Lumen Research last week announced a partnership with Netflix to launch anattention measurement solution covering Netflix's global ad-supported inventory across connected television, desktop, and mobile formats. The solution is available to clients in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, giving advertisers in those markets the ability to measure local or global campaigns running on the platform.

The announcement, dated March 5, 2026, marks a significant expansion of Lumen's reach into streaming environments at a moment when the advertising industry is grappling with how to evaluate ad performance beyond basic viewability. Netflix's ad-supported tier has grown to represent 40% of new sign-ups, creating substantial inventory for advertisers while the platform's broader advertising business is projected to reach approximately $3 billion in 2026.

According to the announcement from Lumen Research, the new capability gives advertisers access to an expanded omnichannel attention toolkit, powered by what the company describes as the largest real-world consented multi-channel eye-tracking dataset, combined with award-winning machine learning attention models. The solution enables a more comprehensive understanding of streaming ad campaign performance, as well as tools to optimize media budgets and invest in working media.

Mike Follett, CEO of Lumen Research, said: "Bringing our attention measurement toolkit to Netflix is a big step forward for us, especially as streaming content consumption continues to grow across all age groups."

He added: "This integration enables our clients to access Netflix data for attention measurement, ultimately empowering them to make smarter investment decisions and drive greater effectiveness across their media mix."

What Lumen's technology measures

At the heart of the solution is Lumen's patented eye-tracking technology. Rather than relying on viewability proxies - signals that indicate whether an ad appeared on screen for a given duration - Lumen's approach attempts to determine whether a viewer's gaze actually landed on the advertisement. The company has built machine learning models trained on real-world biometric data that extend this capability beyond the lab and into at-scale campaign measurement.

The distinction matters. Viewability, the long-standing industry standard, records only that an ad was technically visible on a device. It says nothing about whether anyone looked at it. Lumen's models generate predictions about actual human visual engagement with each impression, expressed in terms such as active attention seconds per thousand impressions. These predictions can then be correlated with downstream outcomes including sales, brand lift, and campaign recall.

IAS studies have demonstrated that brands which prioritize higher attention scores can achieve up to a 130% lift in conversion rates when compared to low-attention impressions, alongside 91% higher brand consideration and 166% higher purchase intent. Those figures emerged from the Integral Ad Science Quality Attention product, which itself relies on Lumen's eye-tracking dataset as a core input.

The Netflix integration extends this framework into a streaming environment where ad formats, viewing contexts, and audience behaviors differ substantially from display or social media advertising. CTV ads are typically viewed on large screens from a distance, often in living room settings shared by multiple household members, a dynamic that creates both challenges and opportunities for attention measurement.

The technical architecture

According to Lumen Research, the partnership draws on the company's multi-channel eye-tracking dataset - described as the largest consented real-world dataset of its kind - and applies machine learning models to generate attention predictions at scale. The approach avoids requiring panel participants to wear eye-tracking hardware for every campaign, instead using the training data to build predictive models that can score impressions without live observation.

The solution covers three distinct inventory types: CTV, desktop, and mobile. This breadth is notable. CTV and mobile present different viewing conditions, screen sizes, and user behavior patterns. Measuring attention consistently across all three requires models calibrated to each environment. The coverage across Netflix's global inventory means that advertisers running multi-market campaigns in the five supported territories - the UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain - can apply consistent measurement methodology regardless of the device on which a viewer encounters their ad.

Those five markets are significant from a European advertising standpoint. AudienceProject launched its own direct Netflix integration in October 2025 specifically to cover the same five territories - the UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain - for reach and frequency measurement. The overlap in geographic scope between the two partnerships reflects the importance of these markets to Netflix's European advertising business.

Context: Netflix's evolving advertising infrastructure

Netflix introduced its advertising tier in multiple markets during 2022 and 2023. The platform completed the global rollout of its proprietary Netflix Ads Suite in Q2 2025, severing its previous dependence on Microsoft's advertising technology. That transition established a technical foundation upon which subsequent measurement and targeting partnerships have been built in rapid succession.

Campaign Manager 360 added Netflix ads integration in February 2025, enabling advertisers to measure Netflix campaign performance alongside broader video strategies. The Trade Desk, Google DV360, and Magnite joined Microsoft as programmatic partners when Netflix opened its inventory to programmatic buying in 2024. Netflix has since added Yahoo DSP as a fourth global programmatic partner, launched advanced targeting capabilities in EMEA with mood-based segmentation and postal code precision, and - most recently - introduced a Conversion API that early testers reported outperformed benchmarks by more than 75% across financial services, education technology, and retail verticals.

Each of these developments has addressed a different layer of the advertising stack: programmatic access, audience targeting, attribution, and now attention measurement. The Lumen partnership fills a gap that the previous integrations left open. Knowing that an ad was served, that it reached a particular audience segment, and that it may have contributed to a conversion, does not reveal whether the viewer actually looked at it. Attention measurement addresses that specific question.

The broader attention measurement landscape

The arrival of Lumen on Netflix does not occur in isolation. The attention measurement category has developed considerably since 2021, with multiple providers expanding capabilities across different platforms and formats.

