• by Micheal P. Gumbert , March 3, 2026

Let me start with a simple question for everyone, can you control, and then optimize, your audience’s attention? I can answer that with a story.

Like 125.6 million other people, according to Nielson, my wife and I sat down that Sunday in February to watch the Super Bowl. I think by the time the game started my wife was looking forward to it, if for no other reason I strongly suspect she was tired of me talking about “advertising prom” and speculating about what the ads would actually look like. My wife is not an advertising person, she’s a nurse (thank God) so she does not think in terms of messaging our audiences …she either likes a commercial or not and feels no need to justify why.

As it happened, she really liked one of the commercials during the Super Bowl. She did not just like, she absolutely loved the commercial with Kurt Russell, because first my wife likes Kurt Russell and then of course being in Minnesota because of his association with the movie Miracle (it is not uncommon to hear people in Minnesota talk about meeting Herb or to tell you where they were watching that game in 1980). So, success! The commercial did its job; it got my wife to pay attention to it. Except …she absolutely could not tell you what the commercial was actually for. Until I told her it was for the Michelob Ultra, she actually thought the commercial was for a new app for paying for stuff.

According to the ways that we talk about attention, the commercial would have been a success from an attention standpoint with my wife in that she paid attention to it. If you were to track her eyes, yes, she was looking at the screen, quite enthusiastically, and even in the psychological sense she was paying attention. The rub is that she was not paying attention to the elements that the people paying for the advertising wanted her to pay attention to.

To answer my own question, no we cannot control, nor can we optimize the attention of our potential audiences. For one thing when we talk about attention, what we mean when we say attention might be better described as ‘noticing’. Our audiences notice, they see and hear, our advertising but they might not actually be paying attention. Given the thousands of messages we are all exposed to everyday can we really blame them? I have said it before, but it bears repeating here, people are not the result of a man equation, you do not, CANNOT, put in input X and automatically expect to get output Y.

So, then what is the answer? Obviously, we need people to notice, and to pay attention to our advertising enough that at some point they remember our brands when they decide to take action when they are in-market. A good first step might be to stop approaching people like they are math equations to be solved or physical phenomena to be experimented on. They are people whose attention we need to earn and maybe if we treat their attention like a valuable commodity that we cherish maybe they will reward that by giving some of it to us.

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