LONDON — The advertising industry has spent years grappling with measurement challenges as media channels proliferate. Now, a new approach is gaining traction: using attention as the common currency that can bridge the gap between disparate platforms.
Rather than simply counting whether consumers have seen an ad, marketers are increasingly focused on understanding how deeply they engage with it. This shift from opportunity-to-see metrics toward attention-based measurement represents a fundamental change in how campaigns are planned and optimized.
“Attention [gives] us a unifier across the different channels that we operate in,” said Jason Jutla, Head of Practice, EMEA & UK, WPP Media, in this video interview with Beet.TV at the Beet.TV Global Leadership Summit with WPP Media. “That will help us from the planning phases all the way through to our optimization on an ongoing basis.”
Incrementality takes center stage
While marketing mix models (MMMs) remain valuable for understanding business effects at scale, Jutla argued that incrementality testing must be embedded from the outset to truly optimize media spend.
“When it gets down to optimization or optimizing your media plans, making sure that every single pound, dollar, euro, whatever currency it is, is spent most wisely, you really need to have incrementality baked in from the start,” Jutla said.
The global marketing measurement and optimization solutions market is projected to reach $4.5 billion by 2026, according to Forrester.
The granular approach Jutla suggests could help advertisers identify genuine business impact – whether that means acquiring new customers or converting those who would not have purchased without advertising intervention.
Creative remains the wild card
Adelaide, a provider of attention metrics, says brands using its AU metric achieved an average of 41% higher brand lift and 55% stronger lower-funnel impact in 2024, while EMarketer says: “Attention reframes media buying metrics around experience, not impressions.”
The likes of Uber Ads have been adopting attention. Yet connecting attention metrics to creative development remains a work in progress.
“I think we’re making strides towards it. I don’t think we’ve quite cracked the code yet,” Jutla acknowledged. He suggested that past personalization efforts have swung between extremes – either too granular at the individual level or too broad to be meaningful.
Attention metrics offer a middle path, helping identify “the triggers for behavior, but also continue to create human-centered campaigns that elicit emotion,” Jutla explained. At a time when consumer attention is increasingly scarce, particularly on mobile devices, understanding what captures and holds focus could lend a hand.
Context gets more complex
The convergence of connected TV, retail media, and social platforms is reshaping how advertisers think about contextual relevance. Traditional notions of “context” – appearing alongside related content – are giving way to more sophisticated approaches that incorporate multiple data signals.
WPP has been investing heavily in AI capabilities to address this complexity. In October 2025, the company launched WPP Open Pro, an AI-powered marketing platform, and expanded its partnership with Google to advance cloud and AI technology in marketing.
“We’re really particularly leaning into trying to understand all the different data points with Open Intelligence and start to think about the consumer in a more holistic fashion,” Jutla said. This allows advertisers to consider not just where an ad appears but also a customer’s past behavior and interests.
You’re watching coverage from Beet.TV’s Global Leadership Summit with WPP Media, filmed in London, presented by Criteo, Index Exchange, Seedtag & The Trade Desk. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
