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 is fascinated by the media and entertainment industries and the strategic forces reshaping them. As a media scholar specializing in machine learning, causal inference, and applied econometrics, his research examines how audiences engage with content and how technology transforms competition across the media, advertising, and gaming industries. His work explores the behavioral and economic mechanisms behind entertainment consumption and develops empirical models to understand and predict audience patterns.

Before joining academia, Palomba served as a research manager at Ipsos, leading projects for clients including HBO, Facebook, CNN, Fox Sports 1, and NBCUniversal/Comcast. During his doctoral studies, he collaborated with Nielsen to study how millennials consume and engage with media products and services.

B.A., Manhattanville College; M.A., Syracuse University; Ph.D., University of Florida; M.S., Purdue University (in progress)

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