Reach, viewability, and completion rates tell an advertiser whether a connected TV ad was served. They don’t reveal whether anybody was actually watching. At ADWEEK Exchange in Boston, part of a national roadshow from Viant and ADWEEK, marketing leaders argued that attention should become the operating metric for CTV investment.
Nine minutes, $100 billion
TVision CEO Yan Liu opened with a blunt framing: Americans spend more than four hours a day watching video, but only about nine minutes paying attention to ads. “As a video media industry, collectively, we invest $100 billion per year to compete for these nine minutes,” Liu said.
Traditional metrics, he said, only tell part of the story. TVision measures attention in households to see when viewers watch, look away, or leave the room. Liu called attention “the best proxy for the quality.”
Where attention hides
Placement matters as much as creative. Liu shared data showing attention across leading CTV apps can differ by as much as 3X between the strongest and weakest performers.
That gap means advertisers can shift spend toward higher-attention placements without increasing budgets. A second-by-second view of a recent Patriots game in Boston made the point: attention rose with each touchdown and fell during a scoreless stretch, even as more people gathered around the screen.
Attention ties to business results
Across more than 100 campaigns, TVision found that a 1% increase in attention correlated with nearly a 1% increase in aided brand awareness.
Panelists from Wayfair, SharkNinja, WHOOP, and Viant discussed what that looks like in practice.
- Wayfair is using attention to adjust CTV campaigns while they are running, and to test whether its brand—not just celebrity talent—holds attention.
- SharkNinja sees CTV as precision at scale, but notes that CTV data arrives more slowly than social data.
- WHOOP has used professional athletes since its founding, but is testing everyday-consumer creative. “If you have a solid creative that has a good message, it can be just as effective, if not more effective, than using that high-profile talent,” said Lindsay Dougherty, AVP of brand media.
A practical way in
Tim Vanderhook, CEO and co-founder of Viant, closed with a simple sequence: benchmark the current media plan, use attention as a signal in buying, and optimize across network, app, show, daypart, and geography.
“The goal is not the cheapest impression. The goal for each brand is buying the best impression, regardless of what that CPM price may be,” he said.
His advice for teams that don’t want to overcomplicate the shift: start with one campaign, one KPI, and one quarter, then compare results.
Source: Adweek
