Why the Next Big Video Opportunity May Be Hiding in Plain Sight
AMENIA, NY – The display advertising ecosystem is massive, mature, and moves a lot of money. It also has a problem: most of what fills it doesn’t move.
That gap between display’s scale and video’s impact is where one ad-tech company sees its opening. Its pitch: deliver HD-quality video that loads instantly within standard display placements, then measure it on attention rather than just impressions or completion rates.
“The display ecosystem, it’s established, it’s robust, and it’s scalable. And it sells. It sells hard,” said John Osborn, president, US, SeenThis, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “The problem historically with the display environment is that it’s primarily littered with lots of static ads.”
Display’s latency problem
Osborn argued that video has always been available in display, but technical limitations have undermined its effectiveness. Heavy files and slow connections mean that, if a video ad does not begin playing within two or three seconds, the user has already moved on.
“If it’s not loading in the first two, three seconds, you’re getting that white box that scrolls through your phone,” Osborn said. “We scratch that itch in a way because SeenThis is the only technology that unlocks the power of HD-level, the highest-quality possible video that instantly loads.”
That claim is being tested against a backdrop of surging digital video investment. According to the IAB’s 2026 Digital Video Ad Spend & Strategy Report, U.S. digital video ad spending is projected to reach $81.9 billion this year, up 11% year over year and growing nearly 20% faster than the overall ad market. Social video, CTV and online video are all expanding, but buyers are increasingly asking whether each environment can prove attention, outcomes and quality.
Attention as the new currency
Osborn said SeenThis has moved away from metrics like impressions and viewability in favor of attention. The company has partnered with Lumen Research to measure attentive seconds, and in June 2026 launched SeenThis Attention, a guaranteed-attention product that supports buying models including attentive CPM and cost per attentive second.
“If you look at the historical ways of measuring things, I mean, even going back to the impression, an impression doesn’t necessarily deliver an impression on the viewer, especially if someone’s not seeing it,” Osborn said. “Through a great partnership that we have with Lumen, we are now tracking and we’re measuring attentive seconds and attention as a metric that it seems everybody more and more is caring a lot about.”
He claimed that when SeenThis first integrated Lumen’s tracking, the results were so far above benchmarks that Lumen had to recalibrate its scale. “The ads that we were delivering, the HD-level streaming ad units in the world of display, it broke the meter,” Osborn said. “They had to develop a new scale because the multiples of attention that we were delivering against the backdrop of slow-loading and static ads, it just popped.”
Cutting through fragmentation
The open web remains a fragmented environment, with inconsistent specs, custom scripts and non-standard implementations making premium video harder to activate at scale. In August 2026, SeenThis and Madington released High-impact.js, an open-source framework intended to replace vendor-specific workarounds with a shared standard.
Osborn acknowledged that noise and complexity are the biggest bottlenecks. “I think the biggest issue is the noise, but the biggest opportunity for us is to cut through the noise with a product that people literally see,” he said. “And if you’re not seeing, you’re not getting anywhere.”
He positioned SeenThis video as a complement to, not a replacement for, CTV and social video. “The conversations we’re having, this is not an either/or,” Osborn said. “We’re not trying to put CTV out of business or Meta, Google, or anyone else. They have really important roles that they play.”
Chasing scale without chasing waste
Osborn said the opportunity is to establish SeenThis video as a distinct channel for brands that feel overexposed to YouTube or CTV and want incremental reach with measurable attention. He cited retail clients as examples of advertisers seeing results that move “all the way through to sales.”
“I hear all the time, we’re way over-indexed, we’re overspent in YouTube, we’re overspent in CTV,” Osborn said. “I wish there was something in the open-web world where we could deliver at multiples of four or five times, not only impressions, but attention metrics that tend to move the needle.”
Whether the open web can absorb more video budgets will depend on whether the industry can standardize attention measurement and reduce operational friction. The IAB, MRC and CIMM released a cross-industry attention measurement framework in 2025, raising the bar for transparency and comparability.
For vendors like SeenThis, that validates the attention-based sales story but also invites more scrutiny.
