When impressions have no impact

Why impression quality is becoming the most important growth driver in modern advertising

The volume of ad impressions keeps rising across an increasingly fragmented media environment, but human attention does not increase with it. Brands now place messages in more contexts, more formats and more platforms than ever, yet a smaller share of these moments leads to real cognitive impact. Standard, passive display ads rarely slow memory decay or create the mental availability needed to influence behaviour.

The industry still treats an impression as a unit of effectiveness, but delivery alone does not guarantee attention or memory. Most campaigns fall short at the foundation, not because the media plan is poorly optimised, but because the quality of each moment of contact is too weak to create lasting impact.

Impression quality as a competitive advantage

Every category has a limit to what advertising can achieve. How close a brand gets to that limit depends on the strength of each contact with its audience.

In competitive markets where budgets remain flat and only a small segment of buyers is actively shopping at any given time, the effectiveness of every paid moment becomes commercially important. Interactive rich media increases the amount of time people spend with the brand and strengthens how brand elements are stored in memory. This improves the usefulness of each impression and increases the chances that the brand will be recalled when the buying moment arrives.

These effects rarely appear in campaign dashboards, yet they are responsible for most of advertising’s true long term value. Improving impression quality gives brands an advantage competitors cannot easily replicate through optimization alone.

Understanding category physics

Most categories follow similar patterns. Buying cycles are long, actual purchase windows are short and the majority of customers are not currently in the market. Because of this, advertising must prepare the brand for future choice, not only immediate response. The goal is to make the brand quick to mind when demand eventually surfaces.

Interactive formats align with this reality. They are designed to spark curiosity, invite exploration and create deeper mental processing. These moments stand out in environments where most banners are ignored. When repeated over time, they build mental availability that makes the brand easier to recognise and easier to select.

How interactive formats improve attention and memory

Campaigns underperform when they rely solely on passive formats that provide visibility but do little to influence how people think. Interactive formats increase the value of each paid moment across three layers:

• Attention

  They help the brand break through noise, hold interest for longer and give people a reason to stay with the message.

  
  

• Deeper processing

  Interaction encourages active thinking. This strengthens how brand cues are stored in long term memory and slows the pace at which they fade.

  
  

• Action readiness

  By reducing cognitive friction, clarifying product value and guiding exploration, interactive formats make future decisions easier and more intuitive.

The combined effect is straightforward. A fixed media budget produces more meaningful mental availability and a more predictable flow of future demand. This improves both short term performance and long term growth potential.

Credit for the inspiration behind this blog post goes to the LinkedIn article “Delusion. Denial. Deception. Why Most Media Plans Are Doomed Before a Dollar Is Spent” by Paul Ruscoe.