Attention Is Not the Same as Effectiveness
By Fiona van Iersel
Minerva Empowerment
Marketing Communications
13 April 2026

Imagine planning a campaign for an app-based food and grocery delivery brand. My first instinct would be to put much of the budget into mobile advertising, social media and keyword search, partly because that is how I behave as a consumer. Mobile advertising could support downloads and sales; social media and search could build visibility and reach people already looking for convenience. Supporting creative work would help the campaign feel connected rather than a collection of separate placements.

It sounds sensible, but a sensible channel list does not guarantee an effective campaign. Too much of the budget can end up generating attention without building meaning or converting interest into action. The message still matters. Peloton’s 2019 holiday advert attracted enormous attention, including a negative reaction from me, but attention was hardly the outcome the brand wanted (Reuters, 2019). Just Eat’s “Did Somebody Say Just Eat” offers a different comparison: a recognisable creative platform connected activity across TV, radio and social media (Marketing Week, 2019; Marketing Week, 2021). Reach and talk value are not the same as a response that helps the brand.

Marketing communications is about giving each channel a role. The hierarchy-of-effects model reminds us that awareness is one stage on the route to purchase, not the destination (Lavidge & Steiner, 1961). Integrated marketing communications asks us to coordinate the tools instead of treating them separately (Kitchen & Burgmann, 2015; Batra & Keller, 2016). Binet and Field’s argument for balancing brand-building and sales activation adds another useful discipline: a plan needs both a reason to remember the brand and a route to act on that memory (Binet & Field, 2013).

The old line often attributed to John Wanamaker still captures the frustration: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” A clearer job for each channel will not remove every uncertainty, but it gives us a better question than simply asking where we can buy the most attention.

References

Batra, R., & Keller, K. L. (2016). Integrating marketing communications: New findings, new lessons, and new ideas. Journal of Marketing, 80(6), 122–145.

Binet, L., & Field, P. (2013). The long and the short of it: Balancing short and long-term marketing strategies. IPA.

Kitchen, P. J., & Burgmann, I. (2015). Integrated marketing communication: Making it work at a strategic level. Journal of Business Strategy, 36(4), 34–39.

Lavidge, R. J., & Steiner, G. A. (1961). A model for predictive measurements of advertising effectiveness. Journal of Marketing, 25(6), 59–62.

Marketing Week. (2019). Just Eat launches first global brand campaign.

Marketing Week. (2021). This much I learned: Just Eat’s Matt Bushby on going with your gut.

Reuters. (2019). Peloton says encouraged by some support despite Christmas ad criticism.