Active Attention Involves Deliberate Decision-Making
According to Roxana Nicolescu, VP, Brand Marketing & Social Media (Global), Wego.com, attention is not necessarily disappearing; it is becoming more fragmented, selective and rapidly reallocated between feeds, creators, searches, messages and cultural moments.
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A traveller scrolling through Instagram saves a video of a hidden beach in Greece. Three days later, they ask an AI assistant for the best time to visit. A week after that, they compare flights, share the destination with a friend, and then make a booking.
Which moment mattered most?
The industry became comfortable counting what was easy to count: impressions served, videos viewed, clicks generated and minutes spent. The assumption was straightforward — more attention meant more influence.
But consumer behaviour no longer follows a straight line. Decisions are now shaped through a series of fragmented moments spread across social feeds, creator content, private messages, search queries and increasingly, AI-generated recommendations.
A person may spend only a few seconds with a piece of content, yet carry its influence all the way to purchase weeks later. Conversely, someone can spend several minutes with branded content and remember none of it.
As artificial intelligence reshapes how people discover and evaluate information, marketers are being forced to rethink a fundamental question: Is attention really about duration, or is it about impact?
“Active attention should be evaluated through the depth of behaviour and progression towards purchase. Passive attention should be assessed through recall, saves, shares, subsequent branded searches and assisted conversion,” says Roxana Nicolescu, VP, Brand Marketing & Social Media (Global), Wego.com.
In this interview, Nicolescu discusses why impressions and time spent are becoming less reliable indicators of influence, how AI is changing the travel discovery journey, why short moments of attention can create outsized business impact, and which metrics brands should prioritise in an increasingly fragmented attention economy.
Excerpts from the interview;
Marketers have always treated attention as a volume game: more impressions, more reach, and more time spent. What signals tell you that this model is becoming less relevant?
The volume model is becoming less relevant because delivery is not the same as attention, and attention is not the same as influence. An impression tells us that content was served, but it does not tell us whether someone noticed it, understood it or remembered the brand.
Current industry measurement standards distinguish viewability, the opportunity for an advertisement to be seen, from attention, which assesses whether it was genuinely noticed or engaged with.
Attention is not necessarily disappearing, it is becoming more fragmented, selective and rapidly reallocated between feeds, creators, searches, messages and cultural moments.
Imagine someone scrolling through social media with no immediate intention of travelling. A creator shares a quiet beach, a local restaurant or an unexpected weekend destination, and within seconds the viewer saves the post. A few days later, they search for the destination, compare flights and send the idea to a friend.
The original content may have generated only a few seconds of attention, but it started a much longer decision journey. This is why we need to understand where attention is clustering, around which trends, creators, conversations and cultural moments, and then connect that attention to saves, branded searches, qualified visits, consideration and ultimately bookings.
In travel, consumers often spend weeks researching before making a decision. How should brands distinguish between active attention and passive attention?
The first consideration is that travel research itself is changing. People previously moved manually between search results, review platforms, maps, social media and multiple booking tabs.
LLMs and AI assistants can now compare destinations, summarise reviews, build itineraries and narrow hundreds of options into a manageable shortlist. Reports published by travel companies and digital analytics providers in markets such as the US show significant growth in traffic from generative AI tools, with some reporting year-over-year increases of more than 3,000%.
These visitors have also been shown to spend longer on travel websites and leave less frequently after viewing only one page, although they are not always ready to complete a booking. This suggests AI is concentrating attention during research and consideration, even when the final transaction happens through another channel.
Active attention involves deliberate decision making: comparing travel dates, changing filters, examining different airports, asking an AI assistant follow-up questions, saving a hotel, setting a fare alert or returning to an itinerary.
Passive attention is more incidental: watching a destination video while scrolling, seeing a creator visit a resort, noticing a travel integration on television or receiving a recommendation in a messaging group.
