Here’s a stat to choke on your overpriced conference coffee: 20 to 30% of ad impressions on TV are actually seen by nobody. Nobody. That’s not a typo. It’s the latest pearl of wisdom dropped by Viant Technology CEO Tim Vanderhook, a guy who apparently decided to ruin a perfectly good advertising conference with facts.
This isn’t just some back-of-the-napkin estimation. Viant snapped up TVision Insights, a company that, get this, actually measures whether a human is present and, more damningly, looking at the TV or just scrolling through TikTok. It’s like they invented a lie detector for ad impressions. And the results? Not pretty for anyone still peddling the myth of guaranteed eyeballs.
The Empty Room Epidemic
Vanderhook essentially blew up the whole notion of “served impressions” being worth a damn. Viant’s new system, which mashes TVision’s attention data with their own tracking, aims to give advertisers a clearer picture. It’s supposed to work across linear, CTV, and those infuriating walled gardens that never let you peek under the hood. The big play? An “attention-adjusted CPM.” Translation: you pay for actual engagement, not just the comforting idea that someone might have seen your ad. Because apparently, we needed a whole new metric to confirm that not all impressions are created equal. Who knew?
The pitch is simple, really. High attention, lots of people watching? You pay a premium. People are in the kitchen, fighting over the remote, or, God forbid, looking at their phones? Your ad is just expensive wallpaper. Vanderhook put it rather plainly: “If the attention is really high and the co-viewing is really high, that content owner is gonna see higher CPMs,” and the opposite, of course. It’s almost as if advertisers want to reach actual humans who might buy something. Imagine that.
CTV’s Long-Overdue Apology Tour
Connected TV has been this shiny object for years, promising the moon when it came to performance. We got nice charts, sure, but actual proof? Less so. Vanderhook argues that Viant’s identity infrastructure, combined with this new attention data, changes the game. Addressability, he says, is CTV’s superpower. You can target specific households, track what happens, and maybe, just maybe, prove that ads actually work. He tossed out the golfer example: if your data shows golfers are prime customers, you can blast them on CTV. It’s so blindingly obvious it’s almost insulting it took this long.
The AI Show: Bids Yes, Plans Maybe
And of course, no tech conference worth its salt is complete without a breathless discussion of AI. Vanderhook claims AI is already running the show when it comes to bidding – over 90% of clients trust the machines to adjust prices faster than any human could. But planning? That’s a different story. Adoption is closer to 30%. Why? Because AI still has trouble wrangling complex, multi-channel media plans. And fully autonomous campaigns? Still more of a fantasy than reality.
“That final piece of letting AI run the whole campaign… we have the least amount of adoption there, and it’s really a question of trust.”
Yeah, marketers love automation until it starts spending their budget in ways that make their bosses sweat. It’s the same old dance.
What You Got That Nobody Else Does?
On industry consolidation, Vanderhook’s take was refreshingly blunt. The future, he reckons, hinges on owning something unique: either exclusive data or exclusive inventory. The walled gardens, naturally, have both. The rest of us—Viant included—are scrambling, gobbling up data companies like TVision and Iris.
But here’s the kicker, the part that made me raise an eyebrow: Vanderhook hinted that the next big thing might not be data at all. It might be something far more ancient and, dare I say, less programmable.
“At a certain point… we need to go back to the foundational principles of advertising,” he mused, pointing to creative. Yes, after all the algorithms, identifiers, and the endless pursuit of attention metrics, we might just discover that ads need to be good. They need to persuade people. Revolutionary.
The ad tech world keeps chasing the next big digital marvel, spending billions to figure out how to nudge a consumer’s thumb a millisecond faster. Meanwhile, the CEO of a major ad tech player suggests the key to success might just be… writing a better ad. If that’s not a commentary on the last two decades of Silicon Valley excess, I don’t know what is.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What does Viant’s acquisition of TVision Insights mean for advertisers? It means advertisers can now measure actual human attention to TV ads, not just whether an ad impression was served. This allows for a more accurate assessment of ad performance and can inform pricing through an “attention-adjusted CPM.”
Is CTV advertising really performing better now? Viant’s integration of TVision’s data suggests that CTV’s promise of addressability and measurability is becoming a reality. By linking household-level IDs with attention data, advertisers can theoretically target audiences more effectively and measure outcomes more reliably than with traditional TV.
Why is AI adoption lower for ad campaign planning than for bidding? AI is highly effective at real-time bidding adjustments due to its speed and data processing capabilities. However, campaign planning involves more complex variables across multiple channels that AI currently struggles to fully integrate and manage autonomously, leading to lower adoption rates due to trust issues and the need for human oversight.
