An ad can land on the right connected TV screen and still miss the person in the room. That was the core tension at ADWEEK Exchange in Dallas, the second stop on the Viant and ADWEEK roadshow, where media leaders asked how marketers can tell which CTV ads earn attention—and use that signal while campaigns are still live.
The attention gap hiding inside reach
TVision CEO Yan Liu opened with a comparison that made the problem concrete. A top-viewed YouTube video had far more eyeballs on paper, but a scene from the thriller Paradise drew 5X more actual attention. “The reach, impressions, or ratings don’t tell the entire story,” Liu said. “When you think about your media, you need to pair that with a quality signal—which is attention.”
TVision measures that signal second by second, tracking what is on screen and whether people are watching. Liu said measurement alone isn’t the goal: the question is whether attention translates into results. In work with a subscription brand and a home services brand, conversions rose as attention increased—an early sign that attention belongs in media evaluation, not just reporting.
Three brands, three CTV problems
ADWEEK CEO Will Lee then pushed brand leaders to talk about the problem CTV was actually solving for them. The answers were very different.
- Zoom is fighting a perception trap: almost everyone knows the name, but many still see it only as video meetings. Its CTV-heavy approach pairs humor-driven work with Colin Jost and an ad starring Kate McKinnon as a CEO trying to overthrow Zoom, then follows up with messaging on other channels.
- AT&T is trying to move beyond price in a mature category. The brand is using CTV to reach the right people with the right message and build an emotional connection around coverage in daily life.
- St. Jude is balancing long-time donors with a younger audience. Three-minute patient stories still build loyalty, but shorter CTV spots like “Just a Kid” introduce new viewers before the longer story follows.
Content adjacency and the move from reports to action
Viant COO Chris Vanderhook noted that CTV is addressable and measurable, but still has a blind spot: brands often buy at the ad level without knowing exactly what content their ads run alongside. Viant’s acquisition of IRIS.TV is meant to close that gap by gathering title-level signals from content editors, helping advertisers match messages to relevant shows.
Viant CEO Tim Vanderhook closed the day with a push from measurement to action. Marketers should use attention data to adjust campaigns while they’re running, not wait for a post-campaign report after the budget is gone. “It’s about increasing reach with the same budget that you actually had,” he said. The practical sequence: start with an attention baseline, then shift spend toward the creative and placements earning more attention.
What marketers can do now
- Set an attention baseline before launch so “good” isn’t guesswork.
- Reallocate budget in-flight toward higher-attention creative and placements.
- Pair short CTV introductions with longer brand stories when audience awareness is low.
- Ask for title-level content signals to know what your CTV ads run beside.
The bigger takeaway is that attention is a quality signal, not another vanity chart. Reach gets an ad in front of a screen; attention shows whether a person was actually present—and the conversion data suggests that difference is worth paying for.
Source: Adweek
