In Context with TVision: The efficacy of scene-level contextual targeting

In this episode of In Context, Wurl’s Tori Owens sits down with Yan Liu, co-founder and CEO of TVision, to explore why attention is becoming a cornerstone of performance in CTV advertising. Liu argues that marketers can no longer rely on audience targeting alone. Instead, true impact comes from capturing attention—an outcome driven by a mix of timing, content relevance, and emotional alignment. If someone isn’t paying attention, he noted, they’re not going to take action. Plain and simple.

Backed by findings from a joint Wurl–TVision study, Liu revealed that ads aligned with the emotional tone of the content saw attention-duration rates soar from 30% to 70%. Whether it’s matching a joyful ad with upbeat programming or syncing a serious message with a somber scene, emotional context helps ads land more naturally—boosting engagement and reducing viewer drop-off.

What makes this approach even more compelling? It doesn’t require bigger budgets. Smarter placements, not higher spend, are what drive results. “You don’t have to buy the Super Bowl to get high attention,” Liu said. “You just need smarter placements.” And while attention is often considered an upper-funnel metric, Liu emphasized its correlation to better outcomes across the full funnel—from brand lift to search behavior to long-term sales.

​​If you put an ad in a very relevant, emotionally relevant spot, the attention to duration will bump up to 70%. More than 2x effect in terms of the contextual relevancy, which is quite significant because we haven’t really found another signal that can increase attention that much.”

Yan Liu

CEO
TVision

In Context is a Wurl original video series featuring short-form conversations with industry leaders exploring the impact of contextual targeting in CTV. Each episode dives into how emerging technologies are helping advertisers unlock smarter creative strategies, improve performance, and drive better outcomes on the biggest screen in the home.

Transcript

Tori: Hi, Yan. Thanks so much for being here with us today.

Yan: Thank you for having me.

Tori: To start, can you give us a quick overview of TVision and your role in ad measurement?

Yan: My name’s Yan Liu. I’m the co-founder of CEO at TVision. We are a measurement company focusing on everything on TV, traditional TV, CTV, and we want to understand the quality of media, especially attention.

Tori: What are some of the signals you’ve seen drive attention in streaming TV? Are there any that you think are underutilized by marketers?

Yan: Ultimately, attention is the combination of all the signal regarding the media quality. That can be the content, can be the time of day, can be the contextual synergy between the creative and content, can be many, many different things, right? But ultimately, what we believe is today, brands only utilizing audience. If you ask any brands they tell you, “Oh, I use this audience, that audience,” but that’s pretty much only strategy, which for me doesn’t make sense because we all learn in Marketing 101, it’s not only about who you want to reach. It’s about when and what’s the message and how we’re going to reach, right? Audience is important, but that cannot be 100% of your marketing strategy. So we have been advocating for a long time that in addition to audience, you have to understand the context. You have to maximize the understanding of when you want to send, what message, to whom, right? That will really complete the entire marketing strategy.

Tori: And at Wurl, we’ve really been leaning into contextual alignment, placing ads and content where the ads tone matches the content on screen. Can you tell us a little bit about the study that you did with Wurl, examining that link between an ad’s emotional alignment with content and viewer attention?

Yan: Sure. So we did a study using your data to really better understand that when an ad has the emotional contextual relevancy with the content, so for example, if you run a happy ad in a happy content, what exactly happened to attention, right? And we look at more than 50 brands, many, many campaigns to really understand what’s the true effect. So the outcome is quite interesting. So if you put an ad in an emotionally not relevant spot, the attention in terms of the attention to duration is roughly 30%.

If you put an ad in a very relevant, emotionally relevant spot, the attention to duration will bump up to 70%. More than 2x effect in terms of the contextual relevancy, which is quite significant because we haven’t really found other signal can increase attention that much.

And another interesting thing is that usually the contextual element is not linearly correlated to CPM. Because many people, okay, I want to buy a Super Bowl. Of course, that’s high attention, but you also have to pay high CPM. I really think this is the new way for brands to unlock a better ROI without expanding their budget.

Tori: We typically see that contextually targeted campaigns deliver improvements and KPIs up and down the funnel. How have you seen attention correlate to other outcomes beyond brand awareness?

Yan: So we run many, many studies historically about this. As you said, this has very strong correlation with the brand outcome. That’s been proven not only by us, but many, many, many companies. We also did many studies to prove that attention does strongly correlate to search, which also makes sense because in order for people to search, they have to pay attention to the commercial. Otherwise, they are not going to just randomly search a brand, right?

Then the lower funnel, I think that’s getting slightly trickier because sometimes we just don’t get those data, but we have some clients, we license data to them. They run the similar study. They’re able to show that, especially in the MMM model in the long run, highly attentive spot does drive better outcome in the MMM model.

Tori: Excellent. Well, thank you so much for your time, Yan. Appreciate you being here with us.

Yan: All right. Thank you.