From Blinks to Clicks: How Jack Myers Saw the Digital Ad Revolution Coming in 1993

In 1993, long before the rise of Facebook, TikTok, YouTube pre-rolls, or programmatic ad buying, The Myers Report published a provocative essay in The Myers Report outlining a radical new vision for the future of advertising. Jack Myers coined it the “Blink Theory,” a recognition that the battle for consumer attention was accelerating, and that advertising value could eventually be captured in moments as fleeting as the blink of an eye.

At the time, Myers cited Nielsen and industry estimates showing that consumers were exposed to over 5,000 commercial messages each day, adding up to more than two hours of daily exposure. With an average duration of just 1.5 seconds, Myers argued that each of these touchpoints represented a “blink” of advertising engagement: 7,500 blinks a day, or 14.5 hours per week of potential influence. His warning to marketers was clear: the old model of long-form, repetitive storytelling was losing efficiency in a cluttered environment, and the future would belong to brands that could win more than their fair share of blinks.

Coca-Cola and AT&T: Pioneers of Blink-Based Thinking

The concept of the Blink Theory wasn’t merely theoretical. Myers pointed to Coca-Cola’s 1993 summer campaign as a vivid example of the strategy in action. Spearheaded by then-Chief Marketing Officer Peter Sealey and produced by a consortium of agencies including McCann Erickson, Burrell Sosa, and the Hollywood powerhouse Creative Artists Agency (CAA), the campaign was designed for instant recognition and emotional impact.

Of the 36 commercials developed, a small handful drove the majority of Coca-Cola’s “blink share.” These spots were short, visual, and instantly tied to the brand, generating immediate awareness. Myers noted that Coca-Cola even reallocated $21 million in summer spending toward this approach, reflecting a bet on capturing high-frequency, short-duration impressions over slower, more traditional advertising narratives.

AT&T’s “You Will” campaign, created by N.W. Ayer, further reinforced the model. Myers observed that its series of futuristic, optimistic vignettes worked best when seen in rapid sequence -- effectively stacking blinks to create a memorable brand anthem. Even in 1993, he recognized that single, standalone messages would struggle in a “cluttered environment” and that efficiency lay in multiple, brief exposures.

Three Paths for Marketers -- and the One That Won

In the 1993 article, The Myers Report laid out three strategic paths for advertisers facing the rising tide of message overload:

1. Radically increase their “share of blinks” - flooding the zone with more exposures to secure mindshare in a fragmented media landscape.
2. Reallocate budgets to focus on tightly targeted media and formats, aiming for sharper demographic precision and regional dominance.
3. Eliminate traditional advertising entirely, shifting to price promotions or walking away from brand-building campaigns.

Looking at the digital advertising ecosystem of 2025, it’s clear which path the industry chose: strategy number one.

Social platforms, streaming video, mobile apps, and programmatic ad exchanges now operate in an environment of effectively unlimited inventory, where advertisers compete for micro-moments of attention measured in fractions of seconds. TikTok videos, Instagram Stories, YouTube pre-rolls, and Google display ads all mirror the “blinks” Myers described three decades ago. Modern marketers pursue share of blinks; though today, we call them impressions, views, or engagements at scale, often trading depth for breadth in the relentless battle for awareness.

The Digital Fulfillment of a Prescient Vision

What Myers foresaw in 1993 was not just a shift in ad duration, but a fundamental realignment in how advertising value would be defined. The industry has largely abandoned the dominance of 30- and 60-second spots in favor of omnipresent, algorithmically placed micro-exposures. Measurement has evolved from gross rating points to click-throughs and viewability scores, but the principle remains the same: win the blink, win the mindshare.

Coca-Cola’s early adoption of Blink Theory foreshadowed the dynamics of modern digital marketing. Today, advertisers routinely flood social feeds, gaming environments, and streaming platforms with short-form creative that echoes the fast-cut, instantly recognizable style that CAA and Coca-Cola pioneered. AT&T’s “You Will” approach, meanwhile, lives on in the form of serialized content designed to capture cumulative attention across a series of micro-touchpoints.

Jack Myers’ 1993 essay was, in retrospect, a blueprint for the attention economy. He challenged marketers to recognize that the human brain and media consumption were accelerating beyond the old linear model -- and that advertising had to adapt or risk irrelevance.

In 2025, with digital ad spending eclipsing all other channels, and with marketers optimizing for exposures that last as little as a second, it is clear that Myers’ Blink Theory was not just insightful -- it was prophetic. The creative arms race to capture, hold, and multiply blinks is the operating system of modern advertising. And in that flash of recognition - the blink of an eye - The Myers Report’s vision is realized.