It does not. As brands pour increasing budgets into media, the returns on visibility are shrinking, and Kavindra’s session, “From Seen to Remembered: The New Rules of Winning Attention,” set out to explain why.

The core argument was simple but pointed. In a world saturated with content, being present is no longer enough. The real battle is being seen, being remembered, and being talked about. Kavindra framed this shift through the lens of out-of-home advertising, a medium with a history stretching back 2,000 years, and made the case that OOH’s future lies not in passive placement but in becoming an active engine for attention and cultural conversation.

To ground the idea, he turned to Bakso Slamet, a local brand with more than two decades of history but limited visibility despite its longevity. The case illustrated how brands sitting on real heritage can still struggle to spark curiosity, and how the right combination of creative and environment can change that.

Three takeaways anchored the session. First, impressions alone are a weak proxy for attention; marketers need to think beyond reach and ask whether their media is genuinely being noticed. Second, attention can be engineered by pairing curiosity-driven creativity with high-visibility environments rather than leaving it to chance. Third, Kavindra introduced the Spark-Spot-Spread framework, a model for turning a single media idea into a wider conversation that travels beyond its original placement.

Festival of Marketing Asia, an extension of the UK event’s success, brought together more than 200 marketers in Kuala Lumpur for a day of sessions spanning customer-centric strategy, B2B marketing, and broader conversations shaping the industry’s future. Kavindra’s appearance placed Nord & Smith’s thinking on OOH measurement and creative strategy alongside some of the region’s most active marketing voices, reinforcing the agency’s position at the intersection of data and cultural relevance in Southeast Asian advertising.

As attention becomes the currency marketers compete for, the session left a clear message: the brands that win will not be the ones spending the most, but the ones designed to be remembered.

Get your OOH campaign planned and executed with the right strategy with Nord & Smith, the most accurate data-driven OOH agency you can definitely trust.