User attention, its measurement, and the growing gap between visibility and genuine audience interest will be at the center of the upcoming edition of IAB Discovery, Why Ads Get Skipped: The Attention Leverage, which will take place on June 16 at Urania in Zagreb.
The topic comes at a time when the market is undergoing a significant shift in the way it evaluates the effectiveness of digital campaigns. Increasing media fragmentation, the growing volume of content, and changing content consumption habits have led to a situation where traditional KPIs are no longer the sole indicator of success. Attention is increasingly being viewed as a new currency of digital marketing, and the question is no longer only how many people saw a message, but how many actually registered and remembered it.
The program was designed by members of the Digital Marketing Attention Working Group of IAB Croatia. Among them are Anja Burčak Sedak from Wiener Insurance VIG, Kristijan Gregorić from Valicon, Marko Jambrešić from dentsu Croatia, Mia Lasić from Addiko Bank, Saša Milinović from OMD, Damjan Planinc from Teads, and Matija Vučković from Eskimi.
The first part of the program features the presentation The State of Attention in 2026, delivered by Saša Milinović and Marko Jambrešić. Through an overview of key trends, they will discuss the development of attention metrics, changes in audience behavior, and the ways in which digital effectiveness is increasingly being evaluated beyond traditional performance indicators.
One of the topics will also be the relationship between attention and the creator economy. In the session Creators in the Attention Economy, Mia Lasić, Dario Marčac, and Mislav Combaj from Crew Media will discuss the role of influencers and content creators in attracting and retaining audience attention.
How advertisers themselves view these changes will be explored in the panel Are Brands Ready for the New Attention Shift?. Alongside Anja Burčak Sedak, the discussion will feature Neda Žužul from SPAR and Tihana Sedlar from Hrvatski Telekom. The focus will be on how prepared brands are to incorporate attention models into their campaign planning and evaluation processes and how they define quality reach today.
The final part of the program, Inside the Attention Hub, will bring together Damjan Planinc, Matija Vučković, and Kristijan Gregorić, who will discuss the practical application of attention measurement, the relevance of available methodologies, and the challenges the market currently faces when interpreting such data.
Rather than another discussion about reach and impressions, this edition of IAB Discovery focuses on a question that is becoming increasingly important for the entire industry: how to prove that communication has genuinely captured the attention of the people it was intended to reach.
An open Q&A session is scheduled after the official program, and the event is open to all interested participants. Registration is available through the organizer’s official registration platform.
