How Just One and a Half Seconds Can Make or Break a Digital Ad

​VCCP Media, in partnership with Dr Karen Nelson-Field and attention technology company Amplified, has today launched Hacking the Attention Economy - a ground breaking report that proves advertisers can drive brand and business outcomes in just 1.5 seconds of attention, if their distinctive brand assets are deployed effectively.

In an era of infinite scroll, social platforms have trained the world to swipe, skip and scroll - rewarding distraction and reducing capacity to focus. Every single day, people scroll the height of the Statue of Liberty - 109,500 feet a year - training ourselves into distraction. And yet, these same social media and digital platforms - built to keep users moving - are funded by advertisers who need those users to stop and look. There’s a fundamental tension at play: users don’t always want to see ads, but platforms must serve them - and brands need them to land.

This finding marks a breakthrough in digital advertising. Until now, the 85% of digital ads that receive less than 2.5 seconds of active attention were widely considered ineffective. But our research shows that short exposure isn’t wasted exposure - if creative and media are aligned, and distinctive brand assets are deployed effectively. Attention isn’t just a media metric - it’s the fuel for brand growth. In today’s fragmented environment, 1.5 seconds of focused, well-branded attention can be more powerful than 15 seconds of passive exposure.

VCCP Media and Dr Karen Nelson-Field, who co-authored the report, conducted an experiment that proves brands are imposing self-inflicted tariffs on themselves through poor branding - with as much as 66p in every £1 being wasted. This could add to £66bn in lost value across the global digital ad industry each year when applied to the £100bn+ global digital display market. This ‘asset tariff’ manifests in different ways depending on the platform. When brand assets aren’t activated properly, the cost of inattention reaches £0.70 on the open web and £0.65 on some social platforms.

VCCP Media tested digital video ads from eight brands - from household names to disruptors - in real social environments, both with and without their distinctive brand assets. Key brand cues like colours, sounds, characters and visual devices were deliberately removed to create ‘bad twin’ versions of each ad. Participating brands included O2, Cadbury, Domino’s, Old El Paso, easyJet, Sage, Bulldog and White Claw. The results showed that legacy brands suffer most when asset fluency is weak - losing an average of 69p per £1 spent, compared to 59p for challenger brands.

Powered by one of the largest attention datasets in the world, experiments were conducted using Amplified’s industry-leading research platform, which tracked over 20,000 views of 72 digital video ads across eight major brands. These tests were underpinned by insights from Amplified’s broader dataset of more than 38 billion biometric data points and 1.3 million people collected across global digital environments. Amplified collects brand-specific attention data to evaluate whether creative formats, executions and - crucially - branded moments are actually being seen and remembered.

With intelligent use of distinctive brand assets, even 1.5 seconds is enough to drive memory and meaningful business outcomes. These distinctive assets act as multipliers. The best-performing brand code in the study delivered a 3.5x return on attention-adjusted ROI compared to its unbranded counterpart. And even in ads with very limited view time, well-branded assets were 2.5x more effective at driving outcomes than weak ones.

Hacking the Attention Economy builds on the huge body of knowledge on the field of attention, and for the very first time adds a new dimension through a pioneering new integrated creative and media research approach. The report - co-authored by Will Parrish, chief strategy officer at VCCP Media - proves that fleeting attention is no longer the enemy; it can be a competitive advantage if brand assets are used strategically and consistently.

Five ways to hack the attention economy

VCCP Media’s report sets out five practical recommendations for brands looking to improve creative effectiveness and reduce wasted spend in a low-attention world:

• Know your assets: Start by auditing what truly makes your brand distinctive - from colour and logo to audio, characters and structure. The strongest performers use a fluent system of assets, not just a logo.
• Balance meaning and memory: Don’t just create brand love - make it work. Brands need both emotional storytelling to build associations, and high-reach executions that activate those associations through consistent asset use.
• Plan formats around creative and media strength: Creative and media decisions should be made together, not in siloes. Match your asset strengths to the realities of each platform - planning what to say and where to say it in tandem.
• Count the seconds and reach: Understand not just who you’re reaching, but how long you’re holding their attention. Attention is a finite resource - plan, test and optimise accordingly.
• Boardroom-proof your brand: Poor branding leads to self-imposed tariffs on effectiveness. To avoid them, brands must ensure their assets work in digital and prove that creative contributes to commercial value.

Dr Karen Nelson-Field, founder of Amplified, added, “Brands are too often focused on the time their ad is in view, but it’s the time that it is actually viewed - active attention - that matters. This study is the first to prove that just 1.5 seconds of genuine attention is enough to encode memory in a real-world digital feed. The good news is, with intelligent asset deployment, you can drive outcomes even in 1.5 seconds. That’s not about doing more, it’s about doing better.”

A new media model

The report highlights the urgent need to move from siloed creative and media planning to a unified approach built around asset fluency. In a low-attention environment, aligning brand execution with real platform behaviour is key to reducing waste and improving impact.

​James Shoreland, CEO of VCCP Media, said, “Marketers are rightly focused on media efficiency, but we’re seeing billions in creative inefficiency go unchecked. This report proves that creative and media effectiveness are two sides of the same coin - and attention is the currency which connects them. Our findings don’t just quantify the impact of integrated thinking—they point to a new paradigm for media planning and buying.”

Hacking the Attention Economy forms part of The Challenger Series, VCCP’s thought leadership platform designed to provoke debate and help brands challenge industry norms to deliver value. Download Hacking the Attention Economy here.