Attention used to be the warm-and-fuzzy metric brands name-dropped at Cannes — the kind of thing you slip into a panel discussion between the rosé tasting and the yacht party.

Then you’d go back to the office, fire up the spreadsheet, and stare at the same calcified CPM formulas you’ve been using since 2014.

Now? Attention is the currency everyone wants to mint. And the mint is running 24/7.

Lumen, DoubleVerify, Adelaide Metrics, Realeyes, and a half-dozen other contenders are treating “seconds in view” like barrels of oil — scarce, volatile, and worth fighting over.

Media buyers who once shrugged at the concept are suddenly willing to pay a premium for the good stuff, because the pitch is irresistible: more attentive seconds, more conversions, more revenue.

It’s the marketing equivalent of selling a magic diet pill — except this one comes with charts, heat maps, and a conference keynote.

Everyone claims they’re measuring it better than the next guy, and the definition of “better” changes depending on whose booth you stopped at last. Right now, the attention economy is less gold standard and more Wild West assay office — everyone’s waving a pan of shiny flakes, and the industry’s still figuring out which ones are actually gold… and which ones are just glitter in the riverbed.

Attention was never supposed to be the star of the show. For years it was the wallflower in the media metrics dance hall — mentioned politely in panels, tossed into conference slides like an afterthought, and quietly set aside when the conversation turned to the “real” numbers like CPMs, GRPs, and that old chestnut, click-through rates.

It was the parsley garnish on the overcooked steak of your media plan: there for presentation, but no one ever actually ate it.

And then something happened.

Somewhere in the last six months, attention staged a coup. Not the polite, corporate kind where people swap job titles and send each other congratulatory LinkedIn posts. I’m talking about a full, ruthless overthrow of the old order. It marched right into the boardroom, kicked “viewability” out of the big chair, and declared itself the new currency. Not a supporting KPI. Not a nice-to-have. The currency.

The transformation wasn’t subtle, and it wasn’t gradual. It was like watching the quiet bassist in the back of the band suddenly plug into a stadium sound system and blow the headliner off the stage.

And leading that noise? Adelaide Metrics.

Their 2025 Outcomes Guide didn’t just publish another industry study — it detonated it.

According to Adelaide, “Campaigns built for high attention delivered 41% higher brand lift and 55% stronger lower-funnel impact compared to those chasing viewability alone.”

That’s not a “cool stat” buried in a PowerPoint appendix.

That’s the kind of number that makes CMOs lean forward, CFOs reach for their red pens, and media buyers wonder if they need to start learning what an AU (Attention Unit) is before their next QBR.

Adelaide’s value prop is deceptively simple: stop measuring what’s easy, start measuring what works. Instead of worshipping time-on-screen, measure attention in a way that predicts real-world business outcomes — and prove it with cold, hard numbers.

Mike Follett, CEO of Lumen, brings some other big receipts. “Lumen has collected data from over 850,000 individuals across 37 countries, giving us over 5 billion eye tracking data points from which to build our predictive models of attention.”

Panels come from partners like Kantar and Dynata, built to be demographically representative.

The measurement is “in context” — people’s own feeds, websites, and devices — not “forced exposure” tests against a white background.

“Our product is a predictive model of attention derived from this primary dataset… the models can only be as good as the data they’re based on,” he says.

And while attention-as-currency makes for a good headline, Follett’s pragmatic: “There are very few instances of the buy-side and the sell-side using attention data as part of a contractual obligation… it’s hard to guarantee attention — partly because media is not 100% predictable and partly because creative is pretty volatile.”

Max Kalehoff, Chief Growth Officer at Realeyes, tackles that volatility by focusing squarely on the creative itself. Their flagship product, PreView, predicts performance across attention, emotion, brand sales, and media cost efficiency before an ad ever runs — no live test panels required.

The AI behind it is trained on 18 million human ad-viewing sessions, 350 billion frames of video, across 90+ countries, all annotated by trained psychologists, and validated through partnerships with Nielsen, Mars, AXA, Google, and Meta.

The result is a single metric — Attention Potential — designed to bridge the creative and media silos. Kalehoff notes that campaigns see the best outcomes when both the ad and the placement outperform on attention. In fact, high-attention creative can often rescue low-attention media placements, and vice-versa.

And unlike some competitors, Realeyes calibrates its scores directly to hard business outcomes like sales lift and CPM efficiency — not just softer indicators like brand lift.

Judy Shapiro, CEO of Topic Intelligence & EngageSimply, has no time for the gold rush. “At worst a scam – at best marketing fluffery (again) to capture marketer attention,” she says.

I’m thinking she doesn’t like this stuff, but let’s see…

Her argument: “The job of all advertising is to grab attention. Attention platforms would have us believe they can ‘divine’ attention and thus intent in some credible tech way. They can’t.”

