Viant’s Tim Vanderhook: When Nobody’s In The Room ‘Is Not An Impression, It’s An Invoice’
CANNES, France — Connected television measurement has long relied on delivery metrics that ignore whether anyone actually watched the ad — a fundamental flaw that attention data is now exposing, with real financial consequences for advertisers paying for impressions that never landed.
“If an impression gets served in a room where nobody is, it’s not an impression, it’s an invoice,” Tim Vanderhook, CEO of Viant, told Beet.TV correspondent Pooja Midha during a panel session at Cannes Lions. “If people are in the room, their eyes are on screen, you’re able to build that brand memory structure, which is the long-term goal that we’re all looking for.”
Midha, who framed the conversation around CTV’s measurement evolution, pressed Vanderhook on how attention signals translate from interesting data into actual buying decisions — and whether the industry is ready to move past reach and frequency as primary success metrics.
Attention adjusts CPMs in real time
TVision’s camera-based panel technology, acquired by Viant, measures presence in room, co-viewing, demographic composition, and eye-tracking attention at the pod and slot level — data that flows directly into Viant’s DSP to adjust CPMs based on actual audience engagement rather than assumed exposure.
“Peacock might have 80% attention and it’s worth the $35 CPM and premium that comes with a big brand like Peacock. But let’s say you go to another show, a fast channel, and it only has 40% attention. To normalize these numbers between the two, it is what we call the attention adjusted CPM,” Vanderhook said.
Midha noted the significance of optimizing at placement rather than show level — down to individual pods and slots within pods, where first-position ads consistently outperform mid-pod placements despite carrying identical CPMs.
Iris TV enables content-plus-attention activation
Viant’s earlier acquisition of Iris TV provides show-level content classification that programmatic buying historically lacked, enabling the combination of contextual signals with real-time attention data for more precise bidding decisions.
“In programmatic, you don’t actually know what content your ad is showing up against. So Molson Coors — when you show a Coors Light ad, it’s a very different environment in the Kardashians versus NFL football,” Vanderhook said. “The marriage of all of this inside of a DSP is that we can take live real-time data from the panel, know how many people are in the room watching a specific show, and with Iris, we can buy and bid inside of that pod where the numbers are really, really high.”
“Premium” is a blurry concept
Vanderhook challenged conventional assumptions about premium inventory, using the recent Knicks playoff run as illustration — games where large leads drove presence-in-room up while attention collapsed as viewers shifted to their phones.
“Sports being the most premium that you could get into — let’s go back to the recent Knicks run to win the championship. In the playoffs, they were up by 50 points at certain points. Presence in-room skyrockets, attention goes down. You don’t really need to watch the game,” Vanderhook said. “Premium content is going to change in what we determine premium, which is how engaged is the audience with that content?”
Publisher transparency portal addresses supply chain gaps
Viant launched a publisher-facing portal providing sell-side visibility into how inventory signals appear within the DSP — including household ID rates, Iris contextual data, and soon TVision attention scores — addressing a persistent information asymmetry between buyers and sellers.
“We constantly get asked, ‘Why aren’t you buying more from us?’ And we found ourselves doing copy and paste of internal reports and sending them to partners,” Vanderhook said. “We just decided why don’t we make a portal that anyone can sign up and we can register them and they can look at their own data inside of our DSP.”
Buy-side independence and measurement
When Midha pressed him on how Viant answers skeptics who question whether any platform can objectively grade its own inventory performance, Vanderhook pointed to business model alignment as the key differentiator from walled garden competitors.
“We don’t own content and we’re not trying to get a larger share of wallet. The way that an advertiser pays us is a percentage of their spend. We don’t make any more money,” Vanderhook said. “When you’re buy side only, it’s that credibility and trust layer that we have. We don’t really care where it goes. And that’s why we think we’re best positioned to tell the truth to the advertiser on what’s working and what’s not.”
You’re watching The Beet.TV Leadership Sessions at Cannes Lions 2026, presented by Viant. For more videos from this series, please visit this page. You can find all of our coverage from Cannes Lions 2026 here.
