Getting attention is one thing. Knowing how much of it an ad needs to drive brand recognition is something else entirely.
Attention intelligence platform xpln.ai is making it its business to know the difference.
The startup launched in 2022 with two core products, CEO and Co-Founder Fabien Magalon told AdExchanger: an attention measurement solution that tracks campaign performance and a targeting solution that helps advertisers optimize for attention.
The “right threshold of attention” depends on the creative, Magalon said, so it’s important for advertisers to understand how their goals might vary depending on the platform or ad format.
Earlier this week, xpln announced the launch of Ideal Attention Time, an attention metric that helps advertisers understand exactly how much attention their creative needs to be effective.
More than meets the eye
Because getting someone’s attention isn’t enough on its own. Attention without brand or product recognition is just noise.
Insurance company AXA, for example, a longtime xpln customer and the first to adopt the new ideal attention time metric, ran a campaign last year to promote its initiative providing legal and relocation services to victims of domestic violence.
One of the campaign videos is thirty seconds long and follows a woman as she moves out of her home due to domestic abuse. It only becomes evident during the last few seconds of the video that this is an ad for AXA’s insurance offerings.
The campaign’s creative was powerful, said Magalon, and even won several awards at Cannes Lions in 2025. “But from a very operational perspective,” he said, “it doesn’t work everywhere.”
In digital environments where people are constantly scrolling, like social media, they’re likely to zip past the ad before realizing it has anything to do with AXA.
May I have your attention?
Which is where xpln’s new attention metric comes in.
Ideal attention time provides advertisers with the minimum attention an ad requires to achieve “basic business outcomes” like product understanding and brand recognition, said Magalon.
The goal is to help brands understand how their creative resonates – or doesn’t – so they can adjust accordingly.
AXA adopted the metric several months ago for a major global campaign, said Marine Gissy, the brand’s global media lead. Gissy and her team already had a solid understanding of which media would drive strong attention, she said, but not how much the creative itself mattered.
Insurance brands don’t have the same instant recognition as major consumer brands like M&M’s, Gissy pointed out, and so the content takes a bit longer to “land,” she said, and viewers don’t always “get it right away.”
Using the ideal attention time metric, AXA found that it takes roughly three seconds for its content to drive attention and five seconds to develop brand recognition.
Xpln uses computer vision to analyze each frame of an ad – ten frames per second – and then labels each element, including whether it contains a logo, what the text says and whether humans are featured.
The tool also measures attention through eye tracking, questionnaires, surveys and panels via external partners to assess how long people spend paying attention to ad creative and whether they can recall the brand.
Xpln then analyzes that data across brands and campaigns to feed an algorithm that can predict, as Magalon put it, “how much attention is needed to trigger recognition” based on the specific creative design and product.
Revise, revise, revise
But back to AXA, five seconds was longer than the brand wanted it to take in order to gain brand recognition, Gissy said. And so it worked with its creative agency to come up with ways to build the brand connection faster, such as by introducing the AXA logo earlier in the ad.
Beyond building recognition faster, AXA also wanted to deepen engagement. To do so, it developed longer formats designed not just to catch someone’s eye but to keep people watching. Since making these changes, the brand has seen an increase in the campaign’s average attention time and a drop in cost per attentive second.
The lag in recognition didn’t come as a surprise to AXA, but it’s good to have quantifiable evidence, Gissy said. Attention proved to be the “real KPI,” she added, that proved bottom-line impact.
Not every brand has AXA’s problem, though. Some of xpln’s clients have had the opposite experience in that their content drives brand recognition “almost instantly,” said Magalon, which means they could end up “overpaying for an outcome [they’ve] already earned.”
It cuts both ways.
Knowing how much attention is enough, it turns out, is just as important as getting it in the first place.
