Attention Please!

As AI floods the content marketplace, brands are no longer competing only for visibility—they’re aiming for the one commodity that truly matters: consumer attention

Brinda Agrawal, Chief Marketing Officer, Ultra Media & Entertainment Group, says brands are increasingly rewarding quality of engagement over sheer exposure. She adds, “Views and impressions tell us how far a campaign travelled, but not necessarily whether it resonated. Today, I pay closer attention to engagement quality metrics such as watch time, completion rates, shares, saves and audience retention. Ultimately, we connect these signals back to business outcomes.”

Every day, consumers scroll past thousands of posts, swipe through AI-generated videos, skip ads in seconds and increasingly ask questions to AI assistants instead of search engines. In a media environment where content is cheaper to produce than ever before, visibility is no longer the challenge. Holding someone’s attention is. That shift is forcing advertisers to rethink one of marketing’s oldest measures of success. Reach and impressions may still tell brands how many people had the opportunity to see a message, but they reveal little about whether anyone actually noticed it, stayed with it or remembered it. Increasingly, agencies and marketers are turning to attention as the metric that separates exposure from effectiveness.

The industry’s thoughts are also evolving beyond viewing attention as a replacement for traditional metrics. According to Kantar, the real objective is attentive reach—combining scale with meaningful engagement rather than optimising for one at the expense of the other.

Soumya Mohanty, MD & Chief Solutions Officer, South Asia, Kantar, says, “Reach tells us whether an ad was seen. Attention tells us whether it made an impression. While attention is increasingly proving to be a stronger predictor of campaign effectiveness, it should not be viewed as a replacement for traditional metrics such as reach and impressions. The most successful campaigns optimise for attentive reach, combining scale with meaningful audience engagement.”

At the forefront of this recalibration is PHD India, which has made attention planning central to its communication models. Instead of treating attention as a reporting key performance indicator (KPI), the agency uses it as a planning input, mapping the minimum number of attentive seconds required for each stage of a brand’s journey. The process blends behavioural science with media strategy to identify not only which platforms deliver attention, but why.

PHD’s Omni Studio, a proprietary tool within Omnicom’s Omni platform, applies these insights across channels to calculate attention-adjusted reach and eliminate inattentive wastage. The approach reframes impressions as measurable moments of focus rather than simple delivery metrics.

Monaz Todywalla, CEO, PHD India, says, “Our methodology focuses on optimising across mediums, channels, platforms, formats, and lengths to increase attention-adjusted reach and decrease inattentive wastage. The depth of these capabilities is built and fully integrated within Omni Studio, our proprietary planning tool housed within Omnicom’s Omni platform. It allows us to apply attention planning intelligence across markets and channels–ensuring that every impression is not just visible, but valuable.”

She adds that attention metrics introduce greater rigour into investment decisions. “It helps us move from intuition-led to evidence-led media investment. Traditionally, premium inventory commanded value based on assumed visibility. Attention data, however, allows us to interrogate the full ecosystem. This often reveals underutilised placements—the whitespaces where attention is high, but competition is low. Mapping attention hotspots allows us to identify those undervalued spaces where consumer attention is disproportionately strong, ensuring placements deliver not just visibility, but real value,” Todywalla explains.

The conversation has become even more relevant as AI dramatically lowers the cost of producing content. Brands are no longer competing only with each other but with an endless stream of creator videos, personalised recommendations and algorithmically generated posts that are all vying for the same few seconds of consumer focus.

Mohanty believes AI itself isn’t the problem. “AI has fundamentally changed content creation by making it faster, cheaper and more accessible. While this has democratised content production, it has also increased the volume of content competing for consumers’ attention. The brands that will succeed are not those that simply create more content, but those that create more meaningful content.”

Dentsu has built a research-led framework around the economics of attention. Through multi-year studies involving thousands of participants, the agency has analysed how gaze, emotion and environment influence brand memory. Creative quality emerged as a primary driver of attention, while dwell time proved significantly more predictive of brand recall than traditional view-through rates.

Sujeet Behra, President, Carat and Chief Strategy Officer, Dentsu Media, says, “Globally, the industry is moving from ‘was it seen’ to ‘was it truly engaging’—and attention is becoming the connective metric between the two. At Dentsu, our Attention Lab brings together neuroscience, AI and behavioural analytics, using tools like EEG, facial coding and eye-tracking, to understand not just exposure, but genuine emotional engagement. This has shaped metrics such as Attention Per Mille (APM) and Attentive CPM (aCPM), giving brands a more precise read on media value than reach or impressions alone. As attention measurement matures worldwide, we’re seeing clients everywhere shift toward attention-first reporting, prioritising creative quality and dwell time as real indicators of effectiveness.”

Publicis is linking attention to brand lift and sales outcomes through its identity-driven data infrastructure. The agency argues that measurement has evolved from exposure to experience. Its multi-layered attention framework blends content intelligence, emotional analytics and outcome modelling.

