Turning Attention Into Better Media Decisions

Marc Guldimann describes a habit that runs deep in digital media buying, where campaigns tend to launch first and the clearest picture of media quality arrives in a report once the budget has been spent. Attention metrics in advertising give buyers a way to have that conversation much earlier, allowing media planners to understand placement quality and predict performance before a single bid is placed or impression delivered.

As part of our Cut Through the Noise series, Marc and Neala Brown, SVP of Strategy and Insights at Teads, share their perspectives on how attention informs decisions across the entire campaign lifecycle, why predictive attention metrics outperform viewability as a driver of business outcomes, and why leading brands should treat attention as an input to planning rather than a standalone KPI.

Since launching the Teads Attention Program in 2022, Adelaide has measured attention on Teads inventory, scoring more than 9.3 billion impressions with its AU metric in the first year alone. AU predicts a placement’s probability of capturing attention and the impact that follows. 

In 2023, that measurement became the basis for our high-attention omnichannel private marketplaces across CTV and digital, with placements scoring 31% above Adelaide’s Teads benchmarks on average.

Advertisers have good reason to look past viewability. Adelaide’s research found that attention delivered a 55.5% higher lift in aided brand awareness than viewability, and a 28.6% higher lift in purchase intent. For brands running an omnichannel advertising strategy, that makes attention metrics in advertising one of the most useful signals for judging how hard each dollar is working and where the next one should go.

Why Attention Metrics in Advertising Are a Stronger Predictor of Outcomes

Viewability was designed as a hygiene metric that confirms an impression had the chance to appear on screen. As Marc explains, it ended up overloaded across the industry and used as a measure of quality because no better alternative existed.

Attention has proved a far better fit for that role. Metrics built to assess the media on its own, separately from audience and creative, have consistently outperformed viewability as a proxy for incremental outcomes in both post-campaign analysis and inside marketing mix models.

Neala sees the same pattern in the work Teads does with clients. When post-campaign results such as brand lift, foot traffic, and sales conversion are analyzed, the link between attention and brand outcomes is consistently closer than the link with viewability.

That closer link is what makes attention a business tool: placements with stronger attention scores are more likely to move awareness, store visits, and sales.

Adelaide’s 2026 Outcomes Guide, drawn from 60 case studies across 16 industries, puts numbers to that link, with attention-optimized campaigns delivering an average 33% lift in upper-funnel KPIs and a 53% increase in lower-funnel conversions.

Using Attention as an Input Throughout a Campaign

The most common misconception about attention metrics in advertising is treating attention as the outcome a campaign is trying to achieve.

Duration-based metrics, which count how many seconds someone spends looking at an ad, illustrate this challenge. Time spent with an ad is a result in its own right, and optimizing every impression toward the longest possible attention can skew the audience a campaign reaches and steer brands toward disruptive ad formats.

Attention is at its most valuable as an input, informing where the money goes and measured against the business outcome the campaign was built to deliver.

Used that way, it can shape decisions at every stage of a campaign:

• Pre-Launch Planning: Buyers agree on the floor of media quality the campaign needs and set it as a threshold, so pre-bid optimization works toward it from the first impression.
• In-Flight Optimization: Brand lift data often arrives with a lag, so attention acts as a leading indicator, helping teams adjust delivery while the campaign can still benefit.
• Post-Campaign Analytics: Attention results are read against each channel’s benchmarks and the outcomes the campaign delivered, giving the next plan a sharper starting point.

Attention-Based Media Planning Starts With a Quality Floor

The most significant shift in attention-based media planning is moving attention out of the post-campaign report and into the plan itself, with quality thresholds set before any money is spent.

Marc points out that buying the highest quality available is rarely the goal. In any market, overshooting the quality a campaign needs limits its scale and the range of inventory it can buy, so the useful question for attention optimization is what floor of quality will predictably deliver the results the campaign is expecting.

Neala adds that the right level depends on the outcome, the brand, and the category:

• High-Consideration Categories (Automotive, Luxury, Travel): A decision like booking travel may need more consumer attention before an ad makes an impact.
• Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (CPG, Retail): Prompting a quick choice, such as picking up a soda at the checkout, can need far less.

Optimizing for pure attention narrows the impressions available to buy, so scale drops and CPMs rise. A floor set at the right level for each brand and KPI keeps the plan efficient and protects the outcomes it’s designed to drive. In a joint campaign analysis with a national restaurant chain, applying an Adelaide AU threshold unlocked a 67% improvement in overall campaign performance while sustaining programmatic scale.

This is the thinking behind the attention thresholds in Teads Ad Manager, helping enterprise brands plan, activate, and measure against inventory certified to deliver on performance and brand outcomes. Used this way, attention metrics in advertising shape the plan before launch as well as the report afterward.

Reading Ad Attention Across CTV, Web, and Mobile

Attention metrics behave differently across screens, and advertisers should avoid applying uniform benchmarks across diverse environments.

Connected TV (CTV) advertising is a lean-back experience in the living room, whereas mobile and desktop feeds are interactive environments built for speed. Each screen plays a distinct role in an omnichannel mix.

Marc’s advice is to understand the benchmarks on each channel and tune campaigns to beat them. Choosing between channels is a separate decision, based on the audience, where a brand will find incremental reach, and which environment suits the message best. Within a channel, a floor set against the right KPI can make a clear difference, and Adelaide’s guide includes a food and beverage advertiser that saw lifts of up to 60% in unaided awareness, favorability, and purchase intent from CTV inventory scoring above KPI-specific AU floors.

Measuring attention in advertising consistently across the plan still pays off. Neala notes that a common approach to attention measurement makes results easier to present and explain to stakeholders, and that the bigger risk comes from gaps, where one part of a media buy is optimized toward quality while another runs without that input.

Looking Ahead

The future of media trading lies in distilling attention into a placement quality score, one that works as a shared understanding of quality before a campaign ever runs. By agreeing on upfront quality standards, media buyers and publishers can trade on true value rather than raw volume.

As attention metrics in advertising become part of how media is planned and traded, advertisers who set the right level of quality for each campaign and hold to it on every screen will be best placed to turn attention into results.

Ready to plan with attention across every screen on a single omnichannel platform? Get in touch to explore our attention and CTV solutions.