Active attention should be evaluated through the depth of behaviour and progression towards purchase. Passive attention should be assessed through recall, saves, shares, subsequent branded searches and assisted conversion.
Both are important because passive exposure can determine which destinations and brands enter the shortlist once active planning begins.
Can a five-second interaction sometimes be more valuable than five minutes of engagement? How do you evaluate the quality of attention rather than its duration?
Yes, because the value of attention depends on what happens during it, not simply how long it lasts.
Imagine someone waiting for an elevator and seeing a five-second travel advertisement that immediately communicates the destination, the benefit and the brand. They remember it, search for the destination later and begin comparing dates.
In contrast, another person may leave a five-minute video playing in the background without absorbing the message at all. Attention research supports this distinction; one study found that an exposure of at least five seconds generated approximately 40% more advertising recall than an exposure of only one second.
Broader research covering thousands of campaigns has also found that attentive exposure is associated with stronger awareness, consideration, preference and intention to act. The important point is not that five seconds is always sufficient, but that a short, focused interaction can outperform a much longer passive one.
To evaluate quality, we should ask whether the brand was encoded, whether the central message was understood, whether the context was relevant and whether the interaction created a meaningful behavioural response.
In travel, a five-second message that clearly communicates a relevant fare, destination benefit or booking advantage and prompts someone to check dates can represent extremely valuable attention. Five minutes of a travel video playing in an inactive browser tab may represent very little.
Attentive seconds should therefore be paired with message comprehension, brand recall, search lift, qualified site or app behaviour, saved trips and incremental booking outcomes.
As attention fragments across search, social platforms, creators, messaging apps and AI-powered discovery tools, what becomes harder to measure, and what becomes more important to understand?
What becomes harder is reconstructing the full sequence of influence. A traveller may first discover a destination through a creator, search for it several days later, ask an AI assistant to compare neighbourhoods, receive a hotel recommendation through a private message and eventually book through an app notification.
Traditional attribution may credit only the final measurable click while overlooking the creator, a private conversation, or an AI-generated answer that shaped the decision. This is especially important as AI systems increasingly filter, summarise and prioritise information before consumers encounter a brand directly.
A brand can remain technically visible while no longer meaningfully influencing the outcome.
AI can improve measurement by processing accessible behavioural signals, estimating predicted attention and helping model cross-channel contribution. Current industry frameworks recognise methods ranging from digital interaction signals and visual tracking to panels and predictive approaches, while marketing mix models can estimate channel contribution and incremental effects.
However, AI cannot measure what it cannot observe. Private messaging, disconnected devices, restricted platform data and AI-mediated recommendations without a referral click will remain partially invisible.
Models also depend on data quality, assumptions and the treatment of confounding variables. The objective should therefore be credible triangulation across attention, brand lift, behavioural, experimental and commercial evidence, not the illusion of a perfectly measured individual journey.
What are some examples of attention metrics that look impressive in reports but have little correlation with real business outcomes?
Reach and impressions are the clearest examples because they demonstrate distribution, not whether the audience noticed or understood the message. Engagement rate can also be misleading when reactions are generated by a competition, an unrelated trend or controversy rather than genuine brand interest.
Video views may include extremely brief or automatic plays, completion rates do not confirm that someone was actively watching, time spent can include idle screens, follower growth can come from audiences outside the target market, click-through rates can reflect curiosity rather than qualified intent, and a low CPM may simply mean that the campaign bought inexpensive inventory that few relevant people noticed.
These metrics are still useful as diagnostics, but they should not be presented as business results. Reach tells us about potential scale, engagement can indicate creative resonance, and CPM measures delivery efficiency.
We should pair them with attentive reach, branded search movement, qualified website or app sessions, destination and accommodation searches, saved trips, fare alerts, consideration, incrementality, bookings and customer quality.
A travel campaign with moderate visible engagement that generates a measurable increase in qualified hotel searches or booking consideration may be considerably more effective than a viral post that never changes brand preference or travel behaviour.
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