She’s seen this before.

According to her, a decade ago, platforms promised advertisers they wouldn’t have to pay unless someone gave them 15 seconds of “attention.” “Most of these platforms have gone under,” she says, and the survivors “pivoted to CTV or ‘outcome’-based advertising” because the original model failed.

Her bottom line: “You cannot ‘buy’ attention directly… you cannot ‘tech’ your way out of bad marketing.”

Let’s be clear: this isn’t a desktop-video, YouTube-pre-roll story. This is across the board. Snapchat’s immersive formats are pulling more attentive seconds out of people than traditional video could ever dream of.

Connected TV specialists are holding viewers longer than their own living room furniture. Even retail media networks — once happy to just pump out impressions — are quietly building attention-based guarantees into their pitches because they know brands are asking for it.

Part of this shift is technology.

Ad measurement has finally caught up to the reality that “was the ad on screen?” is about as useful as asking “was the TV plugged in?” We can now track whether a human being actually looked, how long they stayed, and what they did next.

Part of it is privacy. With third-party cookies now officially in hospice care, precision targeting is losing its superpowers. If you can’t guarantee you’re hitting exactly the right person every time, you’d better guarantee the people you do reach are actually paying attention.

And part of it is the simple fact that marketers are tired of paying for noise. Attention turns the conversation from “did it run?” to “did it land?”

Attention isn’t a fad metric.

It’s starting to seem like a survival strategy.

Platforms love it because it rewards formats that keep people engaged instead of chasing raw volume. Agencies love it because it gives them something new to sell. Brands love it because it finally connects the dots between spend and actual outcomes.

But it’s also a market where — depending on who you ask — you might be sitting on a gold mine, a carefully engineered lab model, or a giant glitter scam.

If you’re still bragging about impressions, you’re playing checkers in a poker game.

The money, the measurement, and the momentum are all moving toward one simple truth: you don’t win by being seen. You win by being remembered.

And if Adelaide’s — or Realeyes’ — numbers are right, you win even faster when you measure the attention that actually drives the sale.

For years, “attention” was a Cannes-friendly buzzword you tossed around over champagne before heading back to a media plan built on CPMs and GRPs.

It was the intellectual garnish—nice to mention, rarely budget-driving.

That’s over.

In the last six months, attention has gone from side salad to main course. The question is no longer “Was it viewable?” but “Did anyone actually care?” And the CFO is leaning in when you can tie that attention to actual business outcomes.

This isn’t the domain of legacy media giants. It’s the playground of specialist measurement killers—companies mixing behavioral science, AI, and data partnerships to quantify something previously slippery. Here’s who’s shaping the attention economy in 2025–2026.

Primary Role: Post-campaign validation via live eye-tracking.
Business Model: Licenses data to agencies, platforms, and brands.
Key Differentiator: Largest real-world, in-market eye-tracking panel on Earth.
Competitive Threats: AI-predicted attention models could make massive human panels look charmingly retro.
Chance to Dominate: High – deeply embedded into agency workflows and platform integrations.

Lumen isn’t dabbling in lab simulations—they run the largest live eye-tracking panel on the planet. That means actual human eyes, in real-world contexts, not just modeled predictions. Their integrations with IAS, DoubleVerify, and dentsu’s “Attention Economy” project make their metrics part of the bigger picture, not a bolt-on.

For brands, Lumen is the post-game analyst: did people look, for how long, and was it worth it?

Primary Role: Real-time, accredited attention verification.
Business Model: SaaS subscription + integrations with brand safety and verification tools.
Key Differentiator: MRC-accredited Authentic Attention® metric blending exposure + engagement.
Competitive Threats: Platforms could spin up their own metrics, cutting out independent verification.
Chance to Dominate: High – accreditation + brand trust = procurement catnip.

DV took its ad verification DNA and spliced in a full attention stack. Their Authentic Attention® blends exposure (viewable, audible, long enough to register) with engagement (scrolls, taps, interaction). MRC accreditation isn’t just a badge—it’s the currency that gets CFO signatures. Case studies with Mondelez and Vodafone show tangible lifts in recall, purchase intent, and cost efficiency.

Primary Role: CTV-specific attention measurement.
Business Model: Panel-based analytics for advertisers and networks.
Key Differentiator: Breaks down attention by app, daypart, and even pod position.
Competitive Threats: Native CTV OS attention metrics from Roku, Samsung, and Amazon Fire.
Chance to Dominate: Medium – owns a niche, but the platforms could eat it.

While others started on web and mobile, TVision doubled down on Connected TV before it was cool. Their panel can tell you exactly when your audience was most attentive—down to whether your ad ran first, middle, or last in the pod. For buyers lost in CTV’s fragmented jungle, this is the map.