Lumen announced a native billing integration with The Trade Desk in March 2024, enabling advertisers to activate attention-first measurement for both display and video ad groups directly within The Trade Desk interface. Earlier, in March 2024, Lumen partnered with Snapchat to launch a global attention measurement tool for rich media ads, drawing on a collaboration that began in 2021. According to that announcement, one second of visual attention per impression correlated with a 20x increase in ad recall and a 3x increase in driving outcomes in the Snapchat research.

DoubleVerify expanded into social attention measurement with Snapchat in June 2025, using Lumen's eye-tracking signals as part of its DV Authentic Attention for Social product. IAS expanded Quality Attention to mobile in-app environments in July 2024, also relying on Lumen's dataset. The fact that multiple measurement vendors draw on the same underlying eye-tracking data from Lumen illustrates the company's position as a foundational data provider in the attention measurement ecosystem, rather than simply a direct competitor to IAS or DoubleVerify.

The Media Rating Council and IAB finalized attention measurement guidelines in November 2025 following a public comment period that began in May 2025. Those guidelines established standardized frameworks covering multiple attention measurement approaches, including data signals, visual tracking, physiological and neurological observation, and panel-based methodologies. The publication of standards reflects the category's maturation but also highlights ongoing methodological fragmentation. Different providers use different proxy signals, and direct comparisons between vendors remain difficult.

A Kantar study examining 873 multi-media campaigns representing over $3.2 billion in media spend across a five-year period produced a counterintuitive finding: overall channel attention levels do not directly correlate with channel-level brand contributions or cost-effectiveness. This suggests that raw attention scores must be interpreted carefully and in combination with creative quality, audience targeting, and campaign objectives. The Netflix integration gives advertisers another data point to add to that analysis.

Index Exchange embedded predictive attention signals directly into its supply-side platform to enable pre-bid targeting based on eye-tracking data - a development that illustrates how attention signals are moving from post-campaign measurement into real-time bidding infrastructure. EssenceMediacom France demonstrated in a July 2024 campaign that implementing attention-based custom bidding in Google DV360 produced 7.3% more cost-effective CPM rates, 6.6% better cost-per-click, and 7.2% improved cost-per-acquisition compared to standard automated bidding.

Why this matters for marketers

For advertising professionals managing campaigns across multiple channels, the Netflix - Lumen integration closes a specific measurement gap. Netflix's audience - which according to Nielsen data commands 8.3% of total TV viewing time- has historically been difficult to evaluate on attention metrics. Standard CTV reporting covers impressions, completion rates, and reach. It does not reveal gaze behavior.

The five-market scope of the solution has practical implications for media planners. Campaigns running across the UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain can now be evaluated using a consistent attention measurement framework, enabling like-for-like comparisons across markets. Media budgets can be optimized not just for audience demographics but for the quality of attention those audiences pay to specific ad formats and placements within Netflix's inventory.

The omnichannel aspect of the toolkit is also relevant. Marketers who already use Lumen's measurement across social media, display, and other digital channels can now incorporate Netflix CTV data into the same framework. This creates a cross-channel attention view - comparing, for example, the attentive seconds generated by a Netflix pre-roll against the same creative in a YouTube environment, or a display placement measured through the IAS Quality Attention product.

Nielsen's measurement of streaming viewing has expanded considerably in recent periods, with the company deploying Big Data + Panel methodologies that combine data from 42,000 panel homes with device-level signals from 45 million households. That infrastructure provides reach and frequency data. Attention measurement adds a qualitative layer - not how many people were potentially exposed to an ad, but how many of those people looked at it.

The streaming landscape has also provided context for understanding why attention measurement in this environment is non-trivial. Matt Damon revealed in January 2026 that Netflix instructs content writers to repeat crucial plot points because internal data shows audiences frequently watch while browsing mobile devices simultaneously. TVision data indicates streaming content captures 64% attention compared to 59% for library content, with original streaming content demonstrating 8.5% higher attention rates than traditional programming. These figures suggest that attention levels vary significantly within streaming environments - a variation that aggregate completion rates do not capture.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Lumen Research, the global attention technology company, partnering with Netflix.

What: Launch of an attention measurement solution enabling advertisers to quantify how much attention their ads capture across Netflix's ad-supported CTV, desktop, and mobile inventory. The solution draws on Lumen's patented eye-tracking technology, its real-world consented multi-channel eye-tracking dataset, and machine learning attention models to go beyond viewability into actual gaze measurement.

When: Announced on March 5, 2026.

Where: Available to clients in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, covering both local and global campaigns across Netflix's global ad-supported inventory.

Why: Streaming content consumption is growing across all age groups, yet existing measurement tools for Netflix advertising have covered reach, frequency, and attribution but not attention. The partnership gives advertisers in five major European markets a way to evaluate whether viewers actually look at their ads - not simply whether those ads were delivered - enabling more informed media budget decisions and a more complete omnichannel measurement picture.

Share this article
The link has been copied!