Mike Follett runs a company that puts eye-tracking cameras on people to find out whether anyone is looking at the ads. The answer, and you may want to sit down for this, is mostly no.

He is also, as far as I can tell, the only CEO in the attention business who will say out loud that the attention span doesn't exist. Coming from the man who sells attention for a living, that's a bit like your rabbi confessing he has some doubts about the building.

Mike is the CEO of Lumen Research, a company that spent roughly eleven years becoming an overnight success. He was on the show in 2024, when he told me attention would never be a currency. Since then, the industry bodies went ahead and wrote attention guidelines anyway, Lumen got a button inside The Trade Desk, and it now counts Amazon and IAS among its partners. So either the industry solved his objection, or it stopped listening.

I asked him which. He answered with beer, Danish breakfast habits, a framed goldfish, and a wife who watches television like a functioning adult.

Last time Mike was here, he'd just spent twelve hours staring at spreadsheets and described himself as "high on attention." I wanted the real answer on where he is now.

"I'm a little more chilled out than I was last time," he said. "I think as attention becomes more of a thing, it becomes more of the infrastructure of the web. It's just easier to sleep at night and to plan for the future. Yeah, I'm sleeping much better since last time. So thank you for asking."

He's earned it. Attention went from what I called a strange British obsession that Mike and Karen Nelson-Field kept banging on about to a category with working groups, guidelines and a slot in every DSP. That's the ad tech equivalent of a knighthood, and Mike knows exactly what it feels like.

"You really feel it when there's a button with your name on it on The Trade Desk," he said. "That's like having a star on Hollywood Boulevard. They love me. They really love me."

He's not pretending the fight is over. "It's still a contested thing," he said. But the difference between contested and nonexistent is the difference between a company and a hobby, and he told me that's what lets him plan.

"Attention has sort of made it. We're now a category. It's not a potential, it's a reality. We've got these deals with these massive great platforms like IAS, Trade Desk, and Amazon. People are being educated about it on marketing courses and they come into the industry knowing what to ask for, and we're there to serve them. It's not only a thing today, it's going to be a thing tomorrow as well, which allows us to build with confidence and to grow with confidence."

Here's the part that makes Mike unusual. Two years ago he told me pricing media on attentive seconds was a category error, because you only need a glimpse of the golden arches to want a Big Mac. With his name on a button, he'd have every commercial reason to change his mind.

He didn't.

"I still agree with that," he said. "I still think the idea that you should buy and sell all media on the basis of how many seconds people look at it, or we imagine that people listen to it, is probably a mistake. Ten seconds looking at a TV ad is not the same as ten seconds choosing to engage with a Facebook ad."

His reasoning is about choice. "In one environment, you don't really have a choice. You're forced to engage with it. If you look at it and you look away from it, that's a negative response to the ad. But on Facebook, if you volunteer ten seconds of attention, the same ten seconds, that is an indication that you're really leaning forward. The two things are not exactly equivalent."

What matters, he says, is the job. "What really matters is how much attention you need to achieve your objective. Advertiser A might want to get people to remember their brand. Advertiser B might want them to actually spend some money this weekend. Understanding how much attention you need to drive that particular outcome is where the money's at."

And then the line every holding company trading desk should tape to the monitor: "That's why I don't think this stuff is ever going to be an absolutely standardized currency. And it doesn't need to be either. Currency isn't success. Success is giving business results."

I asked Mike for two brands: one where two seconds does the job, and one where ten isn't enough. I banned McDonald's. He went straight to beer, which is the correct way to explain anything.

"One of our big clients is Carlsberg, and Carlsberg have got like a hundred brands in basically a hundred countries," he said. "Brooklyn Lager is one of those, and on the East Coast of America everyone knows Brooklyn Lager. It's a very famous brand and basically you just need to show them the bottle and people will start to salivate. Wait, is it five o'clock already? Can we go to the bar? Let's get a drink."

Britain is another story. "Over in rainy old Britain, Brooklyn Lager is a new invention. It's a sophisticated American," he said, and I told him I wasn't sure whether to be insulted by "sophisticated" and "American" in the same sentence.