Through its Connected ID infrastructure, Publicis maps privacy-safe engagement signals that reflect attention patterns across channels. The company is also piloting artificial intelligence (AI)-based creative diagnostics to assess which content elements sustain or reduce audience focus.

Anupriya Acharya, CEO, Publicis Groupe, South Asia, says, “At Publicis, we’re combining first-party data signals with content and attention analytics to link exposure directly to engagement and eventual action. Neuromarketing tools like EEGs or facial coding remain niche, but when fused with AI-driven insights on context and emotion, they can start revealing why people pay attention—not just if they do. Attention now sits at the intersection of visibility, relevance, and memory. It’s not about whether something was seen—it’s about whether it was absorbed and acted upon. We’re using content intelligence models within Marcel to analyse tonality, emotion, pacing, and visual hierarchy—all of which drive sustained attention. By tying these insights back to identity-based engagement signals from audience data, we can measure attention not just as a media outcome, but as a precursor to brand lift and sales impact.”

She further adds, “We partner across a suite of global and regional players to assess attention through visual, contextual, and behavioural lenses. Emotional attention isn’t yet scaled, but through our Connected ID infrastructure, we can track persistent, privacy-safe engagement signals that mirror attention patterns across channels. We’re also piloting AI-driven creative diagnostics that identify which content elements—imagery, motion, narrative flow—sustain or drop attention, enabling continuous creative optimisation.”

Independent agencies are translating attention into creative diagnostics and contextual relevance. Grapes Worldwide uses AI-based eye-tracking and heatmapping tools to identify which visuals and narrative moments retain or lose focus. Instead of analysing only drop-off rates, the agency studies ‘drop-out seconds’ to pinpoint when disengagement occurs. Sentiment analysis, voice tone mapping and facial coding are used in pre-testing to assess emotional response.

Shradha Agarwal, Co-founder and Global CEO, Grapes Worldwide, says, “The definition of ad effectiveness has evolved far beyond views and clicks; these parameters are merely limited to hygiene metrics nowadays. What truly matters now is impact, not just impression. At Grapes Worldwide, we focus on the attention quality through metrics such as View Through Rate (VTR), Drop-Out Seconds, and Engagement Depth. These metrics don’t just tell us whether someone watched an ad, but reveal how deeply they stayed with it and at what creative moment we lost them.”

She adds, “There are new tools in the market that are helping us with AI-based heatmapping and eye-tracking tools to analyse where users’ eyes linger, what visuals hold attention, and what gets skipped. This helps refine both design hierarchy and storytelling flow. For emotional attention, we rely on sentiment analysis, facial coding, and voice tone mapping during pre-testing to decode how audiences feel while consuming a piece of content.”

At TheSmallBigIdea, attention forms part of its proprietary R.E.A.C.H framework—Resonance, Engagement, Attention, Conversion and Hype—linking storytelling with performance metrics. The framework positions attention not as an isolated measure, but as a precursor to recall, action and sharing.

Manish Solanki, COO and Co-founder, TheSmallBigIdea, says, “Clients are now asking, ‘But did people actually engage?’ Especially in sectors like auto, BFSI, FMCG, and consumer tech, where recall and consideration drive real results, the focus has shifted. It’s no longer enough to show how many people saw the ad; we’re now breaking down which formats spark interaction, which platforms drive deeper engagement, and which creatives lead to action. The conversation has evolved from ‘How far did it go?’ to ‘What did people actually do with it?’”

Similarly, SW Network integrates attention diagnostics across planning through AI-led creative analysis and heatmap-based tracking. Metrics such as view-through rates, scroll depth and time spent per session function as leading indicators of campaign health.

Shlok Hari, Business Head – SW Network – Growth Labs says, “Various tech exists in the market, and what we use evolves based on the kind of brand we are working with—Requirements vary between legacy & new age brands. Among the technologies we use are AI-led creative analysis tools that assess every element of a creative and its impact. This can vary from logo placement to colours to text placement to the use of faces, etc. Then, Eye-level analytics through webcam access, wherever possible, helps track where users pay the most attention and what they are more inclined to consume. We also use in-depth heat-map analysis of content-based consumption.”

As AI-generated content floods digital platforms, technology providers are also shifting their focus from enabling faster content production to helping brands create work that genuinely earns consumer attention. The emphasis, increasingly, is on quality of engagement rather than the sheer volume of content.

Rishabh Sagar, CEO and Co-Founder, CRAON, says, “In an increasingly crowded, AI-driven content environment, attention is the ultimate metric—not just reach or impressions. Brands are looking beyond producing more content to creating high-impact video creatives that hold consumer attention and drive real business outcomes.”

Brands are also recalibrating measurement frameworks. Luminous Power Technologies prioritises attention time and emotional engagement as indicators of business impact. Its Indian Premier League (IPL) campaigns track watch-time and completion rates, supported by a live Command Centre monitoring conversation sentiment.

