Is paid social taking an unfair beating in the attention economy debate?
Opinion
Dismissing paid social because its average attention metric is lower than TV’s is a bit like dismissing a well-targeted direct mail piece because it reaches fewer people than a national press ad, writes Republic of Media’s digital business director.
Attention has become the industry’s favourite currency, and with good reason. A joint study by Lumen and Ebiquity found a near-perfect correlation between attentive minutes per thousand impressions and incremental profit across six media types. The evidence is compelling. But the conversations it has sparked can, at times, feel frustratingly one-dimensional.
I’ve been part of a few of those conversations recently. The argument tends to go something like this: TV earns ten seconds of attention; paid social scrapes two – therefore social has a less meaningful role in brand building.
It’s a conclusion that feels data-led, but it’s built on only half the data. How long something holds your gaze and how much that moment with a brand actually means to you are two entirely different things.
Karen Nelson-Field’s research makes this point well. Attention sits on a spectrum – active, passive, and non-attentive – with each type serving a distinct brand role. What determines how much any given moment is worth isn’t duration alone; it’s context and relevance.
Active attention isn’t the only metric of value. A smart strategy balances both: passive attention maintains salience with existing customers, and active attention drives new acquisition.
The targeting variable that changes everything
Here’s what seems to be getting lost in the seconds-on-screen debate: the targeting precision that paid social offers.
A TV ad may hold a viewer’s gaze for longer – but if that viewer has zero purchase intent and no category involvement, those seconds are worth very little to the brand. Relevance changes the equation entirely.
The numbers around social commerce speak for themselves. Some 76% of social users say platforms have influenced a purchase in the last six months. A third of consumers now discover and buy within a single app. Around half of Gen Z expect to make more purchases via social this year. But beyond the statistics, most of us have felt this first-hand while scrolling our own feed. Relevance is acting as an attention multiplier.
When an ad reaches someone with genuine category interest – served because they’ve searched related content, engaged with similar brands, or matched a high-propensity lookalike audience – two seconds of attention can carry more commercial value than a longer but contextually misaligned exposure elsewhere. The seconds aren’t the unit of value. The seconds multiplied by relevance are.
When attention is the lead objective, we should stop asking ‘how much attention does social deliver?’ and start asking ‘what kind of attention, to whom, and at what cost?’
Three functions for social in an attention-led plan
Reframing the question opens up a more useful way to think about social’s role in media planning. From my perspective, there are three distinct jobs to be done.
Earning attention from the right people
This is where creative standard matters most. High-impact social video, built for the feed rather than repurposed from other channels, can generate genuine active attention – but only when it reaches someone who has a reason to care.
We shouldn’t be buying reach and hoping the relevance comes from the platform. We need to start with audience relevance and build reach from there. For brand building, that’s a fundamentally different proposition to broadcast channels, not a lesser one.
Staying present with people who already know you
Not every impression needs to stop someone in their tracks. For existing customers and warm audiences, the job is simpler: stay visible, stay familiar, nudge.
Passive attention is entirely appropriate here – it reinforces brand signals without requiring the same format mix or creative intensity needed for acquiring new customers. Treating every impression as if it needs to earn ten seconds of active engagement is both inefficient and unnecessary.
Turning attention into action
Social is increasingly the only channel where the full customer journey – from first exposure to completed purchase – can happen within a single session. That fundamentally changes its role in a media plan.
The argument for social isn’t just about the quality of the moment it creates at the top of the funnel; it’s about what happens next. For younger audiences in particular, social is no longer simply a media channel. It is the commerce environment.
A more honest conversation about attention
None of this is an argument against rigour in measuring attention. The Lumen and Ebiquity research is valuable, and the industry is right to take it seriously. But rigour means using the full picture – not just average dwell time by channel, but who is dwelling, why, and what they do next.
Dismissing paid social because its average attention metric is lower than TV’s is a bit like dismissing a well-targeted direct mail piece because it reaches fewer people than a national press ad.
Volume and precision are different tools for different jobs. So are ten seconds of passive awareness from someone who’ll never buy your product, and two seconds of active consideration from someone who’s already searching in your category.
The seconds-on-screen debate is worth having. But let’s make sure we’re having the right version of it.
Hannah Jones is the digital business director at Republic of Media