Half of all ads place their brand somewhere only 5% of viewers ever look. That's one of the numbers behind ad attention that Thomas Zoëga Ramsøy, founder and CEO of Neurons, brought to this conversation: a very common placement habit working against reach that's already been paid for.

In this episode of Connecting the dots, I sat down with Thomas to discuss, amongst other things: 

• how much of what looks like a shrinking attention span is really just faster decision-making
• why an ad built on strong emotion can score extremely well and still fail to register the brand behind it, 
• and that placement habit itself.

Thomas founded Neurons in 2013 after years as a clinical neuropsychologist, the kind of background that means he spent a long time measuring what's actually happening in people's brains before he ever pointed that at an ad.

Here's what we covered in the first part of the episode, and what you can take away from it.

Ad attention span is now under two seconds

As marketers, we know that most platforms still treat three seconds as the point where an impression "counts". Thomas's team tested that benchmark directly: eye tracking and EEG on more than a thousand people across Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, and ESPN found the average disengagement point was 3.4 seconds. Follow-up studies brought that down to 2.2 seconds, then 1.9 seconds last year.

Thomas attributes this less to attention spans shrinking outright and more to people making the "is this relevant to me" decision faster and more often. Across the same channels, he also found a real swing between the best- and worst-performing ads, about three seconds in total (roughly one and a half seconds in either direction), which by his account comes down to the creative choices rather than the platform or the targeting. Same platform, same targeting, same media line: a three-second difference in how long the ad actually gets watched, decided entirely before it goes live.

The four types of attention in advertising, and the payoff each one buys

Thomas breaks attention down into four mechanisms, each with a different payoff and a different risk.

1. Bottom-up attention 

Bottom-up attention is automatic: a red balloon against a grey street, a flickering pixel on a screen. It works because the brain can't not look, though it risks feeling like an interruption rather than a message.

2. Top-down attention

Top-down attention is the rare, opposite case: someone actively searching for something specific. Thomas points to DoorDash's Super Bowl code-hunt ad as a deliberate example, though it only really works once a brand is already loved enough that people go looking for it.

3. Emotional attention

Emotional attention is the one most creative strategy chases, and it carries the sharpest trade-off. Strong emotion pulls focus brilliantly, but the classic failure mode, as Thomas describes it, is that people remember the story and forget who told it: he points to both an Evian ad and a Sony Bravia campaign that scored extremely well on ad-liking while barely registering the brand behind them. A reminder that ad liking and the brand recall it's often assumed to buy aren't the same line item.

4. Cognitive attention

Cognitive attention is the quiet one: people focus faster, and stay longer, on brands and items they already recognise, independent of whether they particularly like them. Worth sitting with: if recognition alone pulls focus, familiarity may already be doing some of the work a new campaign is paying to redo.

The corner of death: a brand placement mistake half of all ads still make

What is the "corner of death" in advertising?

The “corner of death” is Thomas's term for placing the brand (logo, product, or name) in the bottom right corner of a static or video ad. By his team's measurement, roughly half of all ads do this, and fewer than 5% of viewers' eyes ever land there.

Thomas points to the Sony Bravia ad, colourful balls bouncing down a San Francisco hill, as a clean example. Beautiful, widely loved, ad liking through the roof. Nobody remembered it was Sony Bravia.

Thomas's suggestion: build the brand into the scene the way a character would naturally hold or use it, rather than adding it in afterwards. It's the kind of gap we spend a lot of our own Creative work closing, keeping creative tied to the media plan it's meant to support rather than produced separately from it.

How to check your own ads for the corner of death without an EEG lab

Thomas's studies run on eye tracking and brain scanning most brands won't run themselves, but the check itself doesn't need either. Pull your five best-performing live assets and look, frame by frame, at where the brand sits in the first two seconds, and whether it's part of what's happening on screen or added in beside it.

The three layers of emotion in marketing, and the one a survey can't reach

Thomas breaks emotion into three layers: 

1. Gut-level responses that happen before someone is aware of them,
2. An implicit middle layer (trust, engagement) that colours a reaction without being nameable, and only then…
3. The conscious feelings people can actually put into words on a survey.

According to Thomas, asking people how they felt used to be the only data point marketing had. That left out roughly 95% of what actually shapes behaviour, the part people can't consciously report.

A creative review checklist based on this episode

The numbers most decks report (likes, view-through rate, ad-liking surveys) and the numbers that actually predict what someone does next aren't always the same number. A few places to start:

• Check where the brand sits in your top five running ads, frame by frame, in the first two seconds. If it's tucked in the bottom right corner, that's the corner of death.
• Look at your best- and worst-performing creative in the same campaign and name the one specific choice, not the audience or the budget, that explains the gap in watch time.
• Before signing off on a highly emotional concept, check whether the brand is woven into the story or sitting beside it as a logo.
• If ad-liking or view-through rate is a headline metric on your dashboard, ask whether it's quietly rewarding creative people love and forget.

Part 2 picks up from here: what emotion actually does once attention has been earned, and a properly counterintuitive argument about which side of the B2B/B2C divide is really the more emotional purchase.

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