By Christina DiLaura, Global Vice President, Attention, DoubleVerify
The fight for consumer attention has never been more intense. The days of mass media dominance are behind us, replaced by a fragmented and hyper-competitive digital landscape. Late last year, ACMA research confirmed a major shift—fewer than half of Australians now watch live free-to-air TV (46 per cent, down from 52 per cent in 2023).
Consumers today are inundated with content across an ever-expanding array of platforms, yet their ability to engage remains finite. The result? An attention recession, where the volume of advertising continues to rise, but the depth of consumer engagement is in decline.
According to WARC’s 2025 The Voice of the Marketer, media and audience fragmentation is now the top concern for 44% of marketers, outpacing even inflation and economic uncertainty as a barrier to effective marketing.
To cut through the noise, brands must rethink how they measure effectiveness. Traditional performance indicators like viewability and reach are no longer enough. Instead, attention metrics have emerged as a vital tool for brands looking to ensure their advertising doesn’t just get seen, but actually resonates and delivers impact.
The evolution of media quality metrics to include attention
Which factor drives the greatest consumer engagement—creative execution, ad placement, messaging, or something else entirely? For too long, advertisers have lacked a reliable way to answer this question. While viewability metrics ensure an ad appears on-screen, they don’t reveal whether it actually captures attention or influences behaviour.
This gap between ad exposure and meaningful engagement is a major challenge for marketers seeking to connect campaigns to business outcomes. Attention measurement offers a breakthrough by incorporating real engagement signals rather than relying on surface-level impressions.
Key attention indicators include: Viewable time – How long an ad remains on screen; Share of screen – the proportion of the screen occupied by the ad; Engagement signals – user-initiated interactions such as touches, screen orientation changes, and audio adjustments and, Ad context and suitability – ensuring an ad appears in the right environment for brand safety and impact.
A recent joint study by Lumen and Ebiquity (October 2024) confirmed attention as a key driver of conversion rate optimisation and brand profitability. The research found a near-perfect correlation (0.98) between attentive minutes per thousand ad impressions and incremental profit, across six key media channels—including TV, online video, paid social, out-of-home (OOH), cinema, and online display.
This makes a compelling case for including attention measurement as an essential performance metric, helping advertisers refine their strategies to achieve greater brand recall, stronger consumer engagement, and ultimately, higher conversions.
How brands can navigate the attention recession
However, despite the mounting evidence, many Australian brands are still failing to measure and optimise for attention. Our research with WARC shows that only 17% of APAC marketers currently measure across all four pillars of media quality—brand safety and suitability, viewability, fraud, and intended geography.
This lack of comprehensive measurement means ad dollars are still being wasted on placements that fail to drive meaningful consumer engagement. Put simply, brands are leaving valuable engagement on the table—a costly mistake in today’s competitive landscape.
For those looking to stay ahead, integrating attention metrics is no longer optional—it’s a competitive necessity. Attention measurement delivers three key advantages:
- Optimising Creative for Attention – Understanding which creative elements resonate most with audiences allows advertisers to refine messaging, format, and design for maximum engagement.
- Informing Strategic Ad Placement – Attention insights highlight which platforms, environments, and formats capture consumer focus, enabling brands to prioritise high-engagement placements.
- Maximising Campaign ROI – By focusing investment on high-attention placements, brands can drive stronger brand recall, deeper engagement, and ultimately, better business outcomes.
Advertisers are already seeing success in applying attention metrics to improve campaign performance. Havas Hong Kong, for example, leveraged attention insights to refine its creative and media strategy for clients. By measuring attention levels across placements, the agency identified high-engagement media partners and creative formats that consistently performed well. This approach led to a 58% improvement in the engagement index. To maximise for efficiency, Havas then applied programmatic attention-based targeting to shift investment away from low-attention inventory. The result was an 83% higher clickthrough rate and a 46% lower CPC. Finally, these insights were used to inform future strategy, ensuring continuous improvements in ad effectiveness and audience engagement.
The future of attention metrics in advertising
Attention is not just another advertising metric—it’s a strategic tool that will define the next era of media measurement. In the coming years, attention metrics will become a standard tool for measuring ad effectiveness, with growing investment in AI-driven optimisation tools that help brands act on these insights in real time.
For Australian advertisers, the message is clear: Ignoring attention means missing out on performance gains, more engaged audiences, and ultimately, a stronger bottom line. Now is the time to shift focus from basic visibility metrics to measuring and optimising for true consumer attention—because in an era of media saturation, attention is the only currency that really matters.