As television and streaming audiences become increasingly fragmented across a growing universe of apps, devices, and platforms, media buyers face a persistent and costly blind spot. Traditional measurement tools have long relied on completed views and gross impressions to evaluate media performance, treating every instance of an ad being served as an equal success. However, a fundamental question is steadily taking center stage in modern media evaluation: what actually happens in the critical gap between an ad being delivered to a screen and a viewer paying attention to it?
That pressing question formed the core of the recent ADWEEK Exchange in Detroit, which served as the inaugural stop on a national roadshow organized by Viant and ADWEEK. Spanning several of the country’s leading advertising markets, the event series was designed to bring together prominent marketers, agency executives, and media platforms to explore how emerging attention data can reveal whether an advertisement was genuinely watched, ignored, or played to an empty room.
A Closer Look at Who’s Watching
Opening the Detroit event, TVision CEO Yan Liu delivered a stark presentation highlighting the wide gulf that often exists between simple TV exposure and true consumer attention. The average U.S. consumer, Liu shared with the audience, spends approximately 213.5 minutes a day—nearly four hours—engaging with television and streaming video content. Of that substantial daily block of time, roughly 24.5 minutes are dedicated to advertising. Yet, when filtered through the lens of actual engagement, only about nine minutes represent genuine attention directed toward those commercials.
Liu pointed out a common scenario in modern households: viewers are frequently present in the room without actively watching the screen, or an ad plays out to an entirely empty room. In these instances, traditional metrics count a completed view because the media file successfully finished playing back, but the measurement completely fails to capture the absence of human attention.
To demonstrate the real-world value of capturing those elusive eyeballs, Liu linked attention metrics directly to brand outcomes. Drawing on a comprehensive study conducted by TVision that examined hundreds of distinct campaigns across 20 different industry verticals, he revealed a compelling correlation: every single percentage-point increase in attention corresponded to nearly a 1% increase in overall ad awareness.
Furthermore, Liu stressed that the surrounding context plays a critical role in determining whether a consumer tunes in or tunes out. Using comparative campaign examples, he demonstrated that the exact same creative asset consistently drew higher levels of attention when placed alongside sci-fi and sports programming compared to when it aired during news broadcasts or reality television shows.
"It’s the same creative. It’s just different context," Liu explained to the room of marketing leaders. For brand advertisers, that reality carries a profound implication: where an ad appears can significantly affect how much attention it earns, even when the underlying creative execution remains entirely unchanged.
To drive the point home, Liu shared attention data gathered from a high-profile Thursday night football matchup between the Detroit Lions and the Buffalo Bills. Interestingly, audience attention dipped as the score widened and the game became less competitive, then rebounded sharply when the matchup tightened up in the third quarter. Notably, the second half of the game drew higher overall attention than the first half—a pattern Liu described as highly unusual for a standard professional football broadcast. He also observed that fewer people were watching together as a shared household experience after halftime.
This granular breakdown effectively illustrated how both the specific content on the screen and the broader viewing environment can dynamically influence attention levels. It also left attendees with a central strategic challenge: if audience attention can fluctuate wildly based on context, creative nuances, and fleeting live events, how can modern brands effectively put that complex information to work in their media strategies?
Creative Has to Earn Attention
That operational challenge carried directly into the panel discussion that followed. Will Lee, CEO of ADWEEK, moderated a conversation featuring a roster of prominent marketing leaders, including Deena Bahri, chief marketing officer at Nutrafol; Sarah Tarraf, senior vice president of knowledge and insights at Rocket; and Chris Vanderhook, chief operating officer and co-founder of Viant.
Lee opened the panel by directly addressing the question raised during Liu’s introductory presentation: does measured attention genuinely translate into meaningful consumer action?
