The measurement of attention in advertising continues to evolve, redefining how advertisers assess ad creative and media quality. In practice, the broad term “attention” encompasses direct observations of individuals noticing, focusing on, or responding to stimuli and various proxy signals that many argue represent scalable indicators of human attention. As AI becomes more sophisticated and ubiquitous, algorithms trained on massive datasets of prior direct tests now compete by providing synthetic predictions of attention.

The ARF will showcase recent attention research from the perspectives of advertisers and agencies, along with preliminary findings from Phase 3 of the Attention Measurement Validation Initiative. Practitioners and academics will discuss the latest results and debate the growing significance of attention metrics in advertising and media measurement.