Primary Role: Pre-launch creative attention scoring.
Business Model: SaaS for creative testing + integrations with media attention data.
Key Differentiator: AI + facial coding predicts attention before launch.
Competitive Threats: DSPs and walled gardens baking creative optimization into their platforms.
Chance to Dominate: Medium – valuable niche, but reliant on integration partners.

Realeyes flips the script—why measure attention after the damage is done? They run creative through AI-powered facial coding to predict whether it will actually grab and hold attention. Then they layer in media attention data so brands can only scale the strongest work. In a world where bad creative burns millions, that’s not a “nice-to-have”—it’s budget triage.

Primary Role: Placement-level media quality scoring.
Business Model: Licenses AU score across publishers, platforms, and buying tools.
Key Differentiator: AU predicts likelihood of attention and outcomes, independent of creative and targeting.
Competitive Threats: Eye-tracking vendors modernizing, platforms pushing proprietary quality scores.
Chance to Dominate: High – already the most integrated attention score in the market.

Adelaide’s AU is a media credit score—predicting how likely a placement is to earn attention and deliver outcomes. It’s everywhere: 150+ integrations, dozens of premium publishers, and coverage across 95% of advertiser spend from cinema to walled gardens.

CEO Marc Guldimann is blunt about his competition: most eye-tracking vendors are “stuck at Gen 3,” chasing duration rather than outcomes. AU’s clean, bias-free scoring makes it publisher-friendly and guarantee-ready.

Primary Role: Hardware-driven ad engagement & data capture.
Business Model: Ad-subsidized free 55" TVs + direct advertiser deals.
Key Differentiator: Dual-screen, always-on interactive ad zone.
Competitive Threats: Privacy backlash; slow household adoption.
Chance to Dominate: Wildcard – if they scale, they could rewrite CTV playbooks.

Telly skipped the measurement wars and built a device designed to force attention. The free 55-inch 4K TV comes with a secondary screen dedicated to ads, shoppable content, and interactive experiences—without interrupting the main program. Early data shows engagement rates triple standard CTV ads.

By controlling the hardware, Telly controls the full data stack—and every pixel the user sees. It’s bold, slightly dystopian, and exactly the kind of move that could redraw the CTV ad map.

The Problem:
Marketers keep confusing time on screen with time actually watched. Just because your ad took up pixels for 15 seconds doesn’t mean eyes—or brains—were anywhere near it. Even Byron Sharp would tell you: paying extra for fleeting attention is like upgrading to first class on a plane you didn’t need to be on.

The Red Flags:

The Smart Play:

Think of duration like salt—great when it complements the dish, ruinous when it is the dish. Buy the seconds people choose to watch, not the ones they suffer through.

The acceleration of attention-based media buying has shifted from experimentation to active adoption, with budgets increasingly tied to verified engagement. Several trends stand out.

Global advertisers including Procter & Gamble and Unilever are testing agreements in which payment depends on measured consumer attention rather than impressions served. These arrangements are intended to ensure spend is directed toward placements that demonstrably hold audience focus, with early pilots influencing broader procurement strategies.

Major agency groups — Dentsu, Havas, and Publicis — are embedding attention metrics across planning environments, frequently sourcing data from multiple providers. This multi-vendor approach allows planners to validate findings across methodologies, optimize allocations in real time, and mitigate the risk of overreliance on a single measurement system. The integration also enables consistent application of attention-based KPIs across diverse media channels.

Attention cost per thousand (aCPM) bidding, in which pricing is linked to validated attentive seconds rather than delivered impressions, is gaining traction in programmatic marketplaces. Enabled by advances in AI-driven optimization, these models are reshaping auction dynamics and encouraging buyers to target inventory with higher engagement potential, even at premium rates.

Connected TV platforms are incorporating attention measurement into their yield strategies, segmenting inventory based on engagement scores. Premium placements — often tied to flagship programming or high-viewability ad positions — command elevated CPMs supported by third-party validation. This tiered structure gives advertisers clearer performance expectations while providing platforms with a defensible basis for premium pricing.

Bottom line: Whether through guarantees, integrated planning tools, or performance-linked bidding models, attention metrics are moving from supplementary insight to central trading currency. Brands and agencies are positioning to treat verified attention as both a measure of accountability and a competitive advantage in media investment.

You’ve just read the free version — the surface-level tour. In ADOTAT+, we go full X-wing trench run into the details you won’t see anywhere else.

The raw interview where he breaks down which Big Tech companies are already running Realeyes in production — and exactly how they’re using it.

How an 18-million-video dataset became the most valuable, regulator-approved biometric goldmine in adtech.

Why 30–40% of “market research” is already poisoned and how it warps AI models before they even start.

His bluntest takes on dumb attention metrics, media’s “opportunity to see” problem, and why full transparency might kill the business advantage.

Predictive swaps in live CTV campaigns, AI-driven “super signals,” and how vendors plan to own both the metric and the price.