MIAMI — At the Possible conference, where every conversation eventually becomes about “attention” and someone is definitely trying to reinvent television before lunch, David Kostman, CEO of Teads, offered a simple reminder: your ad campaign now begins before anyone presses play.
Kostman pointed to the growing importance of connected TV home screens, those few indecisive seconds when viewers stare at tiles and pretend they have control over their evening.
“When we open the TV and we spend a few seconds or minutes thinking which tile do we click on, that’s a time where… a video ad has a tremendous impact on attention,” he said in this interview with Beet.TV.
In other words, the moment of existential scrolling is no longer dead time. It is inventory.
Partnerships and premium placements
Teads has leaned heavily into that moment through partnerships with device makers like LG and Samsung, turning the home screen into what Kostman framed as prime real estate for brands.
“It gives access to advertisers to what we believe is one of the best places to drive attention outcome, which is the home screen placement,” he said.
The pitch is straightforward. Start with a high-impact placement where users are actually looking, then follow them into video and beyond, ideally without losing them to snacks or group chats. Kostman added that these placements are tightly controlled.
“They will only allow the most premium advertisers of the world to be there,” he said, reinforcing that not every brand gets to hang out next to Netflix and YouTube like it owns the place.
Creative meets reality
Of course, there is a catch. The creative has to work everywhere, including formats that were not designed with your carefully crafted 16:9 masterpiece in mind. Kostman acknowledged that these are “non-standard placements,” which is a polite way of saying your ad might need to survive being resized, reformatted and judged in under three seconds.
Still, he said the payoff is worth it. Teads claims stronger brand recall and awareness from these placements, largely because viewers are not yet buried in content and still capable of noticing things.
Self-serve, but make it premium
Kostman also made a case for bringing all this inventory into a single platform, Teads Ad Manager, which he described as a kind of control center for agencies trying to manage campaigns across multiple device ecosystems without losing their sanity.
“It’s very critical,” he said of accessibility and self-serve tools, adding that agencies can launch campaigns across multiple OEMs from one place, which he framed as a “tremendous advantage” for efficiency.
The underlying tension remains familiar. Make it easy enough to scale but not so easy that premium inventory turns into a clearance rack.
Attention is the new currency
If there was one word that hovered over the conversation like a KPI-shaped cloud, it was attention. Kostman positioned it as both a metric and a philosophy.
“For us, attention is the best measure that will basically be a leading indicator in terms of the outcomes that you can drive,” he said.
He went a step further, suggesting that the future is not just measuring attention but predicting it. The idea is to allocate budgets based on where attention is likely to happen, not just where it already did. It is a neat concept, especially in an industry that has spent decades reacting to results after the money is gone.
Brandformance, because of course
Kostman also leaned into the industry’s favorite hybrid term, “brandformance,” arguing that branding and performance are no longer separate lanes but part of the same system.
“If you can on the same platform allocate your campaign based on the results, and allocate your budgets between branding and performance… it makes it so much easier to use and ability to scale,” he said.
Translation: the funnel is now a circle, and everyone is expected to pretend that was always the plan.
The takeaway
Kostman’s message was less about a single product and more about a shift in where campaigns begin. The home screen is no longer a waiting room. It is the opening act, the billboard and the first impression all rolled into one.
And if advertisers are not thinking about that moment yet, they might want to start. The viewer already has.
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