MMA India Report Finds 81% of Marketers Plan Media Around Reach

81% of Indian marketers rank reach among their top 3 media metrics. Just 17% say the same about attention quality.

That’s the headline from the MMA India report Beyond Reach, built with Publicis Media India and released on 9 October.

The survey covered more than 100 marketers in India. The report calls it directional and says it doesn’t represent all Indian marketers.

It fits a pattern you’ve probably felt in your own planning. We covered the pressure on marketers to chase short-term wins earlier this year.

What the MMA India report found

• 81% rank reach or incremental reach in their top 3 media-allocation metrics
• 17% rank attention quality in their top 3
• 69% say attention is absent from their plans or doesn’t change media decisions 
• 86% would likely reallocate budget if attention data showed stronger brand memory elsewhere 
• 92% list weak or unstandardised attention measurement among their top 3 challenges
• 8% use a dedicated third-party attention tool 

What are attention metrics in advertising?

Attention metrics measure how much human attention an ad gets, on top of how many people it reached. In the Beyond Reach report, Lumen’s India benchmarks count attentive seconds generated per 1,000 delivered impressions. The same impression count can carry very different attention depending on the format.

Attention per impression across 5 formats

Lumen’s benchmarks are quoted per 1,000 impressions. Here’s what they look like per single impression, and how many impressions buy you 1 hour of human attention.

So 1 attentive hour takes about 5,200 Reels impressions and about 460 linear TV impressions. YouTube’s own 2 formats sit nearly 2x apart.

The report says these figures don’t rank media effectiveness. They measure visual attention, and sales, recall and ROI need separate measurement.

The Rs 10 crore plan moved 14 points of budget to TV

Publicis ran the same Rs 10 crore plan through its optimiser twice, for adults aged 30 to 55. Run 1 used reach. Run 2 used reach that cleared 3 seconds of attention.

In the attention run, linear TV rose from 25.9% of the budget to 40%. OTT went from 1% to 15%, and YouTube non-skippable on CTV from 2% to 6%.

The money came out of 3 lines. Display fell from 23% to 0%, Meta Reels from 16% to 10% and YouTube non-skippable from 17% to 10%.

A Gen Z example went the same way. A YouTube skippable plan with 46.87% reach delivered 18.36% attention-qualified reach, so about 39% of the reach held up.

The report says these splits apply only to its modelled audience, budget and threshold. Read them as a direction to test.

The creative gap is the part content teams own

94% of marketers say creative is at least as important as placement in earning attention. 14% systematically adapt creative to different formats and lengths.

“Being seen is not the same as being noticed.” - Moneka Khurana, MD, MMA India

If you post 1 cut everywhere, you’re with the large majority that skips this step. The Reels edit and the CTV edit need different openings, lengths and brand cues.

CTV is worth a test if you sell B2B. Amazon DSP now lets you target streaming TV ads with LinkedIn job data.

3 things to do this quarter

Ask your agency for attention-qualified reach next to plain reach in your next media plan.

Cut a separate edit for each format you buy. Start with Reels and CTV, the 2 ends of the table.

Run your own brand-lift test before moving the budget. All respondents said an agreed industry standard would speed adoption, and that standard doesn’t exist yet.

Disclaimer: This article is AI-assisted and may contain errors, so please verify key details against the linked sources.