Most Indian marketers still plan media around how many people they can reach, and far fewer make attention quality a top allocation factor, according to the new Beyond Reach report from Publicis Media India and MMA India.
Reach dominates the planning brief
The report found 81% of Indian marketers put reach or incremental reach in their top three media-allocation metrics. Only 17% say the same for attention quality. That gap matters because reach tells you exposure happened, but not whether anyone noticed.
Marketers seem ready to move. While 69% say attention is absent from their media plans or does not influence decisions, 86% would be likely or very likely to reallocate budgets if robust attention evidence showed another allocation could strengthen brand memory.
The barrier is measurement, not appetite
Attention’s adoption problem is technical. Around 92% of marketers rank the lack of reliable or standardised attention measurement among their top three challenges, and 100% believe an agreed industry standard would speed adoption. In other words, the demand for attention-led decision-making is ahead of the tools to apply it consistently.
Lumen, the report’s attention partner, contributed India-specific planning norms. The benchmarks estimate aggregate visual attention for every 1,000 delivered impressions across formats:
- Instagram Reels: 692 attentive seconds
- YouTube skippable video: 1,957 attentive seconds
- YouTube non-skippable video: 3,579 attentive seconds
- CTV: 7,286 attentive seconds
- Linear TV: 7,771 attentive seconds
The authors caution these are not an effectiveness ranking. But they show equal impression counts can deliver very different amounts of human attention, even within the same platform.
Creative is the missing half
Attention is not just a media metric. Media creates the chance to be noticed; creative determines how well that chance is used. While 94% of marketers say creative is at least as important as placement in earning attention, only 14% systematically adapt creative to different formats and lengths.
Lalatendu Das, CEO, Publicis Media South Asia, said reach remains fundamental but scale alone does not show whether an exposure has the quality to drive an outcome. He added that the report helps marketers understand not just how many people a plan reaches, but the quality of those exposures and their potential to build memory and influence brand choice.
Moneka Khurana, MD and BOD at MMA India, put it bluntly: brands can be seen everywhere, but “being seen is not the same as being noticed.” She said attention does not replace reach; it qualifies it, making attention a real input into planning, creative and investment decisions.
What marketers should do now
For planning teams, the immediate step is to add an attention lens to reach-based comparisons: request attentive seconds per 1,000 impressions by format before deciding where to shift spend. For creative teams, the report suggests adapting work to the attention environment each format actually provides, rather than reusing one master asset. And for the industry, the clearest signal is a standard: every marketer in the study wants an agreed measurement approach to accelerate adoption.
Until that standard arrives, reach will still dominate Indian media plans. But the evidence suggests the shift is not a question of willingness; it is a question of credible, comparable measurement and the discipline to apply it.
Source: Storyboard18