Neelima Burra, SVP – Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer and Business Head of Omnichannel Retail and International Business, Luminous Power Technologies, says, “With our IPL films, we looked beyond view counts to analyse watch-time and completion rates to gauge true content absorption. More importantly, our IPL Command Centre was instrumental in moving beyond clicks to measure real-time Conversation Engagement in terms of tracking shares, meaningful comments, and sentiment. This allowed us to see not just if people saw our ‘Solar Expert’ message, but if they understood, believed, and were motivated by it. We’ve found that paying a premium for placements and creatives that drive these deeper metrics is not an extra cost; it’s an investment. High attention and positive emotional resonance are what ultimately cement brand memory, build trust in a considered purchase like solar power, and drive action, which for us is a visit to our website or a missed call to our number. It’s the difference between being seen and being remembered.”

Rapido integrates attention metrics across creative and distribution, analysing engagement rates, completion rates and retention time across formats, including Instagram Reels.
Pawandip Singh, Vice President, Marketing, Rapido, says, “At Rapido, we look at ad effectiveness holistically; reach and impressions matter, but they’re just the start.

We evaluate performance across engagement metrics, including ER%, completion rates, and retention time, along with qualitative indicators such as attention and emotional connect.
Some of our best-performing Instagram Reels, such as ‘The first of the month’ and ‘Location pe aa jao’, have seen completion rates upwards of 40 per cent, not because they were heavily boosted, but because they struck a relatable chord. Our approach blends creativity with distribution; we don’t view them in silos. Whether it’s user-generated content, offline activations, or CLM-led campaigns, every channel is part of one ecosystem. The goal is to ensure that the right story lands with the right audience, in a way that moves both perception and business.”
Finolex Cables has similarly focused on emotional storytelling to sustain attention. Its campaign ‘No Stress. Finolex’ was structured to drive warmth and relatability, with measurement frameworks extending beyond reach to completion rates and recall uplift.

Amit Mathur, President – Sales & Marketing, Finolex Cables Ltd, says, “For us, effectiveness now goes beyond visibility—it’s about how long the viewer stays engaged and what they take away emotionally. Our ‘No Stress. Finolex’ campaign was built on the insight that attention is earned through genuine connection, not just exposure. So, instead of only tracking reach and impressions, we measure metrics like completion rates, replays, and emotional resonance. When an ad evokes warmth, nostalgia, or relatability, it naturally holds attention longer. That sustained engagement has proven to deliver stronger recall and intent, making emotional connection and attention time key indicators of campaign success.”

Vaishal Dalal points to attentive seconds and memory encoding as emerging standards.

Vaishal Dalal, Co-Founder & Director, Excellent Publicity, says, “The most important new metric is attention time, the number of seconds a viewer’s gaze stays fixed on an ad, also known as attentive seconds. Research shows that while many ads meet technical ‘viewability’ standards, most are never truly looked at, leading agencies to prioritise actual eyes-on-screen time. In addition to attention time, metrics such as brand recall lift, emotional engagement, and memory encoding are becoming key indicators of ad effectiveness. Agencies are using post-campaign surveys and neuroscience-based methods to measure emotional resonance and the depth of brand memory formed.”

Bilal Ansari, Data Strategy Specialist, OML, outlines how brand lift studies and recall campaigns are being used to validate memory impact. He says, “To better understand whether our target audiences are remembering the ads we run for our clients, we run Brand Lift Studies (BLS) on Meta. In situations where budgets for the campaign don’t meet the minimum spending criterion for running a BLS, we instead run Ad Recall Lift campaigns. Some of the tools & technologies we use are built in-house as well as an array of external tools like Brandwatch & Talkwalker (Social Listening), Tubular (Video Intelligence), GlobalWebIndex (Consumer Intelligence), and solutions that help with comment analysis.”

Ansari further adds, “With the help of these tools & technologies, we can look beyond the regular metrics, and focus on other avenues of attention as a metric such as Comment & Sentiment Analysis, Shares & Saves as deeper engagement metrics, Reminder Ads for live content, and of course, all of it layered with rigorous A/B Testing to ensure that we make the best possible decisions for our clients.”

CAN ATTENTION THRIVE ON ITS OWN?
Yet attention itself is not without limitations. Industry experts caution against treating it as another standalone KPI. Mohanty adds, “As attention becomes a more widely adopted metric, marketers need to be careful not to repeat some of the mistakes the industry made with viewability. Attention is a valuable indicator of exposure quality, but on its own, it does not guarantee brand growth or sales impact.”

Across agencies and brands, attention is steadily moving from an optimisation metric to a strategic planning tool. The debate is no longer whether reach matters, but how much of that reach actually translates into meaningful engagement, memory and action. While industry-wide standards are still evolving, advertisers are increasingly recognising that media effectiveness cannot be judged by exposure alone. In an ecosystem flooded with AI-generated content, creator videos and algorithm-driven recommendations, attention has become advertising’s scarcest resource—and perhaps its most valuable currency.