Attention Is Not the Product. The Moment Is by Erhan Ciris

Why the Currency of Live Advertising Needs to Change

There is a question no one in the advertising industry really wants to answer: what are you actually selling?

The standard answer is attention. Eyeballs. Impressions. The CPM — cost per thousand views — is the foundational unit of exchange, and it is built on a premise so simple it has gone largely unexamined: that exposure to a message has inherent value, and that value scales linearly with the number of people exposed.

A thousand people saw your ad. A million people saw your ad. Ten million people saw your ad. More is better. Reach is the goal. The emotional state of the audience during exposure, the significance of the moment they were watching, the degree to which they were present and engaged rather than distracted and indifferent — these are noise in the model. At best, proxies. At worst, irrelevant.

This is a deeply strange way to think about communication.

What a Moment Actually Is

Consider two scenarios.

In the first, your brand’s name appears on a surface during a mid-season league match on a Tuesday evening. The game is unremarkable. The score is level, the play is slow, the crowd is half-full and quiet. Cameras sweep past your placement in the background. A few hundred thousand people are nominally watching. Most of them are also on their phones.

In the second scenario, your brand’s name appears on the same surface during the final minute of a championship. The score is tied. The crowd is at a level of collective tension that is physically palpable through the screen. Every person watching is fully, completely present — not because they chose to be, but because the moment will not allow anything less.

The CPM model assigns nearly identical value to these two exposures. The surface area is the same. The duration is comparable. The impressions are counted the same way.

This is obviously wrong. And everyone in the room knows it is wrong. But the industry has not yet found a language — or a commercial structure — adequate to the difference.

Emotion as Infrastructure

The difference between those two moments is not demographic. It is emotional.