By Hunter Johnson, Founder & CEO, Xpedition
Everyone in this industry has spent the last decade obsessing over the first second. The thumb-stopping hook. Yet, according to Karen Nelson-Field, a leading authority in media science and attention measurement, 85% of placements don’t keep people’s attention for more than the 2.5 second threshold needed for brands to remain in people’s memory. In fact, entire agencies have built whole P&Ls on the reverence for the ‘moment of disruption,’ believing that if you can interrupt the scroll, you’ve earned your fee.
But you haven’t. You’ve just earned a glance. And as nice as glances feel, they don’t lead to much. The second second is where the real impact is made. It’s also where most brands are failing so completely. Recent data from Lumen Research confirms that 70% of ads deemed technically “viewable” are entirely ignored by consumers. The second second is when that all changes, but precious few brands make it that long.
That is an important reality to keep in mind as the industry heads to this year’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. In their LIONS State of Creativity 2025 report, they note that in 2025, 63% of brand activity was short-term focused – up from 53% two years earlier. The LIONS advisory warns that while short-term tactics can deliver quick wins, long-term brand-building enables the kind of spontaneous, high-impact work that earns cultural relevance.
Despite what the creative industry has been telling itself for 20 years, audiences are not captive prisoners to creative interruption. eMarketer’s 2025 streaming-attention work reports that 69% of consumers, after an ad catches their eye, reach for a second screen within 30-60 seconds to go searching.
Entertainment is paramount
Sadly, what most brands offer them once they get there is not entertaining. And this is the gap that matters – when a moment of disruption fails to sustain attention. If the first second is the cover charge, then the second second (and the 60 after it) is the product that will keep them coming back to you. Not because they were disrupted, but because they were entertained.
The brands winning right now understand the difference. Hyundai didn’t take the 2025 Cannes Entertainment Lions Grand Prix with a 6-second pre-roll. They took it with Night Fishing, a 13-minute thriller starring Son Suk-ku that you sit with on a Saturday night and choose to watch. Apple’s Shot on iPhone, to which the same festival just gifted the Creative Effectiveness Grand Prix, has run for 10 years and added five percentage points of market share. This, for a campaign older than half the people writing strategy decks about TikTok-first brand worlds.
The pattern isn’t subtle. Binet and Field have been saying it since 2013: roughly 60% of effective spend should go to brand building, 40% to activation. Activation effects are linear and decay. Brand effects compound. Yet most clients still walk in with a 90/10 brief, a six-week timeline, and a deck full of thumb stops that show what happens in the first 1,500 milliseconds and absolutely nothing about what they want to happen in the next 90 minutes of someone’s life.
Just look at TikTok
This isn’t a “short form is dead” argument. TikTok’s own data is the tell. Videos longer than a minute now get 63.8% more watch time than 30-to-60-second videos, and 264% more than the 5-to-10-second posts the platform was famous for two years ago. Even the platform built on the disruptive moment is moving past it. Audiences are not getting more impatient. They are getting more discerning about what they choose to spend doing amid that impatience.
Entertainment and ad content need to work much closer together if brands want to be successful in the future. That’s because entertainment is the only moat left. It is the one thing that is not yet commoditised and that AI won’t yet systemize. It compounds. It builds mental availability over years rather than milliseconds. It is, when done right, something people want to keep watching, even if they just stumble on it occasionally.
The bottom line
It used to be that the first second – even if it didn’t capture hearts and minds – could still win awards. But that’s no longer the case. The Cannes Lions, long a bellwether for the industry, are more focused than ever on the “second second,” recognizing that the small minority of brands that keep people’s attention beyond the initial scroll are doing so through the boldest creativity and the most entertaining content.
Maintaining engagement for one more second is the difference between being one of the increasingly rare brands that wins customers and accolades, or being tossed into the vast sea of those that are immediately forgotten. It’s not an easy undertaking. That critical moment requires a seismic shift in the entire sequence from creative brief to output. But when you get it right, the impact is immeasurable.
The brands leaning into this approach are winning not simply because they have purpose, and not because they claim authenticity, but because they are, by any honest measure, more interesting than the brands they’re sitting next to in the feed.
The first second buys you a look. The second second, and everything after it, is when the real work – and the real reward – begins.
