The true cost of advertising attention

Mike Follett

New cross media attention research attempts to show how much more visual engagement ads in one media generate than another, and if this extra attention is reflected in the price advertisers pay.

New research in marketing

This article is part of a series of articles from the WARC Guide to new research in marketing. Read more.

‘Unseen is unsold’: so goes the famous marketing maxim. We all have an intuition that ads can’t work unless they get at least some attention. Attention is the ‘active ingredient’ in advertising.

We also all have an intuition that different media deliver different levels of attention: a thousand 30-second TV ads probably generate more attention than a thousand desktop banner ads, and consequently cost a lot more on a ‘cost per thousand’ (‘CPM’) basis. ...

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