the more reliable routes to genuine attention, precisely because it side-steps the contextual mismatch that makes much paid advertising ineffective.
When a credible voice within a relevant community presents a brand’s message in their own idiom, it does not interrupt the viewer’s attention. It flows within it. The audience has chosen to spend time with that creator. The endorsement or integration arrives within a relationship of existing trust.
Over half of marketers already use influencer marketing to build brand awareness, increase credibility and drive revenue, and 76% of all users say social media has influenced a purchase in the last six months. Those numbers reflect a commercial reality: creator-led content is reaching and influencing audiences in ways that traditional paid formats are increasingly struggling to replicate.
The important nuance for B2B technology and financial services is that scale is not the defining variable in creator selection. A macro-influencer with a million followers in a general finance category delivers far less attention value to a specific professional audience than a respected analyst, practitioner or commentator with 20,000 highly engaged followers in the relevant sector. The attention you are buying in the latter case is qualitatively different — more deliberate, more relevant, and more likely to persist beyond the viewing moment.
Short-form video delivers the highest ROI of any video format at 41%, and 94% of organisations say influencer marketing outperforms traditional digital advertising. For brands that have not yet explored creator partnerships as part of their attention strategy, those numbers represent a meaningful argument for reallocation.
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How should you measure attention rather than just impressions?
The measurement landscape for attention has matured significantly over the past 18 months, and the tools now available make it practically feasible for brands of all sizes to move beyond impression-based reporting.
The starting point is understanding what attention measurement actually captures. The most rigorous methods involve active time in view — measuring only the seconds during which a user is genuinely engaged with an ad on an active browser tab or screen — combined with signals like scroll depth, interaction rate, and in some cases biometric data from panel-based studies using eye-tracking technology.
The IAB and MRC’s November 2025 Attention Measurement Guidelines define attention as a complementary layer alongside existing delivery metrics. For brand campaigns, attention data improves the prediction of recall and brand lift. For performance campaigns, CTR and CPA remain the primary signals. The practical approach is to use attention data to audit and improve your creative and placement decisions, rather than replacing your existing measurement framework wholesale.
The tools worth knowing about in 2026 include Adelaide’s AU metric, which has published outcomes data across 60 real-world campaigns and 16 industries. Lumen Research uses panel-based eye-tracking to measure genuine visual attention. Peer39’s Attention Index provides pre-campaign placement quality scoring. And HubSpot’s AEO tools, Semrush and Profound all now offer brand citation tracking across AI answer engines, which is becoming an important dimension of attention measurement as AI-referred traffic grows.
Adelaide’s 2026 Outcomes Guide, covering 60 campaigns across 16 industries, showed that brands using attention metrics in their media planning achieved a 33% average lift in brand KPIs and 53% stronger lower-funnel impact. For financial services specifically, the data showed a 97% lift in unaided awareness for campaigns optimised through attention data. That last figure is particularly striking. Unaided awareness — the ability of a consumer to recall a brand without prompting — is one of the most direct measures of whether advertising is actually working. A 97% lift represents a transformative outcome, not an incremental one.
What does an attention-first media strategy look like in practice?
An attention-first strategy does not require a complete rebuild of your media plan. It requires a reorientation of the criteria you use to evaluate and prioritise your media choices — and a willingness to measure creative performance through an attention lens rather than just an engagement one.
The practical components are as follows.
Creative briefing should start with the first three seconds, not end with them. Every brief should specify what the viewer will receive — in terms of value, insight or relevance — within the opening moments of the ad. If the creative team cannot answer that question clearly, the brief is not ready.
Media selection should include attention quality as an evaluation criterion alongside reach, CPM and targeting capability. That means asking platforms and publishers for attention data, and being willing to pay a premium for high-attention inventory when the audience quality justifies it.
Placement diversity should reflect the research on context. Concentrating spend in social feed formats, where attention rates are at their lowest measured levels, without complementing that spend with higher-attention environments — newsletters, podcasts, specialist publications, connected TV — is a structural inefficiency that attention data consistently exposes.
Creative testing should measure attention and recall, not just clicks and view-through rates. A creative that generates high engagement but low recall is not performing in the way its metrics suggest. Testing that separates these outcomes gives you better information for creative optimisation.
Measurement should include attention metrics alongside existing KPIs, with quarterly reviews that connect attention scores to downstream outcomes: pipeline quality, win rates, brand recall scores. The link between attention and commercial outcome is well established in the research. The organisations that will pull ahead are those that close the loop between attention data and business performance in their own campaigns.
How does attention connect to AEO and organic visibility?
The connection between attention and Answer Engine Optimisation is less obvious than the paid media discussion, but it is becoming increasingly important as AI search reshapes the organic discovery landscape.
For informative queries, the click-through rate of the first organic search result dropped from 7.3% to 2.6% between March 2024 and March 2025 — a collapse driven by AI-generated answers appearing above organic results and absorbing the attention that previously flowed to ranked pages. The competition for attention is no longer confined to the social feed or the display network. It now extends to the search results page itself, where AI overviews are capturing the engagement that organic links once received.
