THE ATTENTION FIXATION

In today’s attention economy ‘the eyes are the prize’, but when it comes to creator content things aren’t always how they appear

If you look at the sheer volume of commercial content being produced these days, you’d be forgiven for thinking things are out of control. This has been supercharged by the mainstream emergence of the Content Creator; which now number more than 200 million worldwide and are fueling an advertising market that will exceed more than $220 billion by the end of 2025.

Commercial models vary when it comes to creator monetization, however with a tsunami of content fighting for eyeballs, the biggest fight often reverts to just getting ANY kind of exposure at all.

‘Reach’ as a metric has been around for decades. You might call it a traditional metric, however it has also found a home in the modern new world of creator marketing. Creators are often bucketed into pay bands that are structured around their follower count or average views, and campaign results regularly report the size of the audience ‘reached’ as a sign of success.

Whilst focusing on this is not strictly incorrect, it carries with it an assumption that it has inherited from traditional advertising; that the more someone watches an ad, the more they are likely to remember the brand and therefore buy the product.

This makes sense with regular ads - these are designed to be highly efficient messaging machines. They are storyboarded, scripted and every pixel is squeezed to convey the maximum brand message in the minimum amount of time.

And for regular ads - the attention situation is dire. In fact, the recent State of Advertising 2025 Report by Neurons revaled that the average attention paid to a single mobile ad has dropped 35% since 2018; now at a measly 2.2 seconds. So the margins are razor thin.

SOURCE: State of Advertising 2025, Neurons

However research also shows that quality creative can deliver brand impact within that time window, in as little as 1.5 seconds in fact However this was shown to occur only for recognisable brands using distinctive brand assets, and the viewer needed to be showing ‘active attention’ during that time - not just having the content in view (Hacking the Attention Economy. VCCP, 2025).

So attention as a single sign of success can be useful in traditional video advertising, but are the rules the same for Creator content? Does simply measuring attention, whether that is views, engagements, or reach tell us what we need to know about how creators fare in presenting a brand message, and ensuring that it will be remembered and acted upon?

If you think about it - maybe not. In contrast to a regular ad - which has an agency, a production team, expensive cameras, a director, script, bigger budgets and longer timelines - creators are usually working with much less. The brand message doesn’t have an opportunity to be as finely tuned. What they do have is an audience, and the ability to engage that audience. But anyone who works with creators knows that there is always an uneasy tradeoff with commercial projects; creators will always want to achieve a balance between selling your product, and maintaining the authenticity and trust with their audience. Swing too commercial and they lose their most valuable asset - the eyeballs that makes them who they are; those same eyeballs that brands so longingly covet.

So is Attention the metric to judge the brand impact of a creator campaign? Our data says.. no it is not.

Element Human’s measurement stack includes measurement of Attention for creator content in social feeds, and combines it with full funnel brand metrics, as well as biometric reaction data such as Emotion and Brand Memory.

We tested  600 commercial creator videos on TikTok with 90 thousand viewers. We found that there is only a weak correlation between the number of seconds spent looking at the content in a social feed, and a rise in awareness of that brand amongst those viewers.
‍

‍

Attention in Feed v Brand Awareness Uplift for 600 x creator videos on TikTok. BASE: (n=90k). Element Human, 2025.

Now why is this? We must remember that creator content combines both advertising and storytelling in one. Unlike a regular ad, a creator video may not mention the ad right away, and the deployment of distinctive brand assets might be different or non-existent. The brand is being weaved into a story, and the story is what the audience came for. This is kind of the point, actually, because creator marketing is using that storytelling mechanism to present itself to a highly engaged audience; to slip around the usual ‘barriers’ that audiences can put up when they encounter advertising.

So creators deliver attention, but we need to measure more than this to truly understand the brand impact. Attention is the table stakes - it’s your foot in the door - but the rest depends on the skill of the creator themselves, and this is where emotion comes in. Element Human research has demonstrated that the longer an audience sustains a high degree of emotional intensity when watching creator content, the higher likelihood that memory associations will be created for the brand, and this in turn will increase consideration of the brand when buying moments present themselves.

Emotional Intelligence (Element Human & Influencer, 2024)

Creator marketing is highly engaging, but the prominence of the brand is not front and centre anymore. It’s part of a story, and the mileage will vary based on the storyteller and the story being told. An elegant combination of storytelling and brand, in which emotional engagement is delivered AND the brand has an opportunity to cut through, is not only the recipe for success but the framework for how to measure it.

Contact Element Human to activate world class measurement for your creator campaigns.

‍