An ad needs roughly 2.5 seconds of attention before anything stays in the head. Below this threshold almost nothing reaches long-term memory. Amplified's measurement, from the research firm of Karen Nelson-Field, shows that over 80% of online ads, in some data around 85%, never cross this threshold at all.

At this scale, attention is scarcer than the impression itself. A brand can pay for thousands of impressions and stay below the threshold above which a memory forms. Two logics of media diverge here. The endless feed offers volume and a low price per impression. The finite medium, whether radio, a printed page or a vinyl record, holds attention longer and is measurably better stored.

The attention threshold and memory

The mechanism is simple. Active attention above this threshold is linked to the brand being recalled later. “When an ad receives more than 2.5 seconds of attention, we can start talking about enduring impact,” Amplified sums up. The firm tested this with client OMD on a sample of 600 people in the US and over 3,300 views of twelve brands on three video platforms, where it found a direct relationship between attention and remembering.

There is also a side worth admitting. More recent research by VCCP Media and Amplified from 2025, on a sample of over 20,000 views of 72 digital video ads, showed that the creation of a memory may take as little as 1.5 seconds if the brand has strong distinctive assets. Attention is not the only lever. It remains, however, the first filter that an ad has to pass through.

Radio and audio data

The strongest data for the finite medium came from audio. In 2023 dentsu, together with Lumen Research, measured attention across podcasts, radio and music streaming. Audio ads earned 10,126 attentive seconds per thousand impressions, against the dentsu norm of 6,501. Correct brand recall reached 41% for audio ads against a norm of 38%, and the increase in brand choice reached 10% against a norm of 6%. Radio came out 10 times more efficient than the average online video ad in that measurement.

The return is linked to the ROI Multiplier analysis from Radiocentre. In it, radio returns on average £7.70 for every £1 invested, and in retail as much as £18.90. Shifting budget so that radio makes up a fifth of total spend raises the return on the whole campaign by more than 8%. The data in the report are long-term series rather than from the last year alone, which is worth keeping in mind when reading these figures.

Printed advertising shows a similar pattern. According to Lumen Research's measurement, a full-page ad in a newspaper gets around 3.3 seconds of attention, while a six-second video ad gets around 2.4 seconds. After two seconds, 20 to 25% of people recall a print ad, against roughly 15% for a digital one. According to the same research, people who noticed an ad chose that brand seven times more often than those who missed it.

The return of physical formats

Consumer behaviour is moving in the same direction. According to the Global Music Report 2026 from IFPI, vinyl grew 13.7% in 2025 and has grown for the nineteenth year in a row, while physical formats as a whole added 8.0%.

In Britain, according to BPI, vinyl sales rose 9.1% to 6.7 million units, a thirty-year high and the seventeenth year of growth. Album sales on physical formats there rose 1.4%, for the first time since 1994.

Vinyl and the book have something that the scrolling feed does not have by design, which is an end. A record has two sides, a book has a last page. That finality is the same property that attention studies measure, only on the consumer's side rather than the advertiser's.

Radio listening in Czechia

The Czech context confirms the figures. According to Radioprojekt, for Q2 and Q3 2024, 83.2% of people aged 12 to 84 listen to radio weekly, that is 7.7 million people. Evropa 2 had 1.493 million weekly listeners and second place among nationwide stations, with only ČRo Radiožurnál ahead of it at 1.56 million.

Radio in Czechia remains a mass medium with a reach that a single digital format can hardly match. For a brand, it is a space where, according to the measurements cited, attention holds for longer than in a scrolling feed.

How much attention a brand buys

Data on attention, return and sales point in the same direction. The finite and curated medium holds attention longer and is stored better in memory, while impressions that are paid for largely fail to cross the memory threshold. A budget built only on the volume of cheap impressions thus leaves a measurable advantage of the finite medium untapped. For a brand, what matters is how much attention it actually buys for its money.

By Tereza Tiller