CANNES, France — Connected television measurement has long relied on delivery metrics that ignore whether anyone actually watched the ad — a fundamental flaw that attention data is now exposing, with real financial consequences for advertisers paying for impressions that never landed.
“If an impression gets served in a room where nobody is, it’s not an impression, it’s an invoice,” Tim Vanderhook, CEO of Viant, told Beet.TV correspondent Pooja Midha during a panel session at Cannes Lions. “If people are in the room, their eyes are on screen, you’re able to build that brand memory structure, which is the long-term goal that we’re all looking for.”
Midha, who framed the conversation around CTV’s measurement evolution, pressed Vanderhook on how attention signals translate from interesting data into actual buying decisions — and whether the industry is ready to move past reach and frequency as primary success metrics.
Attention adjusts CPMs in real time
TVision’s camera-based panel technology, acquired by Viant, measures presence in room, co-viewing, demographic composition, and eye-tracking attention at the pod and slot level — data that flows directly into Viant’s DSP to adjust CPMs based on actual audience engagement rather than assumed exposure.
“Peacock might have 80% attention and it’s worth the $35 CPM and premium that comes with a big brand like Peacock. But let’s say you go to another show, a fast channel, and it only has 40% attention. To normalize these numbers between the two, it is what we call the attention adjusted CPM,” Vanderhook said.
Midha noted the significance of optimizing at placement rather than show level — down to individual pods and slots within pods, where first-position ads consistently outperform mid-pod placements despite carrying identical CPMs.
Iris TV enables content-plus-attention activation
Viant’s earlier acquisition of Iris TV provides show-level content classification that programmatic buying historically lacked, enabling the combination of contextual signals with real-time attention data for more precise bidding decisions.
“In programmatic, you don’t actually know what content your ad is showing up against. So Molson Coors — when you show a Coors Light ad, it’s a very different environment in the Kardashians versus NFL football,” Vanderhook said. “The marriage of all of this inside of a DSP is that we can take live real-time data from the panel, know how many people are in the room watching a specific show, and with Iris, we can buy and bid inside of that pod where the numbers are really, really high.”
“Premium” is a blurry concept
Vanderhook challenged conventional assumptions about premium inventory, using the recent Knicks playoff run as illustration — games where large leads drove presence-in-room up while attention collapsed as viewers shifted to their phones.
“Sports being the most premium that you could get into — let’s go back to the recent Knicks run to win the championship. In the playoffs, they were up by 50 points at certain points. Presence in-room skyrockets, attention goes down. You don’t really need to watch the game,” Vanderhook said. “Premium content is going to change in what we determine premium, which is how engaged is the audience with that content?”
Publisher transparency portal addresses supply chain gaps
Viant launched a publisher-facing portal providing sell-side visibility into how inventory signals appear within the DSP — including household ID rates, Iris contextual data, and soon TVision attention scores — addressing a persistent information asymmetry between buyers and sellers.
“We constantly get asked, ‘Why aren’t you buying more from us?’ And we found ourselves doing copy and paste of internal reports and sending them to partners,” Vanderhook said. “We just decided why don’t we make a portal that anyone can sign up and we can register them and they can look at their own data inside of our DSP.”
Buy-side independence and measurement
When Midha pressed him on how Viant answers skeptics who question whether any platform can objectively grade its own inventory performance, Vanderhook pointed to business model alignment as the key differentiator from walled garden competitors.
“We don’t own content and we’re not trying to get a larger share of wallet. The way that an advertiser pays us is a percentage of their spend. We don’t make any more money,” Vanderhook said. “When you’re buy side only, it’s that credibility and trust layer that we have. We don’t really care where it goes. And that’s why we think we’re best positioned to tell the truth to the advertiser on what’s working and what’s not.”
You’re watching The Beet.TV Leadership Sessions at Cannes Lions 2026, presented by Viant. For more videos from this series, please visit this page. You can find all of our coverage from Cannes Lions 2026 here.
