This post was created in partnership with Viant
An ad can reach the right audience, appear alongside premium content, and play to completion. But advertisers still need to know whether anyone paid attention—and if that attention influenced what happened next.
At ADWEEK Exchange in Boston, part of a national roadshow from Viant and ADWEEK, marketing leaders discussed how attention data can inform connected TV (CTV) investments, creative decisions, and campaign performance.
Why attention matters more than traditional metrics
Yan Liu, CEO of TVision, opened the event by explaining that Americans spend more than four hours a day watching video, but spend 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. It’s not an easy job,” Liu said. “That’s why I believe we need to understand where and when people pay attention.”
Traditional metrics such as reach, viewability, and completion rates offer limited visibility into whether someone actually watched an ad. TVision instead measures attention in households to understand when viewers watch, look away, or leave the room. “Impressions or reach is only part of the story,” Liu said, adding that attention is “the best proxy for the quality.”
Attention also varies depending on the viewing environment. Liu shared data showing that attention across leading CTV apps can differ by as much as 3X between the strongest and weakest performers, creating opportunities for advertisers to shift spend toward placements that earn more attention without increasing their budgets.
He illustrated the point with second-by-second attention data from a recent Patriots game in the Boston market. Attention rose with each touchdown and fell during a scoreless stretch, even as the number of people watching together continued to grow.
Research further connected attention to business outcomes. Across more than 100 campaigns, TVision found that a 1% increase in attention correlated with nearly a 1% increase in aided brand awareness.
For marketers, understanding these differences can help inform media placement and creative decisions, giving them a clearer picture of which investments are earning attention.
Connecting attention to measurable business results
In the brand panel that followed, Will Lee, CEO of ADWEEK, moderated a conversation with Amanda Evans, global head of brand, insights, and partnerships at Wayfair; Dave Kersey, VP, global head of media at SharkNinja; Lindsay Dougherty, AVP of brand media at WHOOP; and Chris Vanderhook, COO and co-founder of Viant.
The panelists discussed different goals and challenges for CTV. For Wayfair, CTV is a newer channel. Evans shared that one of the biggest challenges is making adjustments while ads are running to ensure campaigns meet their goals and capture attention.
As a social-first brand, SharkNinja relies on creators and influencers to build demand and convert shoppers in real time. Kersey said CTV offers precision at scale, but the data doesn’t arrive as quickly as it does on social, where his team optimizes daily.
When the discussion moved to measuring business outcomes, Evans explained that Wayfair’s marketing decisions start with customer insights. The brand’s relaunched Wayfair Delivers platform focuses on building trust.
“We’re no longer just sprinkling a bunch of ads, trying to reach as many people as possible to get that awareness up,” Evans explained. “We need people to change their behavior and become loyalists of Wayfair, and for that, the metric changes.”
Creative was another focus, particularly how brands use celebrity talent. Professional athletes have been part of WHOOP’s advertising since its founding, but the brand is also testing campaigns featuring everyday consumers.
“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,” Dougherty shared.
Evans added that talent should amplify the brand. Wayfair tests whether attention spikes more when the brand appears than when the celebrity is onscreen. Its new Wayfair Delivers spot features NFL quarterback Matthew Stafford, but his family is the hero.
SharkNinja took a different approach with its Crispi glass air fryer campaign featuring Tom Brady, connecting the creative to his Netflix roast. The roast-themed spot ran during a Patriots Thursday Night Football game.
“It’s important that the celebrity isn’t the hero. The product’s the hero. They’re just helping tell the story,” Kersey noted. He said the brand saw search intent and conversions rise shortly after.
Vanderhook brought the conversation back to the relationship between attention and results, recalling that Viant identified attention as an important trend back in 2017.
“Attention doesn’t mean anything if it doesn’t actually drive towards an outcome,” he said. He added that marketers need attention data to be automated so they can act on it without extra work across their teams and agencies.
How to use attention data moving forward
Tim Vanderhook, CEO and co-founder of Viant, closed the event by explaining how brands can put attention data to use. Impressions will remain the currency, he said, but marketers should look at how many of those impressions earned attention.
He outlined a process that starts with benchmarking a current media plan, then uses attention as a signal in buying and optimizes across levers such as 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.
He recommended starting small: one campaign, one KPI, and one quarter, then comparing the results.
