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.

The example illustrated how both the content on screen and the viewing environment can affect attention—raising a question for marketers: If attention can vary based on context, creative, and even what is happening in the moment, how should brands put that information to work?

Creative has to earn attention

That question carried into the panel that followed, as Will Lee, CEO of ADWEEK, brought together marketing leaders Deena Bahri, CMO at Nutrafol; Sarah Tarraf, SVP of knowledge and insights at Rocket; and Chris Vanderhook, chief operating officer and co-founder of Viant.

Lee opened with a question raised by Liu’s presentation: Does attention translate into action?

Bahri said she had come in skeptical that attention would correlate with action, but Liu’s presentation left her intrigued by the possibility. Tarraf was also intrigued, wondering whether an ad interrupting a program caused viewers to check out or whether their attention carried over to the ad.

For Vanderhook, the question is part of a broader effort to give marketers better signals for connected TV (CTV) buying. Viant acquired IRIS.TV to get information about the content within streaming apps, rather than buying at the app level alone. It later tested TVision’s attention data and found it useful in its models for predicting campaign outcomes.

The panel also turned to a factor marketers can control directly: the creative itself.

Nutrafol’s recent campaign drew on the moment someone commits to a long process of improving hair health. The brand wanted to express the creative differently on TV, social channels, and in person.

On TV, Nutrafol could tell a longer story. On social, they could work with creators. In person, people could experience the product. The execution needed to fit each channel while still feeling like part of the same campaign.

“Finding that balance between variety and consistency, I think, is the magic in great creative,” Bahri shared.

Tarraf described a different challenge at Rocket. Because people seek a mortgage infrequently, its emotional advertising needs to remain memorable long after someone sees it.

“When you’re building awareness, you need to build awareness that lasts,” Tarraf explained.

Rocket found, though, that some viewers remembered its Super Bowl ad without remembering which company made it. Tarraf said that resulted in subsequent ads featuring the brand more prominently in their visuals and voiceovers. Rocket also began using test and control groups to measure whether exposure to brand advertising increased clicks, site visits, and conversions.

Putting attention data to work

If the first part of the conversation was about understanding attention and the panel explored what it might mean for brands, Tim Vanderhook, CEO and co-founder of Viant, ended the event by focusing on what marketers can actually do with the data.

Rather than treating attention as a measurement to review after a campaign has ended, Vanderhook urged marketers to use it while a campaign is still running.

“You cut low attention providers, and you reallocate your budget to the higher attention placements that are there,” Vanderhook explained.

He also recommended giving more weight to creative that earned attention and reviewing which media partners delivered it. His suggested starting point was one campaign: establish its current attention level, adjust the creative and placements, then measure the results.

That approach reflects the broader opportunity in attention data: giving marketers a clearer view of not just where an ad runs, but how audiences experience it. As TV and streaming continue to fragment, understanding the conditions that earn attention—and using those insights to refine creative, placements, and investment—can add important context to the way brands evaluate their media.