This post was created in partnership with Viant
As TV and streaming audiences become increasingly fragmented, understanding what happens between an ad being served and a viewer paying attention is becoming a more important part of evaluating media.
That question was at the heart of ADWEEK Exchange in Detroit, the first stop on a national roadshow from Viant and ADWEEK spanning the country’s leading advertising markets. The event brought marketers together to explore what attention data can reveal about whether an ad was actually watched.
A closer look at who’s watching
Yan Liu, CEO of TVision, opened the event by discussing the gap between TV exposure and attention. The average U.S. consumer spends 213.5 minutes a day—nearly four hours—with television and streaming video, he shared. Of that time, approximately 24.5 minutes are spent with advertising, and only nine minutes represent actual attention to those ads.
Liu pointed out that viewers are often in the room without watching, and sometimes an ad plays to an empty room. In these instances, a completed view measures playback, but not attention.
Liu then linked attention to outcomes. In one study, TVision looked at hundreds of campaigns across 20 different industries, and found each percentage-point increase in attention corresponded to nearly a 1% increase in ad awareness.
Liu also stressed that context affected attention. Using another example, Liu showed that the same ad drew more attention alongside sci-fi and sports content than news and reality shows.
“It’s the same creative. It’s just different context,” Liu explained. For marketers, that means where an ad appears can affect how much attention it earns, even when the creative stays the same.
He closed with attention data from the recent Thursday night football game between the Detroit Lions and Buffalo Bills. Attention fell as the score widened, then rose when the game became more competitive in the third quarter. The second half drew more attention than the first, which Liu described as unusual for a football game. He also noted that fewer people were watching together after halftime.