In this context, earning attention from AI answer engines — getting your brand cited in the responses that ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude generate for relevant queries — is an organic attention play with direct commercial consequences. B2B technology brands that have invested in authoritative content, entity optimisation and structured data are seeing 10% of their organic traffic arrive via generative engines, with more than a quarter of that traffic converting to sales-qualified leads.
The creative principles that earn attention in paid media and the content principles that earn citation in AI search are more closely aligned than they might initially appear. Both reward specificity, authority and genuine usefulness over volume and generic coverage. Both penalise content that is produced for production’s sake rather than for the audience it is supposed to serve.
For technology and financial services firms, that alignment is an opportunity. A content strategy built around proprietary insight, specific expertise and well-evidenced claims will earn attention from human audiences in paid and organic environments, and citation from AI models in answer engine environments. These are not separate strategies. They are expressions of the same underlying principle: producing work that is genuinely worth someone’s time.
Where should technology and financial services firms focus their attention strategy in 2026?
The practical priorities for 2026 are clearer than they have ever been, because the research base on attention is now deep enough to draw confident conclusions rather than working from instinct.
The first priority is auditing your current creative performance through an attention lens. How much of your paid social spend is reaching the 2.5-second threshold? Where is your creative losing the audience? What does your first-three-seconds actually deliver to a viewer encountering your brand for the first time?
The second is diversifying your media mix deliberately rather than by default. If your plan is currently concentrated in social feed formats, the attention data consistently suggests you are buying low-quality inventory by attention standards, regardless of the targeting sophistication you are applying to it. High-attention environments — specialist publications, podcasts, newsletters, connected TV, creator partnerships — deserve a more deliberate allocation.
The third is connecting attention measurement to business outcomes. The 97% uplift in unaided awareness that financial services brands achieved through attention-optimised planning is not a theoretical result. It is what happens when creative and placement decisions are made on the basis of what actually earns engagement rather than what generates impressions at the lowest possible cost.
The fourth is treating organic and paid attention as a unified strategy. AEO visibility, content authority and paid creative effectiveness all respond to the same underlying investment in quality, specificity and genuine usefulness. The brands that treat these as separate workstreams and optimise them in isolation will always be less efficient than those that build a coherent attention strategy across every channel.
At SK, we work with technology and financial services clients to develop creative strategies, paid media plans and content programmes that earn genuine attention from the audiences that matter. If your advertising is paying for impressions but not converting them into recall, consideration and pipeline, we would be glad to take a look at why — and what to do about it.
👉🏻 Ready to build an attention strategy that actually converts? Get in touch with SK today.
Summary
- Only 31% of people globally say social media ads capture their attention, down from 43% the previous year — a 12-point decline that reflects a structural shift in how audiences relate to paid advertising on social platforms.
- 85% of online ads fail to pass the 2.5-second attention-memory threshold, meaning the overwhelming majority of digital ad spend generates impressions without generating meaningful brand recall.
- A 5% increase in attention can produce a 40% boost in in-market ad awareness, according to Dentsu’s Attention Economy research — and at least 8 to 9 seconds of sustained attention are needed to influence purchase intent and brand consideration.
- Attention-optimised campaigns consistently outperform standard approaches, with Adelaide’s 2026 Outcomes Guide showing a 33% average lift in brand KPIs and 53% stronger lower-funnel impact across 60 real-world campaigns, including a 97% lift in unaided awareness for financial services brands.
- Viewability is not the same as attention. Research from Teads and Dentsu shows that attention is three times better at predicting marketing outcomes than viewability, and that some traditional viewability drivers — large format size, prominent page position — can actively reduce attention levels.
- The first three seconds are decisive. Facebook’s own data shows that optimising creative for the first three seconds reduces cost per acquisition by 23%. Every creative brief should specify what value the viewer receives within that window.
- Context directly amplifies attention. Contextual ads attract 87% more viewable time and generate three times more engagement than standard display formats. Placement is a creative decision, not just a media buying one.
- Creator and influencer content earns attention more reliably than traditional paid formats in many contexts, with 94% of organisations reporting influencer marketing outperforms standard digital advertising — particularly when matched to specific professional audiences rather than optimised for follower scale.
- Ad blocking now affects 32% of Americans and 31.5% of global internet users, meaning a third of your addressable audience has opted out of interruptive advertising formats entirely.
- AI search is compressing organic attention. The click-through rate of the first organic result dropped from 7.3% to 2.6% in a single year, as AI-generated answers capture the attention that ranked pages previously received.
- AEO and paid attention strategy share the same creative principles — specificity, authority and genuine usefulness — making a unified approach across paid and organic channels more efficient than treating them as separate workstreams.
- For technology and financial services firms, the attention priority is a practical audit of creative performance, deliberate diversification into high-attention media environments, and a measurement framework that connects attention scores to pipeline outcomes rather than stopping at impressions and viewability.
At SK, we help technology and financial services organisations build and execute marketing strategies that deliver measurable growth. From creative strategy and paid media to content marketing, SEO and AEO services, brand strategy, lead generation and performance marketing, we work with ambitious firms who want to lead in their markets.
Talk to us about your attention and advertising strategy →