We live in an age of marketing contradiction.

Advertising budgets are under pressure. Accountability is high. Marketers are being asked to do more, with less. So, they search for cheaper, faster, more efficient media - and often, they find it.

But in chasing efficiency, we’re sacrificing the one thing advertising needs to work: attention.

And as the New Zealand industry gears up to celebrate this Thursday’s annual Beacon Awards, a wave of research from global attention specialists offers a timely provocation:

Are we putting our best creative work in places where it can actually land - or letting it disappear in the scroll?

The Beacons exist to celebrate excellence in media thinking. They reward strategy, insight and the execution behind great campaigns. But impact doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Even the smartest idea, perfectly targeted, brilliantly crafted, will fail if it’s never truly seen.

The Real Price of Dull

Professor Karen Nelson-Field’s latest research, The Eye-Watering Cost of Dull Media, offers a reality check for marketers chasing efficiency at all costs.

Instead of measuring impressions served, it measures impressions seen. Using over 75,000 eye-tracked human sessions across multiple platforms, her team quantified what many media strategists have long suspected: dull environments - where ads are technically viewable but rarely viewed - are draining campaign performance.

Here’s what they found:

• On average, 43¢ of every advertising dollar is lost in low-attention environments
• When great creative is placed in dull formats, the loss skyrockets to 72¢ per dollar
• The total global cost? $198 billion in wasted media spend every year

And these aren’t abstract figures. This is the real-world cost of putting your best creative in the wrong place.

Not All Attention Is Equal

Attention isn’t binary. It’s not just on or off.

Nelson-Field’s team studied the type and duration of attention across platforms, identifying 2.5 seconds as the key threshold - the minimum active viewing time needed to encode brand messages into memory.

Some formats consistently achieve this. Most don’t.

Broadcast television and BVOD performed strongly. These environments deliver full-screen, sound-on, non-skippable experiences that command and sustain attention. Many digital platforms, particularly those reliant on short, skippable, or muted formats, failed to meet the 2.5-second benchmark.

Even YouTube - which outperforms most digital platforms in attention studies - operates in a fundamentally different environment to television. The context, cultural footprint, and trust levels are not the same.

The conclusion is clear: television delivers more than video - it delivers impact.

Why This Matters Now

This isn’t just about ad tech. It’s about brand outcomes.

The Beacons are a celebration of the best outcomes in our industry - campaigns that moved the dial, shifted perception, drove results. But many of those results were enabled not just by creativity or strategy - but by the media environment those campaigns lived in.

A brilliant creative platform loses power when delivered in a cluttered feed. A powerful brand message struggles to break through when it’s squeezed into three seconds of screen time, surrounded by autoplay content or user-generated distractions.

That’s why attention should be considered a design principle, not a reporting line.

It’s also why attention should be discussed in the same breath as effectiveness, particularly this week. Because some of the campaigns we’ll see awarded at the Beacons - the most distinctive, memorable, emotionally resonant work - likely succeeded not despite the media they ran in, but because of it.

The Illusion of Efficiency

The modern media mix is dominated by proxies - metrics that suggest value but rarely capture it. CPMs, viewability, click-through rates - these numbers tell a story, but not always the right one.

What they don’t tell us is whether the ad made it into memory. Whether it had time to connect. Whether the viewer even noticed.

The allure of low-cost impressions is real. But the cost per impact is the measure that matters. And on that measure, many marketers are spending more than they think, for far less than they expect.

This is the efficiency paradox: it looks cheap, but it’s costing you dearly.

Creative Needs a Stage

Emotionally powerful, creatively bold work doesn’t just deserve attention - it requires it. Without sufficient viewing time, even the most compelling idea can’t take hold. It doesn’t land. It doesn’t stick. It doesn’t work.

This is not a new idea. For decades, the work of Peter Field and Les Binet has shown that emotionally driven, brand-building campaigns in high-attention environments deliver the strongest long-term commercial returns.

James Hurman reinforces this truth in The Case for Creativity:

‘If advertising is not remembered, it doesn’t work.’

The Beacon Awards remind us of that every year. The campaigns that rise to the top don’t just have great insights or beautiful execution - they have presence. They were placed where audiences could truly absorb them.

That’s not a coincidence. It’s a strategy.

Why Television Still Matters

Despite its proven strengths, television is still being cut from media plans. Not because it underperforms - but because it’s misunderstood.

Mark Ritson put it bluntly:

‘TV remains the most effective advertising medium ever invented. Full stop.’

Here’s why:

• TV delivers more attentive seconds per impression than most digital platforms
• It supports long-form, emotionally rich storytelling
• It avoids clutter, runs full screen, and earns cognitive focus
• It still reaches broad, diverse audiences at scale
• It’s one of the most trusted media formats in New Zealand

And yet, despite this, many advertisers are seduced by the surface-level allure of digital metrics - overlooking the depth and durability of television impact.

What Needs to Change

Nelson-Field offers six practical recommendations for brands serious about cutting waste and boosting effectiveness:

1. Stop using proxy metrics like CPM, viewability, and CTR  
2. Start measuring active attention – not just exposure  
3. Align creative investment with formats that support it  
4. Cut underperforming channels, even if they’re cheap  
5. Make attention a design principle, not a KPI  
6. Use attention data at the planning stage, not just the reporting stage

This is not a call to abandon digital. It’s a call to balance the equation. To think about quality, not just quantity. To recognise that great creative deserves great media.

If Attention Is the Currency, TV Is the Value

At ThinkTV, we’ve said it before - television isn’t being replaced. It’s being undervalued.

If you want reach, there are faster ways to get it. If you want likes, there are tools that will deliver. But if you want to build brands, earn trust, drive recall, and deliver long-term outcomes - television remains the smartest buy in media.

As the industry gathers this Thursday at the 2025 Beacon Awards, we’ll see the best of what our market can do. The boldest thinking. The strongest partnerships. The campaigns that delivered real change.

But as we hand out awards, we should also ask: Are we giving our best ideas the media environments they deserve?

Because in the end, the ad must be seen.

The message must land.

And the brand must be remembered.

That’s not just creative. That’s effective.

Sources

1. The Eye-Watering Cost of Dull Media, Professor Karen Nelson-Field, Amplified Intelligence, 2024
2. The Long and the Short of It, Peter Field & Les Binet, IPA, 2013
3. Why TV Is Still King, Mark Ritson, Marketing Week, 2022
4. The Case for Creativity, James Hurman, 2011
5. Beacon Awards 2025 - Comms Council NZ