Study: Contextual Targeting Generates 2.1X More Ad Attention

There’s a ton of data out there that vendors claim will boost the performance of advertising campaigns. A lot of it focuses on knowing more and more about the consumers a marketer wants to target. 

There are big segments of the ad tech industrial complex dedicated to identifying women of a certain age (and income level) whose auto leases are about to expire. We can find out what they watch and when they watch it and try to make a connection. 

This seems to work, especially with digital video, even if being served a non-stop stream of auto ads can at times seem irritating, if not creepy. Digging up data to find those likely auto buyers also risks running afoul of privacy regulations.

There’s another approach sweeping the industry known as contextual targeting. Instead of targeting the consumers, contextual targeting looks to align an advertiser’s message with scenes in shows that are emotionally relevant in hopes of increasing engagement and, ultimately, sales.

A new study conducted by Wurl, which helps streamers grow viewership and maximize revenue  with TVision, which measures person-level second-by-second engagement with TV commercials, says this works bigtime with emotionally aligned CTV ads driving 2.1 times more attention than ads that aren’t aligned.

In a forward to the study, Anant Veeravalli, global chief analytics officer at IPG's MediaBrands and Acxiom, says that “marketers need to break out of their comfort zones. Playing it safe won’t unlock what’s next. It’s time to elevate measurement and start thinking of attention as a viable currency – and emotion as the signal that drives it.”

Veeravalli says the research was designed to see if the amount of attention people pay to ads go up when the commercial creative matches the emotion of the content. 

“The answer: A resounding yes. Ads that are emotionally aligned with the surrounding content consistently capture more attention. This reinforces what we’re seeking: emotion isn’t just a creative tool. It’s a strategic lever,” he concludes.

That attention translates into good results for advertisers, whether they’re looking for a lift in brand affinity or incremental in-store visits,”  Dave Bernath, GM of Americas at Wurl told The Measure.

“Everyone's looking for an edge in terms of how their investment in marketing can be more efficient and have greater efficacy.  And we're finding that emotional contextual alignment is doing that,” Bernath said.

Wurl has done studies that show emotionally targeted campaigns boost key KPIs. 

• Monks  used emotion targeting to boost engagement and saw a 33% lift in brand awareness (7x better than the five-year Kantar benchmark), and a 15% increase in purchase intent (2x better than the benchmark).
• PMG leveraged emotional resonance to drive incremental restaurant visits and sales for a QSR brand, seeing a 40% lift in foot traffic and 48% lift in sales.
• Mindshare used emotion-based placements to influence favorability among “movable middle” audiences.

Here are some more details about how the research was conducted. Wurl and TVision looked at more than 50 campaigns in a variety of product categories, looking for ads that aligned with the emotion of the content they ran in, and ads that did not.

They found that when there’s emotional alignment, people pay attention to more of the ad. Viewers in the study doubled their attentive time, to 71% of the ad from paying attention to just 33% of the ad. That’s that 2.1 times increase. 

They also found that ads with strong emotional alignment had strong engagement levels whether they were 15 seconds long or 30 second long. 

“This helps explain why emotionally resonant campaigns continue to outperform across all metrics from brand awareness to lower-funnel performance KPIs: People are more likely to watch — and stay watching — when the ad feels emotionally in tune with what they were just viewing. Emotions can help bridge the gap between content and ad attention — putting ad attention on par with content attention in TV. According to data from TVision, for H1 2025, the attention rate for CTV content is 59.5%,” the study said.

Wurl serves as the tech behind a lot of linear free ad supported streaming channels, or FAST channels,” Bernath said.  “We are powering thousands of these streams. So we're very unique in that we understand the content.”

Bernath says Wurl looks at the advertising creative as a starting point.

“Say you have an ad for your fast food chain or for insurance or travel. We score it on its emotional qualities. It could be high on anticipation and low on fear or high on trust or joy,” he said.

“If you have a Bahamas tourism ad featuring people smiling on the beach, you might not want to come out of an intense True Crime interrogation scene about someone getting murdered,” he added.  “I think we all kind of understand it. It resonates with people. What's exciting is that we can actually do it at scale.”

Contextual advertising doesn’t stop people from targeting and buying audiences, Bernath said. 

“We work with everybody and whoever their data partners are, and whatever targeting they have,” he said. “We're layering on top of that. So there's the emotional piece that is often combined with other targeting techniques.”

In the report, Wurl offers some tips for advertisers.

1. Don’t just buy audiences. Buy moments. Advertisers have long optimized for who to reach. But this research confirms that when and how you reach them — in the right emotional context — is a difference maker. “In today's media, audience targeting is table stakes. The new edge comes from emotional alignment— tapping into the story your viewers are already experiencing. When your ad feels like part of the moment — not a break from it — it earns more attention, sparks deeper engagement, and drives stronger results all the way down the funnel.” — 

2. Attention is more than a metric — it's a strategy. Attention is a new currency. Emotional resonance gives brands a scalable, measurable lever to drive it. Ad attention is driven by a number of factors. The strength of the preceding content, the quality of the ad, and the app it runs on all factor into attention. But context also matters.

“Aligning an ad’s emotional tone with the programming it runs in can significantly improve attention, as this study shows,” says Yan Liu, CEO of TVision.