For years the advertising industry operated under a convenient assumption: linear TV builds brands, digital drives performance. CTV sat awkwardly in between, borrowing the big screen from broadcast and the targeting from digital, yet never fully trusted with the brand-building dollars that still flow disproportionately to traditional television.
New research from dentsu, conducted in partnership with Lumen and Kantar, dismantles that assumption with hard data. Their study, The Brand Reset, is the largest dataset ever assembled linking passive attention measurement to both brand equity and real-world sales outcomes. And the headline finding is one that CTV publishers, broadcasters, and media agencies should pay close attention to: connected television now delivers long-term brand lift that is competitive with linear TV.
The Study at a Glance
The Brand Reset is not a typical white paper built on survey data and panel estimates. It combines eye-tracking attention data from Lumen, brand equity metrics from Kantar's MDS (Meaningful, Different, Salient) framework, and econometric sales modeling across 20 brands in 9 verticals. The study covered 10 next-generation media platforms plus linear TV, with 40,000 respondents across the US and UK. The result is a unified dataset that traces the path from seconds of viewer attention to years of sales impact.
Five findings stand out. Each one has direct implications for how CTV inventory should be valued, sold, and optimized.
1. Digital Video Drives Multi-Year Brand Effects
The old binary that split TV (brand) from digital (performance) was always an oversimplification. The Brand Reset provides the evidence to retire it permanently. The study found that digital video formats, including short-form and social video, generate measurable brand-building effects that persist for up to three years. These are not just short-term awareness spikes. They are the compounding brand equity gains that marketers have historically associated only with television.
For CTV publishers, this is validation. Every impression served on a connected television is not just a performance event to be measured by completion rate or click-through. It is a brand-building moment with long-term commercial value, and that value should be reflected in pricing.
2. A Single Exposure Can Drive Long-Term Sales Lift
One of the study's most striking findings is that even a single video ad exposure can generate a long-term sales lift of one to five percent over three years. This challenges the frequency-obsessed planning models that dominate programmatic buying, where campaigns are often optimized for reach and repetition rather than the quality of individual impressions.
The implication for CTV is significant. In an environment where ad loads are deliberately kept lower than linear TV to protect the viewer experience, each impression carries outsized weight. Publishers who can demonstrate the attention quality of their inventory, rather than just the volume, have a powerful pricing story to tell.
3. CTV Brand Lift Approaches Linear TV
This is the finding that should reshape budget allocation conversations across the industry. The study measured long-term sales lift by channel and found that CTV delivers roughly three-quarters of the brand-building impact of linear TV. Given that CTV typically offers superior targeting, transparent measurement, and lower waste, the effective return on brand investment is arguably already at parity, or better.
For broadcasters operating across both linear and CTV, this data supports a unified sales strategy where CTV is positioned as a brand-building complement to linear, not a discounted digital add-on. For agencies, it validates shifting upper-funnel brand budgets into CTV without sacrificing the brand outcomes their clients expect.
When CTV delivers brand-building impact that approaches linear TV, with better targeting and transparent measurement layered on top, the question is no longer whether CTV deserves brand dollars. It is how quickly you can reallocate them.
4. Earned Attention Outperforms Forced Attention
The study draws a critical distinction between forced attention (non-skippable formats where the viewer has no choice) and voluntary attention (formats where the viewer chooses to keep watching). Counter to what many sellers assume, voluntary attention generates stronger brand-building effects per second than forced attention.
This finding reframes the value proposition of CTV's typically shorter, more curated ad breaks. When a viewer on a FAST channel or AVOD service watches a 15-second spot to completion because it earned their interest, that attention is worth more than 30 seconds of a captive audience enduring a mid-roll pod they cannot skip. The quality of the attention, not just the duration, is what drives brand outcomes.
For publishers and ad ops teams, this has practical implications for ad pod design. Shorter, well-curated pods that respect the viewer's time may generate more valuable attention per impression than longer pods stuffed with inventory. The data now exists to make that case to buyers.
5. Attention Has Diminishing Returns After 20 Seconds
The study measured the relationship between attentive seconds and long-term sales lift, and found a clear curve: impact rises steeply through the first 15 to 20 seconds, then flattens. Beyond the 20-second mark, additional seconds of attention contribute progressively less to brand outcomes.
This does not mean longer ads are wasteful. It means the first 20 seconds matter most, and CTV's typical format of 15- and 30-second spots is well positioned in the attention sweet spot. It also reinforces the case for frequency capping and creative rotation. Rather than showing the same 30-second spot six times, advertisers may achieve better brand outcomes by reaching more viewers once or twice with creatives that capture attention quickly.
What This Means for CTV Publishers and Broadcasters
The Brand Reset lands at a moment when CTV ad spending continues to accelerate but much of that spend is still evaluated through performance metrics. Completion rates, viewability scores, and click-throughs are useful operational metrics, but they dramatically undercount the brand-building value that CTV delivers.
Publishers now have third-party evidence from one of the world's largest agency networks to make several strategic arguments:
- Price CTV as a brand medium. If CTV delivers long-term sales lift approaching linear TV, CPMs should reflect that brand-building premium, not be benchmarked against mobile display.
- Invest in attention measurement. As attention becomes the currency that connects media investment to brand outcomes, publishers who can quantify the attentive seconds their inventory delivers will have a competitive advantage in RFPs and programmatic auctions.
- Rethink ad pod strategy. The data suggests shorter, better-curated ad breaks may deliver more valuable attention per impression. This aligns with the viewer experience and gives publishers a quality story that differentiates premium CTV from long-tail inventory.
- Unify linear and CTV sales narratives. For broadcasters, the study eliminates the rationale for treating CTV as a separate, lower-tier channel. A unified reach and brand-building story across linear and CTV strengthens the overall pitch to advertisers.
What This Means for Agencies
Media agencies are under constant pressure to justify channel allocation decisions to clients who want both brand growth and measurable returns. The Brand Reset gives planners the ammunition to move upper-funnel brand budgets into CTV with confidence.
The study also introduces a planning framework that considers brand size and message complexity when allocating attention-based formats. Larger brands with familiar messages can lean on cost-efficient shorter formats for reach, while smaller brands or complex messages benefit from longer-form CTV placements that earn sustained attention. This is the kind of nuance that allows agencies to build smarter media plans rather than simply chasing the cheapest CPMs.
The Bigger Picture
The advertising industry is at an inflection point. Viewer time has already shifted from linear to streaming, but brand budgets have been slower to follow because the evidence was not there. That excuse is now gone.
CTV is no longer just a performance channel with a big screen. It is a brand-building medium with the data to prove it, and the targeting, measurement, and optimization capabilities to make every brand dollar work harder than it does on traditional television. The publishers and platforms that understand this, and can articulate it with data, are the ones that will capture the next wave of brand investment as it shifts from linear to connected.
The Brand Reset is not just a research paper. It is a pricing argument, a sales strategy, and a wake-up call, all in one.