Attention intelligence platform xpln.ai launched Ideal Attention Time, a metric that tells advertisers the minimum attention their creative needs to achieve basic business outcomes like product understanding and brand recognition. The startup, founded in 2022 with an attention measurement product and an attention targeting product, is working from a simple premise, per CEO and co-founder Fabien Magalon: the “right threshold of attention” depends on the creative, so goals should vary by platform and format.
The case study is AXA. The insurer ran a campaign in 2025 promoting its legal and relocation services for victims of domestic violence, anchored by a 30-second film that follows a woman moving out of her home — with AXA only becoming evident in the final seconds. The creative won awards at Cannes. “But from a very operational perspective,” Magalon said, “it doesn’t work everywhere.” In scroll-heavy environments, viewers are gone before the brand ever appears.
AXA adopted the new metric several months ago for a major global campaign. The finding: its content takes roughly three seconds to drive attention and five seconds to develop brand recognition. Insurance brands don’t carry the instant recognition of an M&M’s, noted Marine Gissy, AXA’s global media lead — the content takes longer to land, and viewers don’t always get it right away.
Under the hood, xpln uses computer vision to analyze ads at ten frames per second, labeling each element — logo present, what the text says, whether humans appear. It layers on eye tracking, questionnaires, surveys, and panels through external partners, then feeds the accumulated data into an algorithm that predicts, as Magalon put it, “how much attention is needed to trigger recognition” for a given creative and product.
Five seconds was longer than AXA wanted, so it worked with its creative agency to build the brand connection faster — introducing the logo earlier — and developed longer formats designed to hold viewers rather than just catch them. Since the changes, the campaign’s average attention time has risen and cost per attentive second has dropped; no figures were shared. Attention, Gissy said, proved to be the “real KPI” connecting to bottom-line impact.
The metric cuts the other way too. Some xpln clients discovered their content drives recognition “almost instantly,” Magalon said — which means they could be “overpaying for an outcome [they’ve] already earned.”
Read more at AdExchanger.