Digital advertising is measured in impressions. An impression means the ad was served. It says nothing about whether anyone looked, read, or retained anything.
A television spot gets three seconds of a distracted audience. A display banner earns 0.2 seconds before the eye moves on. A billboard at fifty metres is a colour blur to a driver doing eighty. These are impressions. Platforms sell them by the thousand.
What dwell time measures instead
Dwell time is the duration of exposure. Not delivery. Exposure.
A pizza box sits on a kitchen counter or dining table for an average of twenty minutes before it is finished with. The brand on that box is at forty centimetres. The household is stationary. The box is the focal point of the meal. That is not an impression. That is a read.
A laundromat visit lasts thirty to ninety minutes. The walls are the environment. A gym locker is opened two to three times per session, with forty to sixty seconds of focused attention per interaction. These are fundamentally different from a digital display rotated every three seconds.
Why the difference matters to your budget
A standard digital campaign achieving a CPM of five euros delivers one thousand ad appearances for five euros. If average viewability is 50% and average view duration is one second, you have bought five hundred seconds of exposure. Divided by sixty, that is roughly eight minutes of actual attention for five euros.
One pizza box placement at forty centimetres for twenty minutes costs a fraction of that. At thirty partner locations, averaging ten deliveries per day, you achieve three hundred household exposures daily. Each lasting twenty minutes. That is six thousand minutes of contact per day, from one campaign, across one surface type, in one city.
The comparison is not close.
How Linger prices on dwell time
Linger campaigns are priced on surface reach and campaign duration, not impressions. You know exactly how many partner locations are active, the surface type, and the average session duration. Every placement ships with a QR code or promo redemption code so you can measure downstream action, not just exposure.
Category exclusivity is included in every campaign. No competitor ads run alongside yours in the same surface network during your campaign period.
The practical upshot
If your brand needs consistent, present reach inside households and high-dwell venues, ambient media will outperform equivalent digital spend on recall and ROAS for most use cases. The channel is early in Europe. That is an advantage.
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July 18, 2026
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