Advertisers can drive brand and business outcomes from just 1.5 seconds of attention, if they utilise their distinctive brand assets correctly, according to a report from VCCP Media, in partnership with Dr Karen Nelson-Field and attention technology company Amplified.
It had previously been considered that the 85% of digital ads that receive less than 2.5 seconds of active attention were ineffective. However, the ‘Hacking the Attention Economy’ report reveals that – if creative and media are aligned, and distinctive brand assets are deployed effectively – short exposure isn’t wasted exposure.
“Brands are too often focused on the time their ad is in view, but it’s the time that it is actually viewed – active attention – that matters,” said Dr Nelson-Field. “This study is the first to prove that just 1.5 seconds of genuine attention is enough to encode memory in a real-world digital feed. The good news is, with intelligent asset deployment, you can drive outcomes even in 1.5 seconds. That’s not about doing more, it’s about doing better.”
VCCP tested digital video ads from eight brands in real social environments, both with and without their distinctive assets. Key brand cues such as colours, sounds, characters, and visual devices were removed to create ‘brand twin’ versions of each ad. The brands included O2, Cadbury, Domino’s, Old El Paso, EasyJet, Sage, Bulldog, and White Claw.
Amplified’s research platform tracked over 20,000 views of 72 digital video ads, as well as leveraging the company’s broader dataset of more than 38 billion biometric data points and 1.3 million people collected across digital environments.
This test found that legacy brands suffer most when asset fluency is weak – losing an average of 69p per £1 spent, compared to 59p for challenger brands. Overall, brands failing to effectively leverage their assets could be wasting £66 billion across the global digital ad industry each year.
The best-performing brand code in the study delivered 3.5 times return on attention-adjusted ROI compared to its unbranded counterpart. And, even in ads with very limited view time, well-branded assets were 2.5 times more effective at driving outcomes than weak ones.
“Marketers are rightly focused on media efficiency, but we’re seeing billions in creative inefficiency go unchecked,” said James Shoreland, VCCP Media CEO. “This report proves that creative and media effectiveness are two sides of the same coin – and attention is the currency which connects them. Our findings don’t just quantify the impact of integrated thinking – they point to a new paradigm for media planning and buying.”
The report also sets out five recommendations for brands looking to improve their creative effectiveness and reduce waste:
- Know your assets
- Balance meaning and memory
- Plan formats around creative and media strength
- Count the seconds and reach
- Boardroom-proof your brand
