Two experiments were designed to test the hypothesis that the amount of attention drawn to an attribute by an advertisement mediates the effect of advertising on attribute importance. The first experiment manipulated the amount of attention given to an attribute in an advertisement and found this to have an impact on the importance of the attribute. The second experiment manipulated the concreteness of an advertisement's copy mentioning the attribute, the relevance of the ad's picture, and the number of repetitions of the ad, and found that attention mediated the impact of textual concreteness on attribute importance, but that picture relevance and repetition were not related to attention or importance.