If an ad falls in a forest and there’s no one around to see it, does it make an impression?

Served but not seen, part 2

Happy New Year! We hope you had a fantastic holiday. We wish you all the best in 2026. And? The SRH Empirical Marketing Dispatch is back!

A few weeks ago, we looked at the results of a report called “The Eye-watering Cost of Dull” by Dr. Karen Nelson-Field, Peter Field and Adam Morgan. If you haven’t read it, you should. Dull media, they argue, wastes billions of advertising dollars each year because it wildly underdelivers on attention. Mostly active attention.

(Also, watch “Go Big or Go Home,” a presentation by Les Binet and Will Davis at the 2025 IPA Effectiveness Conference. It’s fairly short, remarkably eye-opening and we’ll circle back to it in a future Dispatch.)

A couple of weeks before that, we discussed a research paper called “The Effects of Advertising Media Channel Combinations on Brand Performance” by J. Jason Bell, Felipe Thomaz and Andrew Stephen of the University of Oxford. They looked at real-world campaigns and found that most media plans fall into one of seven different media mix “archetypes.” Each archetype had a different impact on various brand and business effects for a number of categories.

Nelson-Field, Field and Morgan argue that reach without attention isn’t reach. Which? Is hard to argue with. Bell, Thomaz and Stephen show that media plans that optimize for reach alone are leaving money on the table. We wondered if these two papers line up in any meaningful way.

Based on the seven media mix archetypes that Bell, Thomaz and Stephen found, are there some media plans that focus more on reach and some that focus more on attention?

And here’s where we take a moment to remember that the campaigns our University of Oxford researchers studied had an average media budget of $12 million, which buys a good amount of reach regardless of channel.

Okay, so how does optimizing for attention line up with our media mix archetypes? Let’s take a look at three “archetypes” from “The Effects of Advertising Media Channel Combinations on Brand Performance.”

Archetype 2 is the clearest example. A good chunk of the media budget goes to TV, but most of the rest goes to online video and display.

According to Bell, Thomaz and Stephen, this archetype never offers the best performance regardless of category or campaign goal. Online video (not YouTube) and display rarely deliver active attention, so this lines up nicely with the findings from “The Eye-Watering Cost of Dull Media.”

Archetype 5 focuses mostly on TV, online display, outdoor, newspapers and radio, with smaller investments in Facebook, online video, cinema, magazines, YouTube and POS.

Here we have a more balanced mix of high and low-attention media. TV, generally speaking, is a high-attention platform. So are print and radio. Online display and online video are not. Facebook isn’t either. Outdoor generally relies on passive attention over long periods of time.

Interestingly, this mix is much better at driving lower funnel metrics like association and motivation (sales) for the Services category. For the Durables/Tech category, however, it’s better at driving higher funnel metrics like unaided awareness.

Archetype 6 focuses mostly on TV, outdoor and Facebook, with some investment in newspapers, cinema, radio and magazines and minimal spend on YouTube, online display and POS. It delivers the best outcomes, but only for CPG brands.

Here’s how these media plans stack up:

This has almost nothing to do with legacy vs. digital or legacy vs. algorithmically-driven platforms. Some channels are simply better at delivering active attention. TV, for example, is great at it. Reddit is less good at it.

The most effective plans (Archetypes 5 & 6) seem to succeed because they use high-attention media to build mental availability while low-attention media like OOH and Facebook deliver nudges and reminders. If you try to build a brand using only low-attention media, you’re trying to remind people about something they haven’t actually learned yet.

So what does any of this mean for you?

Attention has to be earned. People are busy. They’re paying attention to what matters to them. Sometimes that’s their kids or their partner or their dog. Sometimes it’s a TV show or a podcast or whatever their algorithm’s got cooking for them. One of those things might be your brand, but it’s probably not. It takes both great creative and a fantastic media plan to grab people’s attention and hold it for a few, shining, critical seconds.

The real world is messy with lots of weird variables, which makes media strategy and media planning, well, complicated. Embrace the complexity or work with people who do. Are all digital ad placements terrible? No, but you really have to be careful. Because once your media buy is locked in, you’re probably not going to experiment. If you were to experiment, however, a little geo-based media mix and incrementality testing couldn’t hurt.

At SRH, we also have more than a decade of real-world experience with diabolically effective media planning and media buys for brands of nearly all sizes. We also know this …

You can deliver the greatest campaign creative on Earth, but if your media plan is duller than pants, none of it will matter. Of course, the opposite is true.

We’ll see you next time!

Sources!

The Cost of Dull Media – Dr Karen Nelson-Field
The Effects of Advertising Media Channel Combinations on Brand Performance – J. Jason Bell, Felipe Thomaz and Andrew T. Stephen, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford
The Attention Economy and How Media Works: Simple Truths for Marketers – Dr. Karen Nelson-Field
Interactions between attention and memory – PubMed