"No, exactly, this is the way it is," he said. "Here we have to be educated about the wonders of Brooklyn Lager. Just showing us a bottle for two seconds ain't gonna cut the ice. Instead what we need is someone to sit us down and explain the wonders of Brooklyn Lager. People in Britain need a good five, ten seconds for the ad to work, whereas back in NYC they might only need a couple of seconds."

Then it got more extreme. Carlsberg itself, in Denmark, "is such a ubiquitous thing, it's like water." I told him Danes drink it for breakfast, and people think I'm joking.

"You will see well-dressed people who are holding down jobs and paying mortgages having beer for breakfast. Absolutely," he confirmed. "So there, Carlsberg is a bit like water. Whereas in Vietnam, which is one of their big growth markets, this beer-as-water is in actual fact super premium stuff. It really makes a statement about who you are, that you want to buy fancy imported beer. Exactly the same brand requires totally different levels of attention to get the job done."

That's the whole Lumen worldview in one pint. And it ends with the most generous thing an attention measurement CEO has ever said about the people who doubted attention measurement.

"People have been complaining for years, the old hands at advertising, saying there's more to advertising than attention. It'll never be this completely commoditized, standardized thing because of factor X, Y, Z. And you know what, these old farts who were complaining about attention, they were right. They were absolutely right. It is more complicated than that. But now we have the data and the systems to act on that insight. The old geese were right and the scientists had to catch up with them."

I've found Mike say it on two other podcasts, and he said it again here. He doesn't know what an attention span is. He doesn't think it's shrinking. And he runs an attention company.

"I think people do obviously have finite attention. I just don't know what the span is," he said. "The concept comes from the idea that people have the ability to hold things in their mind only for a certain amount of time. It might be five seconds, it might be five minutes."

He pointed to Johann Hari's book on the subject, which looks at why people say they can't read books anymore. "They say, oh, my attention span is weaker. But it may just be the conflation between the words concentration and focus and attention. These are badly defined words. It might be down to that. But I also think it's probably bollocks anyway."

His evidence is at the multiplex. "People seem to be very good at concentrating for very long periods of time, if they want to. Have you seen The Odyssey yet? It's amazing and it's three hours long. I was on the edge of my seat right the way through it. Time was when only Gone with the Wind would last for more than two hours. Now Christopher Nolan can't seem to finish a movie unless you get into the third hour of the night."

(I told him I felt that way about Tenet, except in the second hour it started going backwards.)

So what's actually happening, if not shrinking brains? "Perhaps what we are teaching them is that they don't have to look at this crap if they don't want to. And advertising is absolutely at the bottom of the list of things that people have to look at."

And the finding he wants on the record: "People are pretty good at ignoring ads. They're no better at ignoring ads than they used to be. We don't see any sort of extreme superpowers, improved powers of evading ads. What we do see is that the ads that are appearing in front of people are changing. It's not the people. It's the platforms that they're using that are changing."

Which brings us to the goldfish, the most cited fish in marketing. Mike once sat on a panel next to Snap India's managing director, who said Gen Z has the attention span of a goldfish, and a client on the same panel picked it up and built a strategy on top of it.

Mike says he'd warned them beforehand. "The basic science behind the alleged short attention spans of goldfish is not true. By piscine standards, I think they have very long periods that they can focus on things. Like lots of these urban myths, it's primarily a myth."

I asked whether that's the British dilemma: you'd rather a myth spread across a continent than interrupt a man on live television. He laughed it off and pointed to what he thinks the Snap work actually showed, which is better than the fish.

"The most substantive point is the absolute correlation between increased attention and increased memory, and that was a finding that was true across all demographic groups in India, where we did the research, and matched work we've done in Norway and in the US and in France and everywhere. People everywhere are good at ignoring ads. When they pay attention to them, you get much more impact."

Near the end, I asked Mike about the future of Lumen, and the showman stepped aside for a second.

"The world is wasting a fortune on unwatched ads. There is nothing more useless than an ad that no one sees. My mission in life is to make sure that as a society we become less profligate, less wasteful of the resources we have. That marketers can spend money more efficiently."