Media and the Public’s Limited Advertising Attention Span

Advertisements used to be an inevitable companion to entertainment. And the industry still thrives; the average American consumes about six hours of media a day. But as methods of media consumption have changed, the audience is not necessarily captive — a customer might pay more for a subscription streaming service simply to avoid ads, for example.

So how do advertisers find creative ways to get their messages across and people still willing to receive them? Darden Professor Anthony Palomba discusses his recent study on consumers’ available ad attention spans, co-authored with Professors Judy Franks and Vijay Viswanathan.

About the Expert

Anthony Palomba

Assistant Professor of Business Administration

Anthony Palomba teaches leadership communication and data visualization in the MBA program as well as management communication in the MSBA program. His teaching interests are focused on how business professionals can present data results and actionable insights to key stakeholders through storytelling. In his courses, he sheds light on the way leadership communication intersects with persuasion and data-driven decision-making that lead co-workers to take actions toward reaching a shared vision or accomplishing a set of business goals.

Intellectually, Palomba is fascinated by media and entertainment companies and the way they market their products in a dynamically changing competitive landscape. As a media management scholar, Palomba's research focuses on consumer behavior, branding, and marketing behind video games, television and film. His research explores how and why audiences consume entertainment and strives to understand how consumer behavior models can be built to predict consumption patterns. Additionally, he studies how technology innovations influence competition among entertainment and media firms.

B.A., Manhattanville College; M.A., Syracuse University; Ph.D., University of Florida

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