Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends and above all dear guardians of the bravest budgets on the market, good evening.

Look at this cup. It is an extraordinary, complex, expensive champagne. Now, imagine if I had paid full price for it and then poured it directly into the pot of that plant over there, without any of you even being able to taste it. You'd think I was crazy, right? Yet, this is exactly what is usually done in online advertising investments.

I'm not saying this to ruin your dessert, Lumen research says it "Attention Technology: What advertisers need to know". And the data is more indigestible than my aunt's nougat: 70% of the global digital budget is spent on impressions that do not generate a single second of human attention.

In practice, we are financing the greatest magic show in history: we make banners appear that no one looks at. We have become masters in buying "viewability", that magical technical parameter that says that an ad has appeared on the screen, forgetting that between "appearing" and "being seen" there is an ocean of human indifference.

The ghost in advertising

Lumen research throws an ironic reality in our faces: we chased reach as if it were the Holy Grail, ending up buying millions of "ghost impressions." An ad may technically be "viewable" (50% for a second, the standards say... basically a blink of a hummingbird on caffeine), but if the user is already frantically scrolling to a video of a cat playing the piano, your money is evaporated.

Lumen has proven that attention isn't optional, it's the only currency that matters. Just a 5% increase in attention can double brand perception. And the bombshell news? Attention is 8x more effective than View-Through Rate at predicting brand recall. Yet we continue to optimize campaigns for clicks as if it were still 1998.

The solution: stop counting and start weighing

So, what do we do? Do we continue to toast while 70% of your investments end up in the black hole of unseen social feeds? Obviously not. We need to change the rules of the game:

1.        From quantity to quality (APM is the new CPM): Stop buying "one thousand impressions". We have to buy "a thousand seconds of attention" (Attention Per Mille). One second of careful attention on a quality editorial site is better than ten seconds of "technical presence" at the bottom of a page that no one scrolls through.

2.        Context is King, but Creativity is Dictator: Lumen tells us that format matters, but creativity seals the deal. If the content is boring, there is no algorithm that matters.

3.        High intensity environments: Video games, Augmented Reality, premium editorial contexts. That's where the human eye stops.

Let's stop paying for the "right to appear" and start demanding the "privilege of being looked at", because at the end of the day, a customer who doesn't look at you is a customer who has never met you.

Let's raise our glasses: attention, the only resource we cannot automate.