In a world inundated with advertisements, marketers often wonder what makes an ad memorable or effective. While many are focused on targeting specific demographics, decades of social psychology suggest that the context in which an ad is seen and the attention it receives are equally, if not more, important. This article dives into the idea that an ad's efficacy is highly dependent on these two factors: context and attention span. The Fundamental Attribution Error and Advertising A classic social psychology experiment from 1973 by Princeton University psychologists John Darley and Daniel Batson explored the "fundamental attribution error," the tendency to overestimate the importance of personality traits and underestimate situational factors when judging someone's actions. They found that people often fail to realize how much context matters in human behavior. In the marketing world, a similar error occurs when advertisers focus exclusively on target audiences, failing