Attention Is Marketing’s Most Depreciating Asset

Consumer attention has quietly become the most valuable—and fastest-decaying—asset on a marketer’s balance sheet. When a brand seizes it at the right moment, inventory moves, sentiment rallies and market share is defended. Miss that window, and capital vanishes into a fragmented media ecosystem. This tension is the core of the upcoming ETBrandEquity Townhall, an invitation-only gathering on October 9, 2026 at the JW Marriott, Juhu, Mumbai, convened with strategic partner Samsung Ads.

Built around the operational theme “Owning the Moment of Attention”, the event is deliberately not a broad industry summit. It is a small, confidential room for CMOs, founders and commercial strategists who carry bottom-line responsibility.

From balance sheet to boardroom

The first closed-door session puts a CEO’s lens on marketing. Sudhanshu Vats, managing director and CEO of Pidilite Industries, will unpack the move from consumer advocate to steward of shareholder value. The session is expected to examine how a chief executive evaluates consumer behaviour differently from a CMO, and the non-negotiable metrics marketing heads must present to earn confidence from boards, institutional investors and CFOs.

The anatomy of irreplaceable creative IP

In the second session, Prasoon Pandey, founder of Corcoise Films, goes behind the commercial execution of breakthrough storytelling. It is aimed at enterprise leaders who commission high-stakes creative work but rarely see its actual distillation. He will cover selling disruptive ideas no client asked for, managing risk across multi-screen architectures, and building the agency-client trust that produces culturally resonant, revenue-generating campaigns.

Samsung Ads will add the connected-screen perspective: how high-value consumption and viewing behaviour are shifting, and what that means for the value of brand attention and recurring customer equity.

What the room signals for every marketer

Even if you are not in the room, the agenda frames attention as perishable inventory. Here is the useful translation for your own planning:

• Attention depreciates quickly. Timing and context matter as much as reach; a right message at the wrong moment is still wasted capital.
• Boardroom trust is a metrics problem. CMOs need financial language—capital allocation, enterprise value, shareholder value—not just brand scores.
• Creative can be a moat. Disruptive, unbriefed ideas are often the ones that become culturally resonant and hard to copy.
• Connected screens change attention economics. Where people watch is reshaping how brands convert attention into recurring customer equity.

What to do about it

Audit your reporting: are you showing boards the business outcomes they grade, or the brand metrics you find comfortable? Build a simple attention-moment map before your next media plan—identify the few seconds where your buyer is genuinely receptive. And when commissioning creative, ask the agency for the risky idea alongside the safe adaptation. The townhall itself is under capacity pressure: invitations are non-transferable, and delegate access closes once allocations hit their threshold.

Source: ETBrandEquity.com