Making sense of the IPA’s Making Sense 8

Opinion

Lumen’s Mike Follett takes a first look at the IPA’s Making Sense 8 and reveals behavioural shifts in the data.

We should commend the IPA for standing up for continuity amongst all the cacophonous claims of change in the market. Making Sense 8 makes a good case for stability in the media market. 2026’s data is much like 2025’s. Change is gradual and incremental, not radical and disorienting. We will sing no requiem for any particular medium this year.

This stability fits neatly with Lumen Research’s attention data, which shows strong consistency in how people engage with the ads they see or hear. Over the last decade, people seem to have remained as skilled as ever at avoiding advertising across media.

But while much has stayed the same, some things have changed. The consistency of most Making Sense data helps make the real shifts more salient.

The first big change is between generations

For young people, advertising is primarily mediated via the mobile phone. 51% of their media time is spent on their mobile phones, and only 20% on ‘big screen’ TV. For older groups, this proportion is almost exactly reversed, although ad exposure on smartphones is growing significantly among them too.

This has major implications for what advertising means to both groups. The prototypical ad for older readers (including this older writer) is a 30-second TV ad. That’s what comes to mind when we talk about advertising, and that’s where we start when we develop advertising creative or media plans.

How can I drive growth for this brand via a funny or emotive (or at least memorable) half-minute vignette? How can I get this vignette – and its derivatives in various support media – in front of as many people as possible in the most cost effective way?

But for younger readers, this is not their primary template for advertising. For mobile-first audiences, their induction into the world of advertising is far more fragmented and distracted: shards of short-form video that can be swiped past at will. Instead of a bucketload of advertising tipped over them on TV, they get a drizzle of social media adverts, a miasma of messaging closer to how OOH works than anything Hollywood might teach us.

And this has enormous implications for the making of memories. We have worked on the assumption that brands supply a ‘loading dose’ of memory formation via TV advertising, and then supply a ‘maintenance dose’ of reminder ads via supplementary media (including social media).

But if many of our most important audiences are not watching TV, how can we inject the initial bolus of meaning for brands?

The second big change is in combining generations

Different generations have always consumed different media, but there was a time when advertisers could hope to reach multiple audiences through the same media at the same time. Even 10 years ago, there was a 44% overlap in media reach between age cohorts and a 58% correlation in time spent on shared media.

This is no longer the case. The overlap in time spent with the same media has dropped to 22%, and more and more media consumption is solitary, especially amongst younger consumers. Amongst 16-34 year olds, 46% of media consumption is alone, up 10 percentage points from a decade ago.

This has great implications for advertising. We are frequently tasked with creating or enhancing ‘positional goods’: commodities that command premium prices through the social value that they communicate. There is no point in owning a Rolex unless everyone else knows what a Rolex stands for. Do linens from The White Company really exist unless your guests know what The White Company means?

But shared meaning needs shared media. When I watch TV with my family, I receive two messages: one from the advertiser, and one from my co-audience.

One is ‘private communication ’, and the other is ‘common knowledge’: I know that you know that I know that cats like Felix cat food. Solitary media consumption muffles this secondary, public communication. How can I be sure of a signifier’s value if I am the only one to receive the signal?

These two tectonic trends – the splintering of attention to advertising across a million little shards, and the shattering of ‘common attention’ – pose important challenges for brand builders.

Amid much consistency, these changes are worthy of the name.

Mike Follett is the founder and CEO of Lumen Research.