A great tsunami of attention research has arrived on Australian shores. It sorta reminds me of ‘the year of mobile’ which was in the making for what seemed like a decade.

Like plenty of new ideas, the focus on attention started slowly – all the way back in 2017, when ThinkTV commissioned Karen Nelson-Field to explore how much attention Australian audiences were paying to advertising across channels and screens.

In recent months, attention has been generating, well… attention.

It seems like every channel in town wants to join the party. We’ve seen cinema, radio and out-of-home all embark on attention studies and Australia’s major media agency groups add attention-based planning tools to their arsenals.

And it’s great – all of it. I’m thrilled the industry is embracing attention – but I am wondering if, in our quest to show off our attention creds, we’ve forgotten about the most important piece of the conversation: The consumer.

If we focus only on proving platform performance with attention metrics, we’re ultimately having a conversation with ourselves. Crying out that, “my attention is bigger and better than yours,” isn’t going to help advertisers connect with audiences and convert them into customers.

Getting loads of people’s attention is good but, to be fair, brands don’t need everyone’s attention; they want a specific audience’s attention. If you’re looking to target, say, sports fans, homebuyers or mums, that’s the audience whose attention matters most.

With that in mind, the attention conversation needs to evolve from how much attention each platform commands to how people buying specific products are paying attention to a particular medium.

Once we do that, it's time to align audience attention with brand outcomes. That will give attention staying power.

From a return-on-investment point of view, ads need to do more than just appear in the right place at the right time. We need to ensure the target audience is willing and open to brand messages in those channels.

In that respect, attention is just one part of the equation. An important part but a part, nonetheless. Reach is also important because the attention of 10 people in your target audience is going to be trumped by the attention of 10,000. The opportunity for target audiences to see your ads also needs to be taken into account. People can spend hours on a platform but be exposed to ads for a tiny percentage of the time.

Like everything in marketing, the devil really is in the detail and attention on its own isn’t enough to do the job. Each of these dimensions plays a role in delivering an effective outcome for advertisers.

If you’re an advertiser trying to make sense of all the attention on attention, we suggest you take a minute to look at the methodologies behind individual attention research studies and assess how they relate to your specific target audience. Have your agency team or internal research department go through the studies, review them critically and have a point of view on how they were put together.

Take the research that stands up under analysis. Break down how your target audience is paying attention to the channels that meet your campaign objectives. Try plotting it out to create a picture of the attention paid as a percentage of the time your desired audience is on a platform. For how many minutes – or hours – do they need to consume one type of media to get just a minute of attention on your brand? The results might shock you.

With all of that in mind, take a look at attention in tandem with the factors that drive brand outcomes. While attention makes a real difference, don’t forget about reach, scale and brand safety.

I am sure the attention wave hasn’t quite peaked. There is plenty of discussion to come about attention metrics and the merits of buying and selling media based on attention. I welcome it but if you want to ride the wave, keep a critical eye and look for exactly whose attention matters most to your customers, brand and business.

Kim Portrate is the CEO of ThinkTV.