Monique Harris, CEO, Convo Media
I’ve watched too many digital campaigns be celebrated for “performance” while quietly failing to do the one thing marketing is meant to do: connect.
The plan looks great, the metrics tick up, but the brand barely registers. Somewhere along the way, we confused measurable with meaningful, and the industry has been optimising for the wrong outcomes ever since.
As we head into 2026, it’s time to say the quiet part out loud. Clicks, reach, and impressions are not proof that content is working. They are proof that it was served.
Attention is uncomfortable
Vanity metrics are easy to scale, easy to report and easy to defend in a meeting. Attention is harder. It asks more confronting questions.
Did a real person actually stop? Did the creative make them feel something? Did they choose to lean in – swipe, watch, or explore further? And how much did context matter: appearing within trusted Australian publishing environments, versus just showing up in a random corner of the internet?
And yes, I hear you. We cannot run brand uplift studies for every campaign. But the problem is that we live and die by neat, comparable metrics even when they tell us very little about real impact.
In a world drowning in content, attention is the scarcest resource, yet it is still treated as a secondary consideration. An industry measurement overhaul might be ambitious, but there are practical shifts we can make to start closing the gap between performance and real connection.
The creative-to-conversion gap is a choice
One of the biggest failures in digital marketing is not technical. It has fast become organisational. We have separated “brand content” from “performance media” as if storytelling and conversion live in different universes.
Social teams are encouraged to experiment with narrative, emotion and hooks. Performance teams are asked to optimise for efficiency and scale.
The result is content that starts interesting and ends invisible.
Unless you break the cycle.
We recently saw this play out with an olive oil brand we worked with. Their social content was rich with storytelling: provenance, flavour, the ritual of cooking. But historically, that story stopped when they implemented the display portion of their campaign.
By carrying the same narrative cues through the entire digital journey, from social into premium publishing environments that felt like a natural extension of the content feed, engagement did not drop closer to conversion.
It increased. Time spent rose. Brand recall lifted.
People do not disengage because content appears in a different ad unit or on a different site outside their social feeds. They disengage because it no longer warrants their attention.
A/B testing has become a comfort blanket
A/B testing is meant to help us learn. Too often, it is used to avoid risk. We test button colours. Minor copy edits. Safe variations that deliver marginal gains and zero insight. It looks rigorous, but it is creatively timid. What we should be testing are better questions.
Which opening actually pulls someone in? Which format earns a pause, and in the case of the right digital format, a swipe? Which narrative makes someone want to keep going?
If your testing strategy cannot tell you why something worked, it is not testing. It is tinkering. Build content narratives that really provide insight and actionable points of difference.
Context beats content every time
Great marketing is not just about what you say. It is about when and how you say it.
December is not January. Indulgence is not reset. Passive scrolling is not active decision-making. Content that ignores context might still get served, but it will not resonate. The campaigns that genuinely perform understand the audience’s emotional and mental state, not just the segment.
A recent example came from a travel company whose digital strategy had traditionally been deal-led. The challenge was not the offer itself, but how impersonal it felt.
By incorporating simple, contextually relevant bi-lines into static creative, such as “Swap uggs for fins” when promoting reef tours to southern state markets, the brand created a more emotional and relatable connection.
Interest in visiting increased to 67 per cent. Small change,s I know, but highly relevant and delivered at the right moment.
Attention is earned, not bought
Consumers are not anti-advertising. They are anti ‘wasted my time’. They engage with content that sparks curiosity, feels relevant or offers something beyond a sales message. They tune out anything that feels lazy, interruptive or self-serving.
The brands pulling ahead are not shouting louder. They are being more intentional and not just relying on the age-old ‘evergreen’ content to fill the void.
2026 will not reward brands that produce more content. It will reward brands that produce better content. Content designed to earn attention, not just occupy space
The strongest marketers this year will stop mistaking activity for effectiveness and start asking a far more important question. Did this creative deserve a moment of someone’s time?