Eight to one: what television buys that the feed doesn't.

Every media conversation starts with the same number — impressions — and every media conversation is wrong for the same reason. An impression is a delivery receipt. It says a file was served. It does not say a person was there, and it certainly does not say for how long.

So instead, start with the only measurement that asks the question directly. Lumen Research and TVision ran a consented eye-tracking panel — real cameras, real eyes, recording whether someone actually looked at an advert and for how many seconds.¹ Here is what came back, expressed as attentive seconds delivered per thousand impressions.

Lumen Research / TVision consented eye-tracking panel, presented to the Media Research Group. UK data, collected November 2022 – January 2023.¹

Read the third column again, because it is the one that ends arguments. 11.8 seconds against 1.1. A separate measurement firm working from more than 59 billion attention data points puts social ad formats at 0.4 to 1.6 seconds of active attention per view, with most of that captured in the first two and a half seconds.² Two independent panels, different countries, different methods, same answer.

The comparison nobody is making honestly

Here is the part that should genuinely bother anyone buying media: the platforms do not agree on what a view is.

• Meta counts a ThruPlay at 15 seconds — or the whole thing, if it is shorter.
• TikTok counts a view at two seconds.
• YouTube counts a TrueView at 30 seconds, or completion, or a click.
• A non-skippable television ad is counted complete when it finishes playing.

Put those four numbers in one spreadsheet and you have not compared performance. You have compared definitions. A "view" on one platform is fifteen times longer than a "view" on another, and no dashboard in the world tells you that in the column header.

Four things we are not going to tell you

This is a post published by a company that sells television advertising, so it is worth saying plainly which arguments we looked at and threw away.

One more, and it is the least comfortable of all: the average connected TV campaign reaches under 20% of US households.⁶ Television is not a magic mass-reach button any more. It is a precise instrument that delivers unusually high-quality seconds to a specific set of homes. That is a different product to the one your parents bought, and pretending otherwise is how agencies lose accounts in month three.

What television actually costs

Now the assumption that stops most businesses before they start. People believe a television campaign begins somewhere north of a hundred thousand dollars, because that is what it cost when buying television meant buying a whole audience whether you wanted them or not.

Roku's own published guidance is that $500 to $1,000 is enough to get a campaign live and start generating meaningful data.⁷ One self-serve platform reporting on its own small-business customers puts typical spend at $25 a day — about $700 over a four-week flight — at an all-in cost of roughly $42.50 per thousand including the production of the commercial itself.⁸ Sixty-one percent of that platform's advertisers have ten employees or fewer.

Meanwhile, in 2026 connected TV upfront spending reached $17.73bn and passed primetime linear television's $16.98bn for the first time,⁹ and streaming now accounts for roughly half of all US television viewing.¹⁰ The audience moved. The price of entry collapsed. Most businesses have not noticed either.

What we do about it

ContentPad Advertising is our flagship: we write and produce your commercial, and we run it. One team for the film and the airtime, because handing those to two companies is how brands end up with a beautiful spot nobody sees.

Non-skippable :15 and :30 spots in the ad break of premium, fully episodic programming across 150+ networks. Aimed at households by purchase intent, your own customer list, recent site visitors, and geography from nationwide down to a ZIP code. Reported back as completed views and the households that watched the whole thing and then arrived on your site — with a slice of the same audience deliberately held back and never shown the ad, so you can tell credit from lift.

That second one is worth a sentence more. Television is one of the last parts of advertising where the craft and the commercial side are still one job — you cannot sell a spot you do not understand how to make. Reps who come through the programme end up holding the whole chain: the idea, the film, the audience, the buy and the read. That skill set is portable, and the platform it runs on can be taken into other industries and other businesses — which is exactly the point. We would rather train operators than hire order-takers.