You’ll get the headlines, the snark, and just enough industry gossip to hold your own at a marketing happy hour. But let’s be real—you’re only skimming the surface.

Want the insight behind the numbers? The details behind the hype? The perspectives that actually matter? That’s ADOTAT+. The real deal—where the research is deeper, the analysis is sharper, and the secrets the industry doesn’t want you to know... well, we spill them.

So enjoy the free ride, but when you’re ready to stop guessing and start knowing, you know where to upgrade.

Let’s kick this off with the most depressing fun fact in advertising: as much as 10% of streaming ads are served while the TV is literally turned off.

That’s right—your brand spot might be running to an empty screen humming in the dark like a busted fridge.

And yet the platforms still bill you, the agencies still dress it up in glossy decks, and CMOs still wave the numbers around like they just cracked the Manhattan Project.

This is the hall of mirrors that is TV measurement. Everything looks sleek and scientific until you realize half of it is duct tape and fairy dust. But myths have staying power because they make everyone’s lives easier: agencies get to declare victory, platforms keep the cash printer humming, and CMOs get a chart that looks good on a boardroom slide. Advertisers, meanwhile, are left funding campaigns that deliver phantom lift—success stories that evaporate the second you look under the hood.

Let’s pull these myths apart, one by one.

This one is the industry’s favorite bedtime story. An impression, we’re told, means your ad was “seen.” The reality? An impression means a slot was filled, a pixel fired, and some ad server marked the job as “done.” It says absolutely nothing about whether a human being’s eyeballs were in the vicinity.

Impressions are receipts, not results. Treating them as gospel is like counting unopened junk mail as “household engagement.” That kind of magical thinking is why campaigns “over-deliver” on paper while under-delivering in real life.

Marketers cling to reach and frequency like toddlers to a blankie. “We hit 80% of households five times each!” Terrific. You’ve successfully wallpapered the country.

But repetition is not persuasion. Playing a mediocre ad on loop doesn’t make it compelling—it just makes it annoying. Reach and frequency measure exposure, not impact. You can buy all the “opportunity to see” you want, but if the creative flops or the placement is irrelevant, you’ve purchased nothing more than a very expensive screensaver.

This is where things get downright comical. “Brand lift” sounds like a neat, tidy measure of effectiveness. In reality, it’s whatever the vendor says it is.

Each approach has a bias baked in: survey fatigue, panel skew, attribution noise. Put two vendors on the same campaign and you’ll get two different results. Both will claim victory. Both will send you a shiny deck. Only one might be telling the truth—and good luck figuring out which without a PhD in econometrics.

Here’s where CFOs get fleeced. Linear TV is panel-based, rooted in the gospel of Nielsen diaries and statistical weighting. CTV, by contrast, struts around with deterministic IDs and promises of household-level precision. They are not the same thing, not even close.

Yet dashboards keep mashing them together like they’re different flavors of yogurt. The result? Numbers that look scientific but are actually closer to spreadsheet astrology. You get reach curves that make no sense, attribution models that double-count, and presentations that tell you your campaign was “optimized” when in reality it was just duct-taped across incompatible measurement systems.

Attention is the new sugar high of advertising. Everyone wants to mainline it—minutes of gaze, predictive attention units, eye-tracking heat maps. And yes, attention matters. But attention is not magic.

A viewer can stare at your ad like it’s a traffic accident and still not remember your brand name thirty seconds later. Attention is a leading indicator, not a guarantee. Think of it as caffeine: it gives your campaign a jolt, but the substance still has to deliver. If the creative stinks, no amount of “attention time” will turn it into persuasion.

These myths endure because they’re convenient. Agencies love them because they create easy wins. Platforms love them because they keep CPMs inflated. CMOs love them because they produce clean, defensible slides for the board. But advertisers who actually pay the bills? They’re the ones left holding the bag.

Every dollar spent believing these myths is a dollar flushed down the drain of false confidence. And here’s the part no one says out loud: the vendors know it.

They know impressions aren’t people, that reach isn’t persuasion, and that attention isn’t salvation. But illusion sells. And until advertisers start demanding better, they’ll keep cashing the checks.

This is just the opening act. The myths are the teaser; the real action is in the subscriber-only breakdowns:

If you care about not lighting your ad budget on fire—or you enjoy watching sacred cows get slaughtered—stick around. The real fun is just beginning.

