Credit: Sander Sammy via Unsplash
Australian advertisers are losing up to 90 cents in every dollar spent on dull media formats, according to research from Amplified produced in partnership with Omnicom Media.
The Cost of Dull Media — Down Under Edition, authored by Karen Nelson-Field with contributions from Adam Morgan and Peter Field, applied an attention measurement framework to about $5.12 billion of Australian video and cinema advertising spend
The study found that 86% lands in dull formats that cannot reliably hold attention long enough to form a brand memory.
The research classifies media into three levels based on attention volume, the share of available viewing time where an ad was genuinely watched.
Non-dull formats, covering big screen and premium video, average 25.7 seconds of active viewing at 67% attention volume.
Moderately dull formats, covering premium social, drop to 4.5 seconds at 26%.
Very dull formats, covering non-premium social, deliver just 2.5 active seconds at 14% attention volume.
The financial penalty is significant. For established brands, the study calculates a loss of around 59 cents for every dollar spent in dull media compared with what the same spend would deliver in non-dull environments — a total gap of around $A6 billion.
For challenger brands the loss rises to around 90 cents per dollar, a penalty roughly six times steeper, because established brands can draw on existing memory structures that challengers do not have.
The study also finds that dull media does not merely reduce brand uplift, it can actively transfer it to competitors.
When audiences disengage before a brand is processed, they are still making choices, just not for the advertised brand.
The research is a local extension of Nelson-Field's 2025 global Cost of Dull study, rebuilt using Australian CPMs and spend data.
The methodology combines biometric measurement across cinema, YouTube and Facebook with generative attention modelling across Instagram, TikTok and BVOD, covering about 183,600 ad views across eight brands and six formats.
The study's core conclusion is that the problem is not creative quality but media environment.
Creative influences the size of the effect; the media environment determines the direction. Even strong creative fails when attention has already gone.
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