Creativity tends to get the blame when ads underperform. But what if the real issue isn’t the idea but the media plan?
That’s the assertion at the heart of The Cost of Dull Media, a new report by Dr Karen Nelson-Field, with contributions from Adam Morgan and Peter Field. Unveiled this week to coincide with Cannes Lions, the paper claims that the media industry is haemorrhaging money by investing in ad environments that simply don’t hold attention long enough.
‘We didn’t create this report to win awards or stir the pot. We created it to help fix a broken system,’ writes Nelson-Field, who is founder of Amplified Intelligence. ‘It puts a price on formats that leak attention, and shows how much that leak costs in ROI, in memory, in growth.’
The report uses biometric eye-tracking data gathered across 115,000 ad views in 12 countries, spanning 60 formats across social, web, gaming and TV. The data shows that 75% of ‘viewable’ inventory receives zero active attention. In the ‘dullest’ quarter of campaigns, grouped based on how often and how long people paid attention, only 6% of total ad time is actively looked at.
Using Short Term Advertising Strength (STAS) to quantify campaign impact, the researchers calculated how much more brands would have to spend to make dull media perform like high-attention media. The answer is an extra $198 billion each year; in other words, nearly half the total value of the US media market ($427 billion).
For the top 10,000 advertisers in the US, the researchers worked out that advertisers are losing an average of 43 cents for every dollar spent in dull environments, labeling that the ‘dull media tariff’.
What makes the report more urgent is its reframing of attention as a media efficiency metric. As campaigns grow duller, CPMs drop by 41% from the highest- to lowest-attention formats. STAS efficiency is hit even harder, dropping by 77%.
Field, never one to sugar-coat it, puts it this way: ‘There is a terrifying complacency in media buying that is destroying the foundations of brand prosperity.’
The most damning insight in the report is that dull media undermines strong creative. When standout ads are placed in low-attention formats, advertisers lose an average of 72 cents for every dollar spent.
‘If brilliant ads could lift poor media, we’d see it in the data. But we don’t,’ the authors write. The media environment sets the ceiling for performance. Once attention drops, outcomes fall, even when the idea is working.
This is especially brutal for challenger brands. In high-attention environments, challenger campaigns outperform big brands. But in dull formats, that advantage collapses.
The Cost of Dull Media doesn’t call out specific platforms, but the pattern is clear. In high-performing campaigns, most spend goes on formats where attention lasts — what the report calls slow-decay environments, like CTV and premium video. In lower-performing campaigns, the mix shifts toward fast-decay formats, such as mobile and scroll-heavy placements, where attention drops off almost as soon as the ad appears.
The report’s recommendation is to shift from proxy metrics like time-in-view to something that actually reflects human experience. It proposes a new core planning metric: Attention Volume, which combines attentive reach and active attention time. In other words, it doesn’t just measure what was delivered. It measures what was actually seen.
For media agencies, it’s an invitation to think differently. Stop treating attention as a creative issue. Start treating it as a media buying one.
Main image my Sander Sammy on Unsplash.