Bahri admitted that she had initially entered the discussion somewhat skeptical about whether a direct correlation existed between fleeting attention scores and hard business actions, but she acknowledged that Liu’s presentation had left her genuinely intrigued by the possibilities. Tarraf shared a similar curiosity, raising questions about consumer psychology during commercial breaks—specifically wondering whether an ad interrupting a program causes viewers to mentally check out instantly, or whether their cognitive engagement carries over from the surrounding show into the commercial itself.
For Vanderhook and the team at Viant, pursuing answers to these questions is part of a broader, ongoing corporate effort to provide media buyers with much sharper signals for connected TV (CTV) buying. To secure richer information about the actual programming content running within streaming apps rather than relying solely on high-level app purchases, Viant previously acquired IRIS.TV. Subsequently, the company tested TVision’s attention data within its proprietary planning systems and discovered that incorporating those engagement metrics proved highly useful in building more accurate predictive models for campaign outcomes.
As the discussion progressed, the panel turned its focus toward a variable that marketers can control directly: the creative execution itself.
Nutrafol’s recent marketing campaigns centered heavily on capturing the exact emotional moment when a consumer commits to the lengthy, often demanding process of improving their personal hair health. The brand recognized early on that it needed to express this core creative concept differently depending on the medium—adapting its approach seamlessly across linear and streaming TV, digital social channels, and in-person experiential touchpoints.
On television, Nutrafol utilized the expanded runtime to tell a deeper, more narrative-driven story. On fast-moving social media platforms, the brand collaborated closely with individual creators to build authenticity. In physical environments, prospective customers were given the opportunity to experience the product firsthand. While the execution had to be carefully tailored to fit the native environment of each specific channel, it was vital that the messaging still felt cohesive as part of a single, unified campaign strategy.
"Finding that balance between variety and consistency, I think, is the magic in great creative," Bahri shared with the audience.
Tarraf described a distinctly different set of creative challenges at Rocket. Because the average consumer seeks out a mortgage relatively infrequently, the company’s emotionally driven advertising must achieve a rare level of memorability, lingering in the minds of consumers long after they have stopped watching the screen.
"When you’re building awareness, you need to build awareness that lasts," Tarraf explained.
However, Rocket discovered through audience research that some viewers vividly remembered the humor or messaging of its high-profile Super Bowl commercials without necessarily recalling which specific company had paid for and produced the spot. Recognizing this disconnect, Tarraf noted that the brand adjusted its strategy, featuring the company name and branding elements much more prominently in the visual framing and voiceovers of subsequent campaigns. Furthermore, Rocket began deploying rigorous test and control groups to measure whether actual exposure to its brand advertising measurably drove subsequent consumer actions, such as online clicks, website visits, and completed conversions.
Putting Attention Data to Work
While the earlier segments of the event focused heavily on defining attention and exploring its theoretical and strategic implications for major brands, Tim Vanderhook, CEO and co-founder of Viant, brought the gathering to a close by focusing squarely on actionable execution. Rather than treating attention metrics as a passive report card to review only after a media campaign has wrapped up and its budget is spent, Vanderhook urged marketers to harness attention data dynamically while campaigns are actively in flight.
"You cut low attention providers, and you reallocate your budget to the higher attention placements that are there," Vanderhook explained, outlining a straightforward operational shift for media planners.
He further recommended that brands assign greater strategic weight to creative assets that successfully earned sustained attention while closely auditing which specific media partners delivered those high-engagement environments. To help brands get started, Vanderhook suggested a practical pilot approach: take a single active campaign, establish its baseline attention level using available data, make targeted adjustments to both the creative elements and the media placements, and then carefully measure the resulting shift in performance.
This proactive approach encapsulates the broader, evolving opportunity that attention data represents for the advertising industry: providing marketers with a significantly clearer, more nuanced view of not merely where an advertisement happens to run, but how audiences actually experience it. As television and streaming environments continue to fragment across an ever-expanding array of screens, understanding the precise conditions that earn genuine consumer attention—and leveraging those vital insights to refine creative messaging, media placements, and capital investment—adds crucial context to the way modern brands evaluate their media investments.
