You’re halfway through Sinners when the question hits you: Does Michael B. Jordan actually have a twin? You’re already on Reels. You switch to search, and AI answers in a single sentence. Window of curiosity closed.
Three years ago, that same question would have launched a small advertising odyssey: a results page with paid placements, a Variety profile surrounded by display and native, half a dozen brand impressions before the answer arrived. Today, an AI-generated sentence ends this journey before the first impression renders. The collapsed detour killed publisher revenue first. It is now reshaping something bigger.
Consumer behavior has shifted to the point where the largest screen in the house is the secondary device in the room. The phone is what people search on, message on, shop on, and look at. The television is still where content plays, but the attention has moved to a smaller screen. The TV dollars of old, built on a model where that screen got the most attention, won’t produce the same results today.
The answer is not to dump CTV into social and YouTube. CTV still does real work, and there are pockets of the medium where attention holds. But the dollars need to be spent more strategically. The awareness spent that once carried is now competing with other priorities, and the planning has to catch up.
CTV owns the screen, not the attention
AI search has gotten faster at answering questions and curing curiosity. Zero-click rates on AI-Overview queries are north of 80%. Pew Research finds that click-through rates to traditional links roughly halve when an AI summary appears, and Ahrefs reports that AI Overviews reduce click-throughs to the top organic result by 58%, nearly double its April 2025 level. None of that, on its own, is a CTV story.
The CTV story is what the viewer does with the time AI just handed back. GlobalWebIndex reports 69% of viewers use a phone as a second screen while watching CTV, and nearly two-thirds of U.S. social network users now watch streaming and scroll concurrently. Within a typical ad pod, real attention is the exception. Viewers reach for the phone the moment a break starts, and muscle memory has them back on a feed before the brand bumper finishes. The query that used to take three minutes of scrolling now takes three seconds, which is just enough time to miss the first half of your :15.
Attention happens before the show starts
Spend lands where decisions happen. Before a household commits to a show, they spend several minutes browsing what to watch and pausing to settle in. That window sits outside the ad pod, and it outperforms what runs inside it. The attention-measurement firm Adelaide finds home-screen attention rates above 48%, with brand recall 65% higher when home-screen pairs with in-stream. Pause ads, the format every streamer pitched at NewFronts, work for the same reason. The viewer chose to stop, and the brand reached them outside the pod.
Measurement has to follow the new mix. Brand recall and post-spot search lift should be weighted across every upper-funnel surface, not just the :30 inventory. The line item that delivered awareness in 2022 still has a place, but it has to share the plan with units that catch the viewer before the second screen takes over. Planners treating the ad pod as the only upper-funnel surface are buying reach into an empty couch.
The exceptions still hold
The strongest counter is that CTV attention is healthier than the second-screen narrative suggests. Video Advertising Bureau (VAB) co-viewing studies show concentrated household attention during sports and tentpole programming. Google argues, against Pew’s finding, that AI Overviews actually drive more qualified clicks even if they drive fewer total ones. Both points are fair, though I always question when Google grades its own homework. Sports, season finales, and live event programming still bring the second screen back down, which is why those inventory pockets command a premium. AI search has replaced the part of the search that fed the open web, without replacing the search outright.
But VAB measures who is in the room, not who is looking at the spot. The two used to be roughly equivalent. They no longer are. And the categories where AI Overviews are most aggressive, including health, finance, education, and how-tos, are the categories that feed the top of the funnel for everyone else. When the top hollows out, the bottom takes longer to feel it, but it does.
Become the destination, not the detour
The brands worth betting on are not waiting for that viewer to come back to the spot. They are already on the other side of the window.
Red Bull stopped thinking of itself as an advertiser years ago. Its late founder liked to say it was a media company that happened to sell energy drinks, and he meant it literally: Red Bull Media House produces films, a magazine, a streaming channel, and events the company owns outright rather than sponsors. When Felix Baumgartner jumped from the edge of space in 2012, more than 8 million people watched live on YouTube, and the earned coverage was valued in the billions, none of it paid for. Red Bull built something people actively seek out, so it never has to intercept them on the way to something else.
A social media manager at Duolingo started posting the company’s owl mascot to a dormant TikTok account in 2021, leaning into the now-meme-ified running joke about its pushy reminders. The account now has more than 16 million TikTok followers and helped make Duolingo the most-recognized language app among Gen Z. The team treats the comment section as its creative brief and shows up as a native part of the feed, so the brand is already in the room when curiosity strikes rather than waiting downstream to catch it.
Mattel spent a decade repositioning Barbie, then made the brand the cultural event of 2023: a $1.44 billion box-office run, a marketing push that outspent the film’s own production, and more than 100 partnerships that put Barbie pink into fashion, food, and travel. Warner Bros. described the rollout as a breadcrumb strategy designed to stimulate curiosity and conversation, and it worked so well that the campaign generated 9 billion TikTok views under one hashtag. Most brands cannot yet make a feature film, but the principle scales down: instead of buying attention next to culture, become the culture people are talking about.
The viewer halfway through Sinners will keep reaching for their phone. In today’s fragmented attention economy, earning attention is just as important as buying reach.
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Jeremy Cobb, VP of Digital Platforms at H/L, has built his career across political, corporate, and brand communications, blending hands-on craft in self-service adtech, media buying, and market research with the audience-first instincts that come from years in political and performance media.
