LG Ad Solutions' Tony Marlow On How CTV Is Winning The Co-Viewing Race

In our latest Thought Leaders Circle installment, Tony Marlow, CMO of LG Ad Solutions looks at how CTV is reshaping viewer engagement with content and advertisements, outperforming traditional linear television.

TONY MARLOW: We actually just ran an attention study with TVision, and TVision has a panel of people that's all opted in. They use this camera-like sensor that they literally attach to the TV, and it can detect whether someone's eyes are on the television, whether they're paying attention to the content, or paying attention to the ad. It can also detect how many people are in the room. We found a couple of things—literally, this week we launched the study. We found that CTV garners more attention for both content and ads than linear. The attention factor was significantly higher.

And the second piece we weren't necessarily expecting: there's a much higher co-viewing factor. Meaning that when you're watching connected TV, you're much more likely to be watching with other people, and that wasn't something we necessarily knew, but it is interesting because it's self-appointed appointment viewing. "Oh, let's sit down; we're going to watch show XYZ together!" And it does start to make sense.

Then we found also that ad-supported CTV within the mix showed a very similar upward trajectory in terms of the attention and the co-viewing factor. It's also interesting because one of the questions that we had going into the research was whether you're co-viewing, are you paying more or less attention to the television? Because it could be that you're talking to the other individual, or it could be because it's appointment viewing you're paying attention to the glass. And the research found that when you're co-viewing, you tend to pay higher attention—more attention than when you're watching alone. So, CTV has a greater level of attention, a greater level of co-viewing, and when co-viewed, an even higher level of attention.