This isn’t a puff piece; it’s a learning piece. Think of it as sitting in on a seminar where the professor occasionally swears at bad metrics.

Meet Anders Lithner, CEO and co-founder of Brand Metrics. He’s the Swedish data whisperer who has spent his career dismantling how we think about advertising effectiveness. Brand Metrics is the platform built on his obsession: turning “brand lift” into something measurable, comparable, and actually useful.

Here’s what he said on The ADOTAT Show, and what you should take away if you care about how campaigns are really judged.

Lithner’s framework challenges the industry’s addiction to short-term metrics: clicks, CTR, single exposures, vanity dashboards. His view is blunt—the best ROI may not show up this quarter. That’s not failure, it’s how branding works.

For CTV, his lesson is equally sharp: don’t confuse assumptions for measurement. Attention can be powerful, but it must be validated and tied back to outcomes. Otherwise, it’s just another shiny metric vendors push to justify inventory.

By 2030, Lithner believes brand outcomes themselves will become predictive signals, not just backward-looking reports. With millions of survey datapoints, Brand Metrics is already training models to forecast expected lift. That means campaigns won’t just be measured—they’ll be optimized mid-flight against predicted brand impact.

It’s a future where lift is no longer a lagging indicator but a lever.

If you remember one thing from Anders Lithner, make it this:

And if you forget all that, at least remember the ketchup: Heinz wins not by being the cheapest or the cleverest, but by owning a spot in your head long before you ever stand in the grocery aisle.

👉 This section is designed to grow your knowledge, not flatter a vendor. The lesson? Don’t buy the myth that impressions or clicks equal effectiveness. Learn how lift actually works, and you’ll spend smarter. You just saved yourself a $5000 seminar.

Brand lift was supposed to be the universal yardstick. The magic ruler that proves whether millions in ad spend actually pushed anyone closer to buying.

Reality check: there is no universal yardstick.

Instead, the industry is stuck with rival vendors, each hawking their own gospel:

👉 They’re not Coke vs. Pepsi competitors. They’re rival priests in the same cathedral, all chasing the same scarce prize: the KPI that decides where billions in ad dollars flow.

For decades, Nielsen has been the Vatican of measurement. Its 42,000-household panel and survey machine defined the “currency” of TV trading. Agencies still kneel, because those ratings anchor billions in deals.

But in a streaming-first world? Panels feel like rotary phones.

Translation: Panels aren’t dead — they’re the glue keeping Nielsen’s cathedral from collapsing. Critics call it inertia. Nielsen calls it gospel.

EDO doesn’t bother with recall surveys. Their creed: watch what consumers do, not what they say.

When paired with survey providers, EDO generally aligns — but offers more granularity and speed. Surveys explain sentiment weeks later; EDO shows which audiences, placements, and creatives are driving action now.

Translation: If nobody Googled you after the ad, did it really matter?

Lumen doesn’t try to be a currency. They’re not selling CTV ratings. Their sermon is simpler: attention is the missing diagnostic layer.

Translation: Lumen isn’t fighting for the altar. They’re the diagnostics vendor whispering in the marketer’s ear, “Here’s what actually got noticed.”

Adelaide argues attention seconds are meaningless without context. Their creed: the AU (Attention Unit) predicts real outcomes, not just stares.

Adelaide shares its inputs (eye-tracking, placement data, outcome benchmarks) but not the weights. Why? To avoid the viewability trap, where everyone games the metric. Instead, they commission audits and publish case studies.

Translation: AU isn’t a black box — it’s a guarded formula. You’ll know the ingredients, just not the recipe.

Not really. This isn’t Coke vs. Pepsi.

But it feels like a fight because:

Bottom line: They’re not competitors in method. But they’re all fighting to be the KPI that directs billions in ad dollars.

This isn’t just nerdy vendor drama. Fragmentation creates real fallout:

So who becomes the next currency?

👉 Welcome to the arms race of 2025. It’s messy, political, and only getting uglier.

The free sermon ends here. Behind the ADOTAT+ curtain, we’ll reveal:

👉 Read the next part in ADOTAT+ to see how brand lift became the biggest confidence game in advertising.

The free section shows you the cracks in attribution and brand lift. But ADOTAT+ takes you inside the room where those cracks are quietly engineered — and who pays the price when they’re ignored.

Here’s what subscribers are already getting:

👉 If you’re reading only the free version, you’ve seen the preview. In ADOTAT+, you get the uncut version — the politics, the players, and the playbook.