Brands routinely block entire news or music categories despite content variation within those genres, missing advertising opportunities that artificial intelligence can identify through granular scene-level analysis rather than broad categorical exclusions.
“Many brands just block the entire news category. Is every news bad for your brands? I don’t think so,” Yan Liu, CEO and co-founder at TVision, told Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan. “Maybe classical music is not your thing. But is every single piece of music bad for you? No. That’s why we are advocating using AI [to screen out positive from negative spaces].”
Scene-level insights reveal specific content characteristics rather than relying on genre classifications, enabling measurement, targeting, and optimization that benefits both publishers and brands.
Emotional alignment boosts attention
TVision’s study of roughly 50 campaigns across CPG, QSR, finance, automotive, and other industries found that aligning emotional elements between creative content and surrounding programming can increase audience attention by 2.1 times.
“If you’re able to align the emotional element between the creative and content in the perfect moment, we are able to boost the attention by 2.1x,” Liu said. “If you only got seven minutes per day, now potentially you can get 14 minutes. That’s huge for any brand.”
The research examined how emotional relevancy between content and commercials affects audience attention as overall attention spans continue shrinking.
CTV lacks performance signals
Connected TV struggles with missing performance indicators compared to digital media due to tagging difficulties and near-100% viewability rates, making attention measurement critical for understanding inventory quality.
“In the streaming industry, the biggest issue is it’s missing a signal because compared to digital media for CTV, it’s difficult to put a tag,” Liu said. “We believe attention can be a great signal to tell the brands what’s the quality of the inventory.”
Attention serves as a foundational metric in marketing funnels progressing from impressions through attention to search, website visits, and purchases, with no subsequent actions possible without initial attention.
Marketing triangle’s delicate balance
Successful campaigns need balanced alignment of audience, creative, and context rather than connected TV’s historical emphasis primarily on audience targeting.
“Marketing is not only about the audience. Yes, the audience is very important, but context and creative, they’re equally important. It’s like a triangle,” Liu said. “Let’s say if you figure out a perfect audience, but if I’m going to run some ads at 2:00 AM and the creative is really bad, not interesting at all, no matter how many times I run those ads there’s no impact because you’re sleeping.”
Optimal performance requires aligning all three elements at the right moments rather than focusing solely on audience identification.
“When these three things can align in the right angle, you can maximize the campaign performance,” Liu said. “For so long in the CTV industry, people only focus on the audience. Audience is important, but we advocate, you should add creative, you should add context.”
You’re watching Performance Marketing in Streaming TV: The Strategies & Innovations Driving Outcomes, a Beet.TV Leadership Series, presented by Wurl. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
