Eighty-five percent of digital ads hold our attention for less than 2.5 seconds on average. Will Parrish of VCCP Media urges readers not to worry; there is a solution.
Sergei the meerkat is an asset with meaning
You know those little things that just stick in your head? A yellow arch, three stripes, a yodel, a meekat outline.
They’re tiny, powerful time capsules of meaning, hammered into our minds over many years. Think of them, and you likely instantly picture countless ads, products, people, colors, and sounds – built layer by layer, like a pearl, through the telling of emotional stories, long and short, online and offline.
This is an incredible superpower for a business – to own a shape, sound, or character that lives in people’s brains. Something you glimpse for a second, imagine in 3D, and it prompts you to act. These assets feel too important to ignore, yet often aren’t on balance sheets.
Why?
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Because they’re intangible.
What good is intangible in a world obsessed with tracking every impression and attributing every click?
Especially when the fight for attention is refereed by algorithms geared to volume and variety of content. The attention economy is a runaway train, and six of the 10 biggest companies thrive on it.
We’re up against TikTok dances, catchy sounds, and addictive ASMR videos. It’s so intense that 85% of digital ads get less than 2.5 seconds of attention. And here’s the challenge, proved by Dr Karen Nelson-Field and her team at Amplified: 2.5 seconds is below the threshold for driving ‘mental availability’ – or simply put, memory.
So, with most brands pouring cash into these low-attention environments, what’s the way forward? It might just lie in the simple power of those yellow arches, yodels, and meerkats.
These distinctive assets, built over years of brilliant marketing, are the essential livery we need to cut through the noise. The only problem is that we can’t objectively prove their value.
“But we do value them!”
Well, sort of. In the 2000s and 2010s, we saw a dip in the use of these ‘fluid’ devices. Back then, TV was king, building culture and collective memory during shared ad breaks.
Now, the world has changed, and we might be making two mistakes. Firstly, assuming a heroic, long-form brand film, chopped into varying lengths, fits the mayhem of modern media – where the grammar is poor, audiences are alone, and if it doesn’t catch their eye is skipped, swiped, and consigned to the memory scrap heap.
Secondly, thinking high-attention content, such as creator collaborations, can be less distinctly branded, just like old TV ads, and still work.
That’s why, with Dr Nelson-Field, we created ‘The Bad Twin’ test. We stripped eight brands of their distinctive elements from short-form digital assets – removing colors, sounds, visuals, and characters. Then, we ran these ‘bad’ versions side-by-side against their well-branded counterparts. We kept the ad’s structure, story, product, logo, and voiceover consistent.
What did we find?
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Media dictates attention.
Our ‘good twins’ gained slightly more attention than their ‘bad twin’ counterparts… but not enough to move the needle significantly.
Here’s the interesting part: distinctive assets dictate the outcomes. Well-branded creative might not add seconds to attention, but every well-branded second drives an incredible 2.5x ROI versus non-branded content for immediate sales. When you put your assets to work, they really work. Without those distinctive brand elements, you lose immediate trust and reassurance to buy.
Remember that depressing fact that 85% of digital ads get less than 2.5 seconds of attention?
Until our study, that was the minimum for mental availability or memory formation, which meant most digital ads were potentially wasted. Our new study showed, for the very first time, that when distinctive assets are present, results for mental availability start from as little as 1.5 seconds. This unlocks massive potential, reducing waste when creative and media are integrated.
This quantifies the value of these distinctive brand elements. We can now calculate how much of a digital media plan can be de-risked by using the devices a brand has lovingly (and fiscally) built meaning into. This provides hard proof of why continually building your brand and investing meaning into these assets pays off.
So we calculated a ‘tariff’ on every £1 spent in digital media for when distinctive assets aren‘t deployed effectively.
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Unlike other tariffs, these are entirely self-inflicted when poorly branded creative runs in low-attention environments. And it’s hefty: 66p in every £1, on average, is your penalty for not using the distinctive assets you already have.
The intangible brand worlds we’ve built are intangible no more! Our work connects with other important conversations – System1’s ‘The Long and Short(form) of it,’ Dr Grace Kite’s ‘lots of littles’ – all pointing to the way brand can thrive in a world of fleeting fragments.
Our brand worlds are rich enough to support more than just ‘logo slaps.’ Colors, characters, sounds, photography styles, and more are at our fingertips to build and maintain brilliant brand worlds. The value of these elements in digital spend is quantifiable, and their expected impact is forecastable.
Does this mean we live in a world of 1.5-second media plans?
Of course not.
It’s a reassurance that if we build meaning into these assets, they can stand up in as little as 1.5 seconds. But building that meaning does require higher attention and longer-form, emotional environments to remind and reinforce, say, the role meerkats play in our lives or that pizza is just a yodel away.
Now, you can fight for the importance of that work and prove its tangible impact. To hack the attention economy, we have to build our assets up and put them to work.
VCCP
VCCP is the global challenger network for challenger brands. We create enduring brand platforms that deliver value for our client's businesses and enable diverse...