By Anna Sampson, Insight & Strategy Director, Magnetic

A new study from Dentsu – ‘The Attention Economy’ – makes an important contribution to the attention debate. It calls for a new way to value attention, declaring that impressions, reach and OTS are not enough. Dentsu makes a commitment to discovering new ways to value attention across platforms, a cause they are committed to because they believe the way media is currently bought priorities efficiency over effectiveness.

This comes after Magnetic’s recent study ‘Pay Attention’ raised the same challenges. Both studies highlight the importance of reducing ad avoidance and the idea that attention sits on a spectrum. Dentsu refers to full and partial attention as measured by eye gaze from eye tracking. ‘Pay Attention’ pulls on the theories of Daniel Kahneman and a psychological understanding of attention that sees attention as ‘top down’ or conscious and slow, to ‘bottom up’ or unconscious and fast.

In Pay Attention we demonstrated that magazines are particularly strong at focused attention. The Dentsu study takes this further and finds that the longer you view a video advert the better the business outcome. So here we find for the first time quantifiable evidence of what many of us instinctively know – time is money.

‘The Attention Economy’ makes a direct link between attention and effectiveness. So, isn’t it time we all started paying attention to attention, and the media channels where advertising avoidance is low? This study is based on Video on linear TV, in feed video and pre-rolls, but with a commitment to roll this out globally across all platforms. We can’t wait to see the next set of results.

Read the full Dentsu Attention economy research here.

The Magnetic Pay Attention report shares why quality attention is so important. Details here.