Marketing’s data dilemma: Why relevance, not reach, defines attention

In an economy where attention is the new currency, brands are discovering that reach no longer guarantees recall. To measure what truly captures consumers’ focus, Snapchat, WPP Media, and attention-measurement specialist Lumen launched Attention Advantage in August this year.

This multi-platform research redefines digital effectiveness through a simple yet critical metric: genuine attention, where eyes actually linger on an ad. It’s a timely insight, given that by 2035, India’s 377 million Gen Z consumers will command $2 trillion in spending power, but an increasingly low tolerance for uninspired advertising.

The study identifies three creative imperatives for brands navigating this reality: show up on the right platforms, prioritise immersive formats like non-skippable video and AR, and craft native, user-driven content that feels authentic. Together, these findings offer a new playbook for marketers chasing what’s now the rarest commodity online — sustained human attention.

Consumers aren’t suffering from an attention deficit, says Rohit Dadwal, CEO of MMA Global Asia Pacific; they’re simply in a deficit world of relevance. “People don’t lack the ability to recognise,” he told Campaign, on the sidelines of MMA Smarties Unplugged India 2025. “They move on because it’s not relevant. But if it’s interesting, they’ll sit through a three-minute ad or even look it up online.”

That reframing captures a shift in how marketers must now think about creative effectiveness. It’s not the speed of scrolling that’s the problem; it’s the shallowness of connection.

Dadwal calls attention the new metric, referencing MMA’s ‘First Second Strategy'. This methodology found that it takes just 0.5 to 0.8 seconds for a consumer to recognise an ad on a mobile device. So, just imagine that if a brand advertises to everybody and nobody pays attention, then what’s the point of advertising?

Speed, Dadwal said, is now both a consumption pattern and a creative constraint. “Many campaigns don’t even show the logo in the first two seconds,” he added. “It’s not about reach anymore. It’s about resonance.”

Drowning in dashboards, directionless in decisions

Marketers today are inundated with data, but not insight. They are drowning in dashboards, yet strangely, despite having access to it, they are literally directionless.

According to MMA surveys, 71% of marketers struggle to act on measurement, unable to convert the flood of information into actionable intelligence. The paradox, Dadwal explained, lies in how organisations collect and compartmentalise their data.

“There’s a lot more data, and that data is represented on some dashboard. But is it being effectively utilised? Are people able to build intelligent insights to act on it—and is it visible?” he asked.

Much of that failure stems from data silos. While marketers could have first-party data from CRM, Dadwal questions whether it really align to their campaign objectives? “Should you be looking at that data before building a campaign, or post-campaign—and does it tie back to the sales channel?” he questioned.

Marketers are also waking up to the limits of information without integration. “A lot of this data is not intelligent,” Dadwal added. “They are hopeful that AI will do that for them, but they also need to tie it back to their objectives and KPIs.”

Why marketing must tie itself to business

The role of marketing is intangibly tied to sales. “From a measurement perspective, it should be directly correlated to sales,” he said. “With all the digital data we have, you should be able to measure every dollar spent to sales.”

Yet most organisations fail to connect those dots. “Different platforms, services and vendors have their own metrics,” he said. “Unfortunately, some marketers still measure likes and views—metrics that don’t deliver value to sales. The challenge is connecting it to the sales data, which is an internal process. In many organisations, that data doesn’t tie up from one source to the other.”

Without this alignment, CFOs are left unconvinced. If one doesn’t have the mechanics where the supply chain supports the data that rolls into marketing and then to the CFO, how does one correlate a marketing dollar being questioned by finance, Dadwal wondered.

MMA has been developing frameworks to address this disconnect. The Movable Middle Growth Framework (MMGF), for instance, helps marketers understand which segments drive the most growth and whether they’re overspending or underspending.

“If you can tie that back to your campaign objectives and KPIs, your dashboard becomes a friendly place,” he said. “But today, that’s not the case.”

The promise, and pitfalls, of AI

Artificial intelligence (AI), Dadwal believes, can bridge some of these gaps, but only when applied with precision. “AI can play a role at various levels, but you need to choose which part of your campaign, media or strategy you want it to influence,” he explained.

MMA’s Consortium for AI Personalisation (CAP) focuses specifically on how AI can optimise creative and media delivery in real time. “We looked at whether AI could target audiences and render creatives based on audience preferences, in a real-time scenario,” Dadwal said.

The results have been significant. Dadwal revealed that MMA has done about 25 case studies in QSR, financial services, beverages and healthcare sectors. On average, it saw between 50% to 175% enhanced ROI on the same marketing dollar. In some cases, companies customised up to 512 creatives based on 1,200 audience signals—a scale that would be impossible for humans alone.

AI’s strength, Dadwal said, lies in prediction and rendering—not yet in creation. “We don’t think generative AI should build your creative, because of IP and trademark issues,” he explained. “But once the creative is approved, AI can predict which version should be sent to which audience or signal.”

While predictive AI can assist in campaign post-mortems, Dadwal cautions against expecting full creative foresight. “If I ask AI whether a campaign will be successful, nobody can do that,” he said. “It’s not possible for at least another ten years — because AI doesn’t have emotion, and marketing is about human emotion.”

Rewriting KPIs for the AI era

Technology is also expanding the boundaries of what can be measured. “There were 72 attributes used to measure marketing earlier; now it’s 94, and with AI and martech, it could go to 120,” Dadwal said. But metrics alone mean little without the ability to act on them. “You can change the KPI, but if you don’t have the capability to measure it, what’s the point?”

He pointed to how roles evolve with technological adoption. “A decade ago, digital wasn’t even a role in most organisations,” he said. “Now, the Chief Digital Officer is essential because 30–40% of budgets go there. They build KPIs and ensure they tie back to business.”

This shift, Dadwal believes, is forcing marketers to think beyond performance alone. “In certain companies, data might lead the narrative, but marketing has to be built on storytelling and emotions,” he said. “You can’t build a brand on performance alone.”

To counter the false divide between creativity and conversion, MMA has developed a new framework, Brand as Performance. “If you drive purely based on data, you’ll never build affinity or emotional connection,” Dadwal said.

He argues that the binary between brand and performance is outdated. “When you do performance, you build brand too,” he said. “You don’t run performance campaigns without your brand logo. That’s how people remember and interact with it.”

Case studies back this up. “We measured performance campaigns for seven months and saw a 2x return in both affinity and sales,” Dadwal said. “You still need brand-building because otherwise, you can’t sustain on performance alone.”

From attention to accountability

Dadwal believes the industry’s next frontier is turning marketing data into true business intelligence. “Data can help predict and analyse insights for the next campaign,” he said. “But it’s also important to see how it integrates into the supply chain and KPIs—not just for marketing, but for the organisation.”

For that, businesses must evolve their structures as much as their tech stacks. “If all this data exists, we should be able to measure a lot more,” he said. “And when we can, the definition of marketing will also change, it’ll be accountable for far more than likes or engagement metrics.”

He calls this the era of “connected accountability.” “The more data we have, the more informed our decisions can be,” Dadwal said. “But that requires organisations to understand what their data means, not just how much of it they have.”

As AI matures, marketing may finally be able to blend its twin instincts—intuition and intelligence. But Dadwal’s reminder is simple: technology can’t replace the fundamentals of relevance. “Consumers don’t have short attention spans,” he said. “They have short tolerance for irrelevance.”

In a world where brands compete not for eyeballs but for emotional bandwidth, that may be the sharpest KPI of all.