How advertisers can navigate the attention economy to help customers discover new brands

The term attention economy refers to the way humans are able to manage the wealth of information at their disposal. In 1971, economist and Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon, who coined the term, wrote, “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”¹

With so many sources of content prevalent in our daily lives, the attention economy reflects the multimedia competition for eyes and ears as attention becomes an increasingly scarce commodity.

With attention in short supply, understanding the attention economy is important in advertising because it challenges how media is currently bought, by valuing ads actually seen and heard over ad impressions simply bought or served.

Whether it’s with the latest news, listening to music, or streaming entertainment, consumers are always trying to stay connected throughout their day across multiple devices. Technology has reshaped the way we consume content, and as a result, our attention has never been spread so thin.² This has posed a challenge for advertisers as they work to connect with audiences across these fragmented touchpoints.

“With so much content vying to earn audiences’ attention, how can brands be confident that their desired customers are really noticing and engaging with the ads they’re serving? This is a dilemma that dentsu’s Attention Economy team is on a mission to solve,” notes Kelsey Tyson, VP of global partnerships at dentsu. “Together with our clients and partners like Amazon Ads, our market-leading Attention Economy offering seeks to better understand these industry challenges, to help find better ways to maximize audience engagement and connection.”

To help brands ensure that their ads stand out in a highly competitive multimedia space, dentsu and third-party research firm Lumen have conducted an ambitious analysis into the attention economy across digital and social media with the goal of better understanding audience attention and how to maximize it and, in turn, develop better industry standards for buying media. This year, dentsu worked with Amazon Ads to expand their work for the first time into streaming media, conducting three joint studies involving over 1,000 ads from 76 brands, across Amazon-owned streaming properties Twitch, Amazon Freevee, and Amazon Music.

This work illuminates how brands can connect with audiences across Amazon streaming properties and the relationship between higher attention and brand impact. Recently at unBoxed 2023, Joanne Leong, global head of planning at dentsu and Lisa Kim from Amazon Ads took the stage to discuss these insights in depth. Read on to explore some of the highlights of that discussion.

Attention may be more fractured than ever, but Amazon Ads and dentsu’s streaming media attention research shows that there are steps that brands can take to keep audiences coming back. Brands can drive engagement and maximize impact through tactics like aligning with the premium streaming content that customers already love, considering immersive ad formats, and playing with levers like ad frequency.