You’ll get the snark, the headlines, and just enough industry gossip to bluff your way through a conference cocktail hour. Fun, yes. Dangerous, no.

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ADOTAT+ is where the real game is played. That’s where we map the numbers to the outcomes, unpack the “everyone knows” myths, and publish the receipts the industry would rather keep buried. It’s where the analysis cuts deeper, the strategies are sharper, and the secrets you shouldn’t know become the ones you can’t afford not to.

So by all means, enjoy the free floaties. But when you’re ready to dive into the deep end—where the currents are strong and the insights actually move money—you’ll know where to upgrade.

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I lobbed a question on LinkedIn that should’ve been harmless enough: Is YouTube really TV—or just a glorified aquarium of moving images while everyone scrolls their second screen?

Spoiler: it was not harmless.

What happened next was less “polite industry debate” and more “cage match.” And leading the charge was none other than Evan Shapīro, who came at me with the force of a thousand Nielsen charts and the kind of righteous certainty usually reserved for cable pundits and climate change deniers.

According to Evan, my take was stuck in 2011—as if I were still watching cat videos on a Dell laptop while the rest of the planet had quietly migrated YouTube to the living room big screen.

His main points were blunt:

And honestly? He’s not wrong. His case has teeth. Sharp ones.

But here’s the rub: that’s not the whole story.

Let’s start with the data Evan leans on:

So yes, YouTube has reach that would make any media CEO salivate. On the raw scoreboard, it wins.

But if you stop there, you miss the nuance. And that’s where the cracks show.

Enter BARB’s new U.K. dataset—the kind of report that media buyers read with a whiskey in hand.

Here’s the killer detail: while TV sets are now the #1 device for YouTube viewing, the top 200 channels only represent a tiny sliver of consumption. The vast majority of watch-time is happening in the long tail: kids’ nursery rhymes, toy unboxings, endless Peppa Pig loops, mukbangs filmed in kitchens with questionable lighting.

Translation: YouTube on TV is both Frontline documentaries and Blippi screaming about excavators. Sometimes in the same living room, at the same time.

For advertisers, that’s both thrilling and terrifying. Yes, you can get reach. No, you can’t always control the context. Your ad could play before a BBC-quality doc—or before something that looks like it was edited by a toddler on Red Bull.

This is the paradox advertisers can’t shake:

CTV platforms? They’re the curated whiskey lounge—single malt in crystal tumblers, pristine ad breaks, high trust.
YouTube? It’s a frat house kitchen—somewhere between the warm White Claws and the half-eaten pizza is a decent bottle of wine. But you’ve got to dig for it.

This isn’t just a fight about definitions. It’s a fight about budgets. If YouTube is TV, it wants TV money. If it’s not, it gets stuck as “cheap digital reach.” The stakes are billions.

So instead of trading philosophy, I’m testing what actually matters:

Evan isn’t wrong. For millions, YouTube is TV. Full stop. He said it.

But if advertisers don’t cut through the hype and measure by attention, memory, and outcomes, they’re just buying diner coffee and calling it espresso. And no matter how you label it, one wakes you up, the other tastes like burnt socks.

Stay bold, stay curious, and know more than you did yesterday.

When I first threw out the “Is YouTube actually TV?” grenade, I thought I’d get some spicy comments, a few half-baked analogies, and maybe an argument about whether Frontline on YouTube is the same as Frontline on PBS.

What I didn’t expect was the avalanche. Suddenly I had Lumen, TVision, Amplified Intelligence, EDO, iSpot, and dentsu all sliding data across the table like I’d accidentally convened the Geneva Convention of Attention Measurement. Everyone had a chart, a model, or a data set, and together it painted a picture of what’s really going on.

The consensus? Attentive eCPM is emerging as the one metric that cuts through the noise. It takes CPMs—those blunt instruments marketers have been waving around for decades—and puts them through the shredder of actual human behavior. Because if you don’t measure seconds of real, active attention, you’re just pricing wallpaper.

Let’s get blunt: viewability is a fig leaf.

It tells you an ad could have been seen. It doesn’t tell you if it was seen, for how long, or whether the person watching even registered it before reaching for their phone. In industry terms, viewability is the equivalent of bragging that your billboard got put up—even if the road it’s on has no cars.

This is where Lumen Research comes in. Their eye-tracking work shows that:

Viewability says “your ad loaded.” Attention says “someone actually watched it.” And there’s a canyon between those two ideas.

Now let’s bring in Peter Field—yes, the effectiveness guru—who’s been working with dentsu and Lumen datasets. His numbers tell a sobering story:

That’s more than double what you get on YouTube—even when YouTube ads can’t be skipped.

And here’s the kicker: for skippable YouTube formats, only about 15% of impressions make it past the skip.

So sure, YouTube impressions are cheap. But most don’t survive long enough to pass the 2.5-second “mental availability” threshold—a number Karen Nelson-Field at Amplified Intelligence has made famous. That’s the threshold for encoding a memory that actually influences long-term brand growth. Below that? You’re just screaming into the void.

Then I got my hands on TVision’s latest dataset, and things got even more interesting.

On the surface, YouTube is winning:

But dig into the details, and the story splinters:

It’s not enough to ask “Is YouTube TV?” The right question is “Which version of YouTube are we talking about—phone, laptop, or the TV set—and what kind of attention profile does that environment create?”

Here’s where the rubber meets the road.

Attentive eCPM = Media CPM ÷ Verified Seconds of Active Attention.

It sounds nerdy, but it’s revolutionary. Instead of paying for impressions (half of which nobody notices), you’re paying for eyes-on-seconds. And once you apply this math, the value hierarchy flips:

In plain terms: the metric advertisers thought mattered—cost per impression—doesn’t predict brand lift. Attentive eCPM does.

One of the biggest takeaways from all the experts I spoke with is that context multiplies outcomes.

That’s why EDO and iSpot consistently show higher branded search, site visits, and purchase intent tied to CTV and premium YouTube CTV buys, while YouTube mobile ads perform better for direct-response crumbs. Different formats, different outcomes.

The old media metrics—CPM, GRPs, reach—are blunt sticks in a world where seconds of actual attention drive brand growth.

If you’re serious about brand outcomes, you don’t buy impressions. You buy attentive seconds. And when you normalize for that, TV—whether traditional, CTV, or YouTube-on-CTV—delivers better economics than most of digital video.

Attentive eCPM is the only metric that tells you if your money is buying memory, or just noise.

And this is only the surface layer. What you’ve just read is the appetizer—the polite version. The real shifts are happening deeper:

That’s all in the full ADOTAT+ breakdown.

Because here’s the truth: arguing about whether YouTube is “TV” is a parlor game. The people who will win are the ones who know where the attentive seconds live, how to measure them, and how to buy them before everyone else catches up.

👉 The rest of ADOTAT+ is where we map the playbook, vertical by vertical. If you’re still buying on CPM and GRPs, you’re already behind. If you want your budget to buy memory instead of noise—upgrade and read on.