By Shai Luft, Co-Founder and COO at Bench Media
Every few years, our industry falls in love with a new metric. First it was clicks, then it was viewability, then came engagement and today it’s “attention.” The promise is always the same: finally, a single number that will tell us if our advertising is working, but it never plays out that way.
As marketers, we are told “attention metrics” will unlock performance, solve fragmentation, and even replace outdated proxies like impressions. The IAB is exploring guidelines, specialist groups like The Attention Council are pushing hard to codify it, and entire conferences are being staged under the banner of “ATTENTION 2025.”
But attention is not a silver bullet, and it is, in fact, just another stop on the merry-go-round of measurement fads.
The pitch is seductive. A modest lift in attention supposedly leads to big gains in brand recall and ad effectiveness and it’s the kind of clean story CMOs crave when the CFO is demanding proof of ROI. The problem is no one can even agree on what attention actually is. One vendor measures eye movements with webcams, another measures dwell time on screen, others use predictive modelling, when some even claim they can divine attention from engagement signals. When the industry needs formal guidelines to define a basic metric, you know it’s built on shaky ground. Even if we could measure it perfectly, attention doesn’t equal persuasion. Just because someone’s eyes linger on your ad doesn’t mean they’ll buy your product. If attention were all it took to engage your audience, then bad creative wouldn’t matter – and we know it does.
‘Metrics don’t save campaigns’
Advertising has a habit of chasing metric messiahs. Clicks promised performance, until we realised people click on things they never intended to buy. Viewability promised exposure, until we learned that “viewable” doesn’t mean seen and engagement promised depth, until we saw that likes and comments rarely correlated to sales. Now attention is touted as the new saviour.
But metrics don’t save campaigns – strategy and execution do.
Marketers aren’t naïve, they’re under pressure. Boards and CFOs demand clean, comparable numbers to justify spend, agencies are chasing differentiation, and ad tech companies are hungry for new revenue streams. Into this mix comes attention, a shiny new KPI promising clarity in a messy landscape, but that clarity quickly unravels if the foundation itself is flawed.
Marketers should focus on the basics that consistently drive outcomes. Channel fit matters – is the medium right for the audience and the message? Attention in the wrong place is wasted energy. Creative strength matters – a boring ad that earns “high attention” is still a boring ad. Executional excellence matters – sequencing, integration, and frequency management move the needle more than any vanity metric. The brands that grow aren’t the ones chasing the latest KPI, they’re the ones that nail their strategy and execute brilliantly across all channels.
The idea of an “attention recession” has also been widely discussed, reflecting the reality that consumers are more distracted than ever. That’s true – we’re all drowning in screens, feeds, and notifications. But if attention is in short supply, why are we treating it like the currency of the future? That’s like betting your budget on a currency that’s losing value every day.
‘Attention can’t tell you if behaviour changed’
I’m not saying attention doesn’t matter, but the reality is, it’s not enough on its own. Marketers should treat it as one of many diagnostic signals, not the holy grail.
What’s more useful is building a layered measurement framework that balances short-term and long-term outcomes: brand lift to track awareness, consideration and favourability; sales lift and incrementality testing to prove whether exposure directly drives conversions; marketing mix modelling to understand how channels work together over time; customer lifetime value to measure whether you’re acquiring and retaining the right customers; and creative effectiveness testing to make sure your message is understood and remembered.
Attention can provide context, but it can’t tell you if behaviour changed.
That’s why the questions marketers should be asking are different. Did the campaign reach the right audience in the right environment? Did it drive an uplift in brand metrics or sales outcomes? Did the creative cut through in a way that’s memorable and relevant? Can we prove it added incremental value compared to doing nothing? These are the outcomes that matter. The brands that are set for growth are the ones who stop chasing the latest metric fad and start building holistic, outcome-focused measurement frameworks. They’ll use attention data in the same way a mechanic uses a warning light – as a diagnostic signal – but they’ll focus their energy on the engine itself: strategy, creative, and execution.
The attention economy is an attractive story, but marketers don’t need another story – they need results. Growth doesn’t come from how long an ad holds a gaze, it comes from media that’s placed with precision, creative that resonates, and a strategy measured against outcomes that matter. Attention is a starting point, but the end goal is behaviour change, loyalty, and brand growth. That’s what marketers should measure and what they should fight for when everyone else is distracted by the next shiny metric.
Top image: Shai Luft