Attention Is A Critical Component Of Advertising For Long-Term Impact

Thoughts on why we should pay more attention to attention.

To answer this, we must consider a key driver of brand recognition: strong mental attachment. This refers to a brand's tendency to quickly come to mind for a specific need or occasion (category entry points). Even the author, a person who does little housekeeping, when thinking of laundry detergent, the first thing that comes to mind is Tide or Ariel. In other words, brands should quickly come to mind by the time a purchase need arises. Brands with a wide range of CEPs have a large mental market share, which usually correlates closely with actual market share.

Deferred demand or long purchase cycle

Most category buyers will not be in the market this week or next. This is based on the 95:9 Ehrenberg-Bass rule and Field & Binet's 60/40 split theory. The long-term growth potential lies in building a strong brand. It should quickly come to mind for most buyers in multiple CEPs. This is as they move from the passive stage to the active stage - from waiting to ready to buy.

According to Tomasz Tunguz, a venture capitalist at Theory, sales cycles have changed significantly in 2023. Slower sales cycles are creating disruption in the pipeline and companies are feeling it.

The average startup's sales cycle increased 24% from the beginning of 2022 to 2023. Those sales cycles that used to fit into a 2-month period are now 75 days.

But the delay is not evenly distributed. Startups focused on selling to large firms lengthened their cycles by 36%, twice as much as SMBs. This figure is statistically significant with an ar value of 0.0005.

The chart above shows that about 1/3 of business sales cycles are 50% or longer than last year. The distribution of medium and small businesses is skewed to the left and up to 10% of businesses report a shorter sales cycle during the period. Most companies are seeing moderate growth, but about a quarter have recorded a doubling.

These metrics suggest that startups should plan for significantly longer sales cycles to avoid premature conclusions about sales team health, product-market fit, competition, or other concerns.

Channels with long-lasting memory effect

The key to success is high-touch media channels to create long-term memories

Marketing's reach and continuity are key. They create mental reach and keep brand memories fresh.

However, it's not enough to simply reach your target audience in a high level of attention. From a paid marketing view, brand marketers and media buyers must know a study by Karen Nelson-Field of Amplified Intelligence, a research firm that measures attention.

In the diagram below, you can see that memory retention is not triggered until the ad has been visible for 2.5 seconds. Each second of active attention results in an average of 3 days in memory. More attention - more days in memory.

To build memory for your brand, most ads must meet the 2.5-second attention threshold. They should be mentally accessible. Research shows that 83% of cross-platform digital ads fail to meet this standard.

Advertisers are increasingly allocating a larger portion of their budget to these channels. To grasp the horror of it, imagine this: In every $100,000 spent on ads, $83,000 was wasted.

Attention is not only important for brand building and long-term effects. A strong link exists between active attention seconds (eyes-on-ad) and short-term ad strength (STAS). As shown in the graph below, more active attention to an advertisement increases the STAS score. In other words, attention has a significant impact on both memorization and brand choice.

Knowing all this, we recommend paying attention to the attention factor in media planning.

To make long-term memories, you need to:

• Reach a wide audience.

• Be consistent.

• Use emotional ads.

• Distribute them through the right channels to get high attention.