Why reach and impressions aren’t enough anymore: WPP Media’s Amin Lakhani on media’s next big shift
As the digital landscape fragments, media planners like WPP Media's Amin Lakhani and advertisers are questioning the old currency of impressions and turning to attention as a more powerful measure of impact.
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For decades, the advertising industry has relied on reach and impressions to justify spending. But as consumers scatter across platforms, multitask across devices and filter out ads in milliseconds, those old metrics are losing credibility. According to Amin Lakhani, President of Client Solutions at WPP Media South Asia, marketers today are asking harder questions - and agencies are under pressure to provide sharper answers.
Read more: Rise of the Attention Economy: Why marketers are rethinking metrics, media and creativity
“There is a huge amount of migration of consumers onto digital platforms. We are seeing multiple platforms coming into play - whether it’s entertainment, utilities or commerce," Lakhani told Storyboard18's editor Delshad Irani, in an exclusive interaction on Media Dialogues. The question is how do we really, in the advent of technology, measure them right, such that we can plan and drive effective campaigns?”
From Reach to Relevance
Lakhani emphasized that while digital has created unprecedented opportunities for engagement, it has also exposed the weaknesses of impression-based measurement.
“Clients continue to keep asking that question time and again. And this initiative itself that we’ve taken is a step forward in that direction - to bring in technology, to bring in consumer insights, to see how they are spending time, and how their focus and distraction play up, helping us really plan for a client’s win.”
This is no small shift. Reach may still matter for building awareness, but it is no longer the endgame. What matters now is whether consumers actually pay attention.
Building a New Planning Framework
WPP has already started integrating these lessons into its planning systems.
“What we've done is that we've already integrated these learnings into a planning platform. Not only in India but globally,” Lakhani said.
“As you know, India… we don’t have a single-source equivalent measurement or industry-recognized measurement system yet in digital. And as an industry, a lot more needs to be done in that direction. And I think this is one of those initiatives which is trying to bridge that gap.”
The response from advertisers has been strong. “Clients like Domino’s, Britannia, and Aditya Birla Fashion were very much excited to join us,” he noted. “I am seeing that as the next step - we are looking at doing deeper planning hacks with some of our large and key clients immediately.”
Attention as the New Currency
At the heart of this shift is the attention economy, the idea that not all impressions are equal, and that the scarce resource in modern advertising is consumer focus.
As Mike Follett, CEO of attention measurement firm Lumen, put it: “You can’t assume that just because you’ve bought an impression, you’ve made an impression. People are in charge of their own attention. Our job as marketers is to do something interesting and worth looking at.”
For Partho Banerjee, Head of Marketing and Sales at Maruti Suzuki, the implications are clear: “The creative agencies will be under pressure. Because now we are going to further be telling them that your creative is not working. If, based on this study, we can come out with some metrics which clearly show that within the first three seconds there is no more cutting through, then creative agencies will have a problem.”
A Future Beyond Impressions
Lakhani believes the next few years will be critical as more clients adopt attention as a planning and buying metric.
“Through this medium, through this initiative, through the launch of the report, we are trying to get attention and focus on this topic. And I’m very confident that more clients will come onto this bandwagon. Hopefully we will see this turn into a reality where we start embracing this metric much more than where it is right now.”
For agencies, the challenge will be balancing the demands of clients who want accountability with the need for creative freedom. For platforms, it means designing ad formats that earn rather than demand attention. And for advertisers, it signals a fundamental change in how success is measured: not by how many people could have seen an ad, but by how many people did—and for how long.
In short, impressions are no longer enough. The future of advertising will be measured in seconds of focus, not just numbers on a dashboard.
