Let's be brutally honest for a minute. We've all been playing this game for years. We proudly brandished reports with millions of impressions and "viewability" rates that reassured us. We built PowerPoint empires on a vanity metric: the CPM.

The reality? We were paying for fog. We were buying the right to exist on a page, secretly hoping that a real person would notice us between two frantic scrolls.

But the comedy is over. And if you continue to steer by CPM, you are no longer being cautious, you are complicit in your own waste.

An ad that is "viewable" by IAB standards? It's often a banner in the corner of a screen, seen for 1.1 seconds by an eye that hasn't even registered its existence. Paying for that is no longer marketing. It's a subsidy for servers that display pixels to other pixels. It's a tax on ignorance.

The alternative is no longer a conference theory. It is here, and it is ruthless: the attention economy. We are no longer talking about "how many had the chance to see me?", but "how many seconds of available brainpower did I actually buy?".
Is it more difficult? Yes.
Is it more expensive at first glance? Probably.

Does it force you to admit that 70% of your old impressions were worth NOTHING? Maybe.

So, the only question that matters for your next quarterly review is not: "What was our reach?"

But rather: "How many seconds of real attention did our last million buy?"
If the answer is "I don't know," then stop looking for where your budget is going.
Ready to face reality, or do we keep counting ghosts?

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