The (next) attention revolution is here, says Dr Karen Nelson-Field

Over the last decade, a growing group of researchers (and, latterly, tech vendors) have been rallying to change that. They’ve done so under the rubric of ‘attention,’ a movement within marketing’s creative and media research arms to turn that simple insight into reliable tools to understand how, when and where media actually gets seen.

The de facto leader of that movement is marketer-turned-academic-turned-marketer-again Karen Nelson-Field, the former professor of media innovation at the University of Adelaide and, since 2017, founder of adtech shop Amplified Intelligence. She’s also the co-chair of The Attention Council and the author of not one but two books with ‘The Attention Economy’ in the title.

It’s not a battle Nelson-Field has been waging alone. Co-conspirators include the attention economy’s new stalwarts, such as Mike Follett’s Lumen Research, and megavendors from the ad effectiveness world, such as Teads, DoubleVerify and Ebiquity.

With those vendors already transacting very big business with all of the world’s major media providers, attention is no plucky upstart. But changing the ways in which media are bought and sold takes time and in a recent episode of The Drum Podcast, Nelson-Field and Follett together explained why attention looks like it’s having a moment in 2025. Major media owners have started to sell their ad space for its ability to “drive attention” and longstanding attempts to standardize attention reporting may finally come good, with industry bodies the IAB and MRC expected to jointly release standards for attention measurement accreditation later this month.

Still, when The Drum sat down with Professor Nelson-Field, she argued that “we’re still in a nascent space.” Here’s where it’s been and where it’s headed next.

No, you don’t have a shorter attention span than a goldfish

The idea of contracted attention spans is often weaponized in pitch decks and case studies to make the case for advertising that hits harder, quicker. It seems true: our brains, melted by never-ending streams of Tweets and TikToks, have atrophied to that oft-cited eight-second mark, where we’re bested by the proverbial goldfish, in line with an unfortunately over-cited headline in Time magazine from a decade ago.

For Nelson-Field, the very baseline in understanding current thinking about attention consists in seeing why it’s misleading to claim that any stable number could be put on our ‘attention spans.’ Two basic dichotomies are at play in making this understanding. First, fast-decay versus slow-decay platforms and formats: not all media environments are created equal and the myriad environmental differences between them all affect the attentive state of the viewer – most of us, no matter how second-screen addled we’ve become, can pay decent attention to a good movie for 90 minutes, but might not pay heed to a scrollable ad for more than a second or two. And under that second dichotomy, active versus passive attention, we see that even while ‘paying attention,’ the mind wanders from a more focused mode and semi-distraction.

Put those together and we see, Nelson-Field says, not only that ‘we have eight-second attention spans’ is meaningless; it would also be pretty good news for some platforms.

“It’s probably true that our attention span isn’t eight seconds,” Nelson-Field says, “but I don’t think that matters… and there’s no evidence that eight seconds is bad. On fast-decay platforms, it’s one-and-a-half to maybe two seconds. And even in longform formats with ‘slow’ or ‘flat’ decay, where you’re stuck to your chair and can’t leave the room, you’re still distracted to some degree.”

‘Attention as a design principle’

So, attention is fluid and platform-dependent. We know this. What Nelson-Field says we haven’t yet fully come to grips with is quite how much of the attention question is decided on the supply side. “What I know about human behavior is that you’re not in control of your own behavior in these formats. The user experience is what defines how much attention you can pay. This isn’t new, but the user experience is designed within an inch of its life for you to do what it tells you to do – keep scrolling, keep being committed, find more things that are interesting. Most people think they’re in control of their own attention on most media platforms, but that’s not the case.”

Getting to grips with that dynamic in a way that all parties in the media ecosystem (the platforms, the media agencies, the people who make the creative) truly understand is a paradigm shift, says Nelson-Field – one she calls “attention as a design principle”. “We’ve moved on from it being a bit arbitrary, shiny and a bit surface level. The people that we engage with now ask me to write them playbooks for their entire organizations, across the globe. Attention can’t be a one-off thing – you’ve got to design and guide rules around every touchpoint where human interaction is needed: creative, media, planning, optimization, maybe even point-of-sale.”

The subtext here is clear. The need to serve media in ways that maximize actual rather than potential attention is by now well understood by certain departments that can buy software integrations to keep an eye on that nuance. But for Nelson-Field, the next frontier breaks attention back out of the niche it has built for itself, for consideration throughout the ad ecosystem.

In the ‘attention as a design principle’ paradigm, Nelson-Field says, considering the contours of attention will become an input question, not a tuning question after the big stuff is settled. “The questions on the media side are ‘how much attention do I need? What type of attention do I need? And only then, where can I find it?’ On the creative side, it’s ‘how can I amplify my opportunity with attention above what’s expected? And how can I optimize outcomes – meaning, if I’m getting attention, how can I definitely get outcomes from it?’”

‘Cost per meaningless thousand’

That latter point is an important one for attention vendors to accept and share, for Nelson-Field: attention is attention and it’s not necessarily tied to any particular outcome. “Look, if your brand’s shit and you don’t have the branded moment appearing much, or someone’s not in the category to buy, you won’t get the outcome. Any vendor who tells you that attention is perfectly related to outcomes is lying to you.”

For Nelson-Field, as attention thinking has matured, the above isn’t the only place where nuance has replaced certainty. When people who buy media first took the red pill of attention thinking, she says, there was a temptation to divide media into high-attention and low-attention formats: cinema was ‘good’ because the lights are off and our phones stowed in our pockets; programmatic and display ads comparatively ‘bad’ because they’re relatively cluttered and competitive environments.

“We’ve moved on from saying ‘cinema’s the best and Facebook’s the worst’,” Nelson-Field says. “They all play a different role at different levels of the campaign cycle or the brand cycle.”

This coming-into-maturity of the attention space may mean the jettisoning of some proxies that have got us to where we are now, Nelson-Field says. Chief among those: ‘time in view’, a measure that does what it says on the tin (once 50% of an ad’s pixels are on display) and has been the default proxy for attention for several years. The problem, Nelson-Field says, is that we engage with all platforms differently, so using time-in-view as a cross-platform measure is (at best) flawed. “So most people don’t understand the consequences to CPM (which I call ‘cost-per-meaningless-thousand) or to planning. It’s yet another massive gap between served and seen and it has an impact on viewability too. Everyone calls viewability the bad guy, but it’s not. Time in view is the Achilles heel.”

Plenty has yet to change, in other words, before Nelson-Field’s dream – at least a decade in the making – of well-understood, universal attention thinking and metrics are standard across the industry. But there’s still time. “I think we’re still in a nascent space, in the category itself. My first book was only five years ago and I’ve just dropped my next one. In five years, the gap between the first book and the last book is just huge. In another five years, it’ll be that different again.”

That mature stage of the industry is emerging now, with attention tech integrations from the major players and platforms, the coming rise of “attention marketplaces” and buy-in from the wider ecosystem including DSPs and retail media. Those standards and accreditation from the IAB and MRC will be another step, Nelson-Field says.

“I didn’t start this business knowing what products people would need. So we’ve had to grow the category, we’ve had to work out the use case and build product around it. Now we have to manage the distribution system. It’s a long road, but it’s working.”