Paying Attention to Planning
07 July 2026
During her presentation to the Advertising: Who Cares? event last month, IPSOS’ Samira Brophy quoted Charles Vallance, Founder of VCCP in a piece he called The Tyranny of Targeting:
“Modern media analytics is in danger of reducing the medium back to being the medium alone. If we continue down this path, we may end up on a fool’s errand, mistaking accuracy for effectiveness and precision for persuasion.”
This is not a new thought (Charles’ original piece appeared in ‘Campaign’ over ten years ago) but it is one we have studiously ignored.
Today, big numbers rule. It is extraordinary how so many smart people can become obsessed with a metric that is both so superficial and at the same time so provably (and ironically) so meaningless.
Many people, including Omar Oakes and Karen Nelson-Field have used the descriptor cost-per-meaningless-thousand. As Karen puts it in Omar’s opinion piece: “There’s nothing about effectiveness and efficiency that comes with CPM…. yet we all rely on it every day of our lives, as if the cheaper it is, the better it is.”
Omar concludes: That’s why CPMs are misleading: they ignore attention and treat all impressions as equal, turning “cost per thousand” into a “cost per meaningless thousand.”
In one sense we have come a long way. Many old gits like me will recount how we’ve always used ‘attention’ to particular formats, and positions in planning. That is true, in the sense that we all instinctively knew that first-in-break generated more attention (less time to leave the room to put the kettle on…) and that outside back-covers were widely noticed by those not reading the magazine.
Today we don’t have to rely only on instinct. Karen Nelson-Field’s business, Amplified has been working away using AI to find patterns in the approximately 50 billion data points collected over close to a decade.
An independent South African media agency, Connect, part of the UP and Up Group has negotiated the rights to what is called AttentionAI across African markets.
There are several things interesting about this.
First, it’s an indie agency, and its Chief Operating Officer Scott Reinders that has spotted the potential and moved to do something with it.
Second the potential lies in using attention as a planning aid not ‘just’ as a post-campaign evaluation metric.
For something to be used to write plans across a range of advertisers it needs to be based on robust, trusted data. 50 billion data points would seem at first glance to meet the robust threshold; Karen Nelson-Field is clearly a trusted researcher.
As a planning aid AttentionAI can be used to guide creative output by platform, and within platform. What creative formats work best within what channel formats?
It therefore plays a significant role bringing creative and media planning closer together, and at a stage in the process before any money is spent.
In other words, attention is being used not as one element within a post-mortem but as a part of the upfront decision no doubt alongside other tools within Connect’s toolkit.
This case also shows what can be done with AI. This is not always the bogeyman; it often opens doors to create products of great value particularly when let loose on massive datasets built robustly, and with rigour.
If the bricks are top quality, and you hire a skilled architect you’ll end up with a building that lasts.