Attention, not awareness, is now the currency of brand marketing

How much is too much?

Author Robin Sloan’s stock and flow analogy for media during social media’s heyday continues to provide a prescient means to answering that question. Borrowed from economics, flow is the daily deluge of content in our feed. It’s the daily reminders that people exist and content can be stitched. Stock is like a durable good. It has staying power in that its ‘value’ persists beyond a typical hype cycle.

What happens when the flow is simply too overwhelming?

We’ve seen the studies that highlight the teen attention paradox. The anxiety brought on by having to reconcile doomscrolling with the perceived effects it has on their brains. And as this continues to influence daily media use, both advertisers and AI bots are more than ready to fill that space. It’s beginning to feel like the flow has overtaken the stock and, in doing so, created new marketing dynamics for marketing leaders to manage.

The Pressure and the Overload Problem

Our current media environment is best described as both complex and fragmented: more platforms, more formats, and more touchpoints for audience management. For higher education marketers, this new reality has introduced the significant challenge of reaching our audiences meaningfully while ensuring we are simultaneously meeting platform demands and maintaining competitive budgets.

Outside our industry, we find marketers grappling with these sweeping shifts. WARC’s Voice of the Marketer shows that marketers’ concern about fragmentation has jumped nearly 10 points year over year (the largest increase in the study). And for good reason. Fragmentation dilutes reach and effectiveness, as placements slide down vast supply chains creating a long tail of lower-quality options. Budgets are stretched thinly across a growing number of ad units and placements limiting competitiveness on ad networks.

Our audiences, meanwhile, experience a flood of advertising: an average of 6,000 to 10,000 ads per day. Platforms themselves fuel this cycle, rewarding rapid content turnover and warning brands that ads fatigue quickly, sometimes within days (yet, there’s no evidence for ad wearout). Research on media attention highlights an interesting outcome of this constant flow: 85% of digital ad views fail to hit the 2.5-second active attention threshold needed to create lasting memory. Unsurprisingly, this volume of advertising has eroded trust, with 60% of adults reporting they see “too many” ads.

This has resulted in a collision of external pressures with internal constraints. Across industries, marketing leaders are being asked to do more with less. According to a recent SimpsonScarborough study, 61% of higher ed marketing leaders said they were being asked to do more with less: the challenge of more.

Overload Now a Barrier to Brand Outcomes

Therein lies a tension higher ed marketers must now overcome: Balancing the bits of attention our brands most likely command across niche and short-form media on platforms that reward consistent change. Of course, this runs counter to brand-building necessities. 

Strong brands are still powerful and remain foundational in shaping choice. Ipsos’ Brand Value Creator study has shown no decline, over the past decade, in the role of brand equity in purchase decisions. We see similar patterns in higher education. Per EducationDynamics, nearly 60% of prospective students start with schools they know, rather than programs (up from just 13% 10 years ago).

How Do Higher Ed Brands Gain Traction?

The answer begins by recognizing that attention—not awareness—is now the true currency of brand building. This is quite the shift in which the focus of immediate advertising outcomes has either been on leads or clicks. While both are outputs of marketing activity and each has its value, when it comes to true media planning, planning media must now be about the media environment and leveraging that environment along with effective messaging to maximize each impression (this takes time and effort to manage within ad platforms). That’s because, in a fragmented and fatigued media environment, reach alone doesn’t guarantee recall, and viewability doesn’t equal visibility. What matters is the quality of the seconds your message holds.

Remember, ads only work if they’re seen and held long enough to be remembered—and fewer than 15% of digital impressions reach the 2.5-second threshold needed to enter long-term memory. Yet, when attention is earned, the payoff compounds: brand preference, action intent, and consideration all rise in direct correlation to attentive seconds.

How to Build for Attention

When it comes applying this shift, consider these three strategies when planning creative strategies and media planning:

Plan for Attentive Reach, Don’t Cheapen Your Reach

The cheapest CPM doesn’t mean the best value. If your ad never earns a real glance, the savings disappear. From network placements (outside of the feed) to low-cost display or added value ad units, cost can quickly add up in places where your audience either isn’t or less likely to view your ad.

• Move away from low CPMs as wins and think about CPMs as a lever for more attention — keeping in mind that it isn’t always about buying more ads but buying more attention.
• Use average dwell times or active attention paid by channel or unit to guide the decision-making process.
• Benchmark views as a mechanism to refine targeting and/or messaging.

Balance Frequency and Attention

Aggregate attention, not exposure volume, drives outcomes. Frequency builds the attentive reach required for awareness and mental availability, while longer, sustained attention drives preference and intent. Campaigns should plan bursts of “good enough” attention across formats rather than relying solely on long-form storytelling.

New research has emerged that has captured the power of “littles.” Littles used as a moniker to highlight the minimum attention threshold needed to produce advertising outcomes—powered in many full-screen media environments. 

Short-form video platforms like TikTok and YouTube shorts offer marketers an unprecedented opportunity to build brands not with big, high-production tentpoles, but with a steady stream of small, native, emotionally resonant content. What this means is that two ads viewed for 1 – 1.5 seconds has a similar effect that one ad viewed at 2.5 or more seconds — a huge insight for managing the flow.

Unify Creative and Media Around Attention

Attention is not a media metric alone; it’s a creative and contextual one. When media and creative are planned together around how people pay attention, universities can reclaim efficiency and meaning from fragmented campaigns.

It is essential to develop a true understanding of how people engage with certain channels/ad units and build plans and creative strategies around it. Viewing content in YouTube feed commands a different combination of active and passive attention and scroll behavior than Instagram Stories. How this might look in practice: Static images are used in social feeds to reinforce brand cues while long-form video is used in YouTube desktop and tv viewing to land a narrative or story.

This ad has routinely made TikTok’s top quartile for clicks and viewrate. Outside of intermediate performance, it is primed to deliver an impactful impression because it has a strong presence of brand in logo, in supporting imagery and focuses both delivery in the stage of most active user attention.

The question higher ed marketers must all now reconcile is how our marketing efforts – in this case advertising — make a lasting impact for institutions when attention is at an all time low. In some ways the market has responded with the hope of lower costs, lower cost media, reducing cost-per-click or cost-per-lead as shown by IPA’s Effectiveness Conference. Convention dictates we continue to revert to outputs as value, but in many ways, we are experiencing a full circle moment — the roots of media planning being an effort to maximize eyeballs.

As prolific writer and media researcher Erwin Ephron noted, “degrees of attention” matter. At the end of the day, serving ads isn’t the competitive sport it once was. It is about understanding the levers to pull to ensure your ads get seen — and remembered.