Heineken sees 8% awareness lift from just 2.2 seconds of attention

Heineken has spent heavily to prove something most display advertisers still struggle to show: that attention, measured in seconds, actually moves brand awareness. In a test with GumGum, the brewer overlaid brand-lift survey results with attention data for its Birra Moretti brand and found a clear threshold: just 2.2 seconds of attention.

The test and the threshold

Working with advertising technology company GumGum, Heineken used a method called Attentive Lift, which merges brand-lift study data from On Device with attention metrics across a panel of thousands of consumers. The Birra Moretti campaign ran mobile and desktop skin units against martial arts, boxing, tennis and gaming content.

The result: respondents who looked at the ads for more than 2.2 seconds showed an 8% increase in unaided awareness and a 4% increase in familiarity. Desktop skin units held attention for 4.5 seconds on average, three times the IAB baseline.

Why this matters for display budgets

The context is a media market that keeps tilting toward platforms. European spending on social video rose an estimated 25.7% in 2025, according to the IAB, while growth in non-walled garden inventory has slowed. Heineken’s marketing and sales investments already account for 10.1% of its €14.84 billion net revenue, so every channel must justify itself.

“It’s important for us to be able to tell a story to our brand team and unlock more budget,” said Sabrina Court, digital media specialist at The Heineken Group, in the source.

The promise of attentive lift is that once a brand-specific attention benchmark is established, the in-house media team can use it to guide decisions and, later, to adjust campaigns mid-flight.

The attention trap to avoid

Attention metrics are seductive, but Marc Guldimann, founder of Adelaide, warns that optimising for the longest duration of attention on an impression can backfire. “When you optimize media to the longest duration of attention on an impression, you end up creating bad creative incentives,” he said. The most attention-grabbing creative may not be the best carrier of a brand message.

Mixing attention time with brand-lift surveys reduces that risk. The goal is not maximum attention, but the threshold at which attention starts producing brand outcomes.

What a marketer can steal

• Pair attention data with brand-lift research instead of relying on one signal alone.
• Build a custom attention threshold for each brand, not for the category.
• Use the benchmark to make budget cases and guide mid-flight changes.

Mattress Firm’s CMO Tom Murray described a similar approach at Advertising Week New York, using creative effectiveness data from iSpot to align attention, message recall and awareness. Its campaign targeting sleepers with snoring partners scored high on all three, proving attention can be earned rather than shortcut.

Source: Digiday