AMENIA, NY – The display advertising ecosystem is massive, mature, and moves a lot of money. It also has a problem: most of what fills it doesn’t move.
That gap between display’s scale and video’s impact is where one ad-tech company sees its opening. Its pitch: deliver HD-quality video that loads instantly within standard display placements, then measure it on attention rather than just impressions or completion rates.
“The display ecosystem, it’s established, it’s robust, and it’s scalable. And it sells. It sells hard,” said John Osborn, president, US, SeenThis, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “The problem historically with the display environment is that it’s primarily littered with lots of static ads.”
Display’s latency problem
Osborn argued that video has always been available in display, but technical limitations have undermined its effectiveness. Heavy files and slow connections mean that, if a video ad does not begin playing within two or three seconds, the user has already moved on.
“If it’s not loading in the first two, three seconds, you’re getting that white box that scrolls through your phone,” Osborn said. “We scratch that itch in a way because SeenThis is the only technology that unlocks the power of HD-level, the highest-quality possible video that instantly loads.”
That claim is being tested against a backdrop of surging digital video investment. According to the IAB’s 2026 Digital Video Ad Spend & Strategy Report, U.S. digital video ad spending is projected to reach $81.9 billion this year, up 11% year over year and growing nearly 20% faster than the overall ad market. Social video, CTV and online video are all expanding, but buyers are increasingly asking whether each environment can prove attention, outcomes and quality.
Attention as the new currency
Osborn said SeenThis has moved away from metrics like impressions and viewability in favor of attention. The company has partnered with Lumen Research to measure attentive seconds, and in June 2026 launched SeenThis Attention, a guaranteed-attention product that supports buying models including attentive CPM and cost per attentive second.
“If you look at the historical ways of measuring things, I mean, even going back to the impression, an impression doesn’t necessarily deliver an impression on the viewer, especially if someone’s not seeing it,” Osborn said. “Through a great partnership that we have with Lumen, we are now tracking and we’re measuring attentive seconds and attention as a metric that it seems everybody more and more is caring a lot about.”
He claimed that when SeenThis first integrated Lumen’s tracking, the results were so far above benchmarks that Lumen had to recalibrate its scale. “The ads that we were delivering, the HD-level streaming ad units in the world of display, it broke the meter,” Osborn said. “They had to develop a new scale because the multiples of attention that we were delivering against the backdrop of slow-loading and static ads, it just popped.”
Cutting through fragmentation
The open web remains a fragmented environment, with inconsistent specs, custom scripts and non-standard implementations making premium video harder to activate at scale. In August 2026, SeenThis and Madington released High-impact.js, an open-source framework intended to replace vendor-specific workarounds with a shared standard.
Osborn acknowledged that noise and complexity are the biggest bottlenecks. “I think the biggest issue is the noise, but the biggest opportunity for us is to cut through the noise with a product that people literally see,” he said. “And if you’re not seeing, you’re not getting anywhere.”
He positioned SeenThis video as a complement to, not a replacement for, CTV and social video. “The conversations we’re having, this is not an either/or,” Osborn said. “We’re not trying to put CTV out of business or Meta, Google, or anyone else. They have really important roles that they play.”
Chasing scale without chasing waste
Osborn said the opportunity is to establish SeenThis video as a distinct channel for brands that feel overexposed to YouTube or CTV and want incremental reach with measurable attention. He cited retail clients as examples of advertisers seeing results that move “all the way through to sales.”
“I hear all the time, we’re way over-indexed, we’re overspent in YouTube, we’re overspent in CTV,” Osborn said. “I wish there was something in the open-web world where we could deliver at multiples of four or five times, not only impressions, but attention metrics that tend to move the needle.”
Whether the open web can absorb more video budgets will depend on whether the industry can standardize attention measurement and reduce operational friction. The IAB, MRC and CIMM released a cross-industry attention measurement framework in 2025, raising the bar for transparency and comparability.
For vendors like SeenThis, that validates the attention-based sales story but also invites more scrutiny.
