Attention Economy Pioneer | CEO and Co-founder at Lumen Research (UK)
The uncomfortable moment usually comes quietly. A campaign reports great reach. The dashboard looks healthy. Spend keeps flowing. And then someone asks the question no one really wants to answer: Did anyone actually look at it? That’s the attention problem Mike Follett has built his career around. Not to provoke for sport, but to replace confidence theatre with evidence — and to (finally) show, with hard data, how often marketing mistakes visibility for value.
Mike’s thinking is grounded in large-scale, empirical data. His (a bit strange, but effective) eye-tracking research spans billions of ad exposures across platforms, formats, and markets, proving — repeatedly — that not all impressions are equal, and that attention is both measurable and predictive of real business outcomes. His work directly challenges comfortable but flawed industry assumptions, including last-click attribution and superficial engagement metrics, replacing them with models that explain why ads work, when they work and where money is wasted.
Mike Follett brings marketers something rare: clarity backed by evidence. So yeah, he is definitely a motivational talker — he delivers hard and serious sessions that will make you rethink media value, creative effectiveness and ROI from the ground up. As he said himself: “Not all attention data is equal, so buyer beware. Our attention models are based on real human eye tracing data, collected from over 700,000 people across 37 countries. Maybe this is why our models work — and others are less successful.” Ouch.
Mike Follett: The Long and the Short of Attention and Memory
How much attention do your ads actually need to create a memory? And does it take more attention to build long-term brand memories than it does to spark short-term reminders that drive action in the moment? Join Mike Follett as he unpacks the findings from the dentsu Brand Reset project — the world’s largest investigation into the relationship between attention and memory. Follett will break down the difference between fleeting exposure and meaningful attention, and what it takes for a message to move from “seen” to “remembered.” Expect fresh evidence and a sharper understanding of how attention translates into brand impact — in both the short term and the long term.