Dr Karen Nelson-Field PhD
Marketing budgets are getting bigger while the proof that any of it works is getting weaker. Viewability metrics inherited from a decade ago tell buyers an ad was technically on screen; they say nothing about whether a human noticed it. The gap between paid impressions and commercial outcome is now the single largest unmanaged risk on the marketing P&L.
Karen Nelson-Field is a media scientist who built the measurement system the advertising industry is now adopting to prove whether attention, not just impressions, drives commercial outcomes.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Karen Nelson-Field
- She runs Amplified Intelligence, the company whose eye-tracking dataset of 55,000+ panellists sits behind the IAB and MRC’s 2025 attention measurement accreditation standards. The category she explains is the category she helped define.
- Her three books, published by Oxford University Press and Springer, give CMOs and media leads a defensible academic spine for redirecting budget away from cheap reach and toward attention-weighted media.
- A decade inside the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute means her commercial advice rests on the same evidence base as How Brands Grow, the most influential marketing science framework of the last twenty years.
- Her client list, Google, Meta, Snapchat, PepsiCo, Nestlé, Mars, Unilever, OMD, means she addresses media owners and advertisers using the same vocabulary, neither captured by either side.
Biography highlights
- Founder and CEO, Amplified Intelligence (founded 2016)
- Industry Professor of Media Innovation, The University of Adelaide
- Former Senior Research Associate, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science
- Author of three books on media science, published by Oxford University Press and Springer
- Judge, IPA Effectiveness Awards 2022
- Work covered in The New York Times, Bloomberg, CNBC, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, The Drum, WARC
Biography
For two decades, advertising spent more on media than on any other line of marketing investment, and verified less of its return than almost any other category of corporate spend. The industry standard for measuring whether an ad worked was whether the pixels were technically on screen. Whether a human looked at them was a separate question, mostly unasked.
Karen Nelson-Field is the researcher who turned that question into a measurable category. As Founder and CEO of Amplified Intelligence, she built the eye-tracking and machine-learning infrastructure that quantifies active and passive attention across TV, digital, and social environments. The company now operates the largest human attention panel in the world, and its data informed the IAB and MRC’s 2025 attention measurement accreditation standards.
Her authority predates the company. A decade at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, working alongside Byron Sharp on buyer behaviour and brand growth, gave her the evidence-based grounding that distinguishes her from attention commentators who appeared after the category became fashionable. Her three books, Viral Marketing, The Attention Economy and How Media Works, and The Attention Economy: A Category Blueprint, are read as the field’s reference texts rather than its trade press.
For boards and CMOs, the practical value is direct. She names where current media metrics are misleading, what the replacement looks like, and how to allocate budget against the new evidence. Clients including Google, Meta, PepsiCo, Mars, and Unilever commission her not for trend commentary but for the underlying mathematics of where their advertising money actually performs.
Key speaking topics
- Attention as a media currency
- The economics of advertising effectiveness
- Brand growth and buyer behaviour
- Media planning under digital fragmentation
- AI and machine learning in audience measurement
- Marketing science and evidence-based strategy
Ideal for
- CMOs and marketing directors reassessing media investment frameworks
- Media agency leadership renegotiating attention-based trading models
- Platform and media owner executives benchmarking against new measurement standards
- Board-level conversations on marketing accountability and budget governance
Audience outcomes
- A working definition of attention that distinguishes it from viewability, reach, and exposure
- Specific evidence on which formats and platforms convert attention into commercial outcome
- A clear view of where IAB and MRC 2025 measurement standards change buyer obligations
- Direct guidance on reallocating media budget against attention-weighted metrics
- An evidence base drawn from the same school as How Brands Grow, applied to current media conditions