The Video Advertising Bureau distributed a report titled What's the Deal with Engagement? today, July 30, 2026, dated internally to July 2026 and sent to VAB members and what the trade organization calls qualified marketers. Sent from VAB Insights at 16:30, the email describes the release as the second installment in a five-part measurement series called "What's the Deal with," which the organization says exists to simplify five key areas of measurement: viewership data collection, identity, engagement, outcomes, and what VAB terms "what's next."

According to VAB, engagement is the experience of being connected to an advertisement or brand. The guide states that engagement is fueled by attention and feelings of immersion, and that it can range from what consumers think and feel about a brand to how they interact with it. VAB frames measures of engagement as tools that let marketers go beyond simple audience counting, providing what the guide calls a deeper understanding of how effective advertising has been with the audiences it reached.

Five reasons for measuring engagement appear in the report. According to VAB, engagement measurement enables brands to optimize spend toward the media channels that most effectively reach target audiences; allows a more personalized ad experience through a better understanding of how customers interact with a brand; enables optimization toward audiences who have previously engaged or show a higher likelihood of engaging; provides additional metrics beyond audience count for evaluating campaign effectiveness; and gives brands a deeper understanding of consumer response that can help drive business outcomes.

Three categories, not one number

The guide's central structural claim answers what it calls the most common question marketers ask about engagement: how many ways exist to measure it. VAB's answer is three, organized as cognitive, emotional, and behavioralengagement, each tied to a distinct set of metrics rather than a single composite score.

Cognitive engagement, according to the guide, is associated with how consumers think about and rationally process an advertisement or brand. Its listed metrics are recall, memorability, purchase intent, consideration, and message comprehension. Emotional engagement covers how a consumer feels about an advertisement or brand, described in the guide as a non-conscious physical response. Its metrics include favorability, brand loyalty, emotional intensity, and physiological response, the last of which the guide breaks down further into heart rate, brain activity collected via EEG, and galvanic skin response. Behavioral engagement, the guide states, is associated with how a consumer physically interacts with an advertisement or brand, with attention, eye gaze, ad completion rate, dwell time, social amplification, and click-through rate listed as its metrics.

The guide does not rank the three categories against one another or claim that any single metric predicts sales on its own. Instead, it treats the three-part framework as a checklist, encouraging marketers to determine which type of engagement matters most for a given campaign before selecting a measurement approach. That framing echoes a caution the industry's own standards bodies have already issued elsewhere. The Media Rating Council and Interactive Advertising Bureau finalized attention measurement guidelines in November 2025, explicitly stating that attention should not be treated as a direct measure of campaign outcomes, but rather as an exposure and engagement signal. VAB's decision to separate cognitive, emotional, and behavioral engagement into distinct, non-collapsed categories sits comfortably alongside that standards-body caution, even though VAB does not cite the MRC-IAB guidelines directly in its own document.

Six factors said to drive engagement

Beyond the three-way measurement split, the guide lists six factors it says contribute to advertising engagement generally: content, quality, context, dwell time, screen coverage, and screen size.

Premium, professionally produced content, according to the guide, emotionally resonates with audiences and raises brand memorability. Brand-safe ad environments hosting that kind of content are said to offer a more attentive and engaged audience. An advertisement relevant to the content airing alongside it can amplify the ad's effects, the guide states, while longer dwell time, meaning how long someone looks at or watches an ad, is associated with the brand staying longer in memory, though the guide notes this can vary by platform. Ads that fill more of a screen are correlated with greater attention and recall, and ads shown on larger screens tend to inspire greater engagement than those on smaller ones, according to the document.

None of these six factors comes attached to a specific percentage or statistical lift in the guide itself. They are presented as directional principles rather than measured findings from a named study, a distinction that separates this section of the report from harder data VAB has published elsewhere this year.

What to look for in a measurement partner

The guide devotes a separate section to vendor selection, listing four criteria it recommends marketers apply when evaluating an engagement measurement partner: transparency, cross-platform capability, an identity-based approach, and multi-metric reporting.

A transparent partner, according to VAB, is one forthcoming about its methodology and reporting, which the guide says gives marketers assurance in the accuracy of how audiences engage with their brand and ads. Because engagement can happen across every screen, the guide recommends partnering with providers that have cross-platform capabilities to capture engagement wherever it occurs. An identity-supported solution, the report states, gives a more detailed picture of who an audience is and how its members engage with a brand, connecting the engagement question to the identity infrastructure VAB detailed a day earlier. A single metric, the guide argues, can never tell the full story, so a solution offering multiple engagement metrics enables what it calls more intelligent optimization strategies.

That vendor-evaluation framing follows a pattern VAB has used elsewhere in 2026. The identity guide published July 29, 2026 recommended three specific questions marketers should ask identity vendors about match-rate accuracy, without supplying a benchmark figure for what counts as an acceptable rate. The engagement guide follows the same structure: it tells marketers what to ask a vendor, not what answer should satisfy them.

Nine vendors across three measurement approaches

The report's most concrete section names specific companies. VAB organizes what it calls three measurement approaches with exciting and innovative ways to quantify engagement: in-home biometric measurement, innovative metrics, and in-lab biometric measurement.

In-home biometric measurement uses sensors placed in panels of opt-in participant homes. According to the guide, technology developed or adapted by providers in this space lets brands determine who is in the room, how they are engaging with content, and what content they are engaging with, across platforms and devices. The guide names three example companies in this category: Mediaprobe, Lumen, and TVision.

TVision's inclusion places the guide alongside a body of measurement activity PPC Land has tracked closely this year. Viant Technology agreed to acquire TVision for 40 million dollars in April 2026, a deal framed around ending television's self-measurement problem, and the acquisition closed in May 2026, folding TVision's second-by-second, person-level attention data into Viant's demand-side platform. Earlier still, OpenX and TVision launched a pre-bid attention targeting product in March 2026, converting panel data into real-time activation signals ahead of a bid being placed. TVision's data also underpinned VAB's own February 2026 report finding premium video outperformed YouTube on every measured CTV attention metric, and a separate VAB analysis finding Netflix and Hulu viewers 49 percent more engaged than YouTube viewers on connected television.

The second category, innovative metrics, covers new measurement approaches rooted in data science and infused with artificial intelligence and machine learning models. According to the guide, by processing a range of ad placement, engagement, and creative signals, providers in this space deliver business-ready metrics that let brands quantify and optimize unique measures of engagement quickly and effectively. Three companies appear here: Amplified Intelligence, Upwave, and EDO.

EDO's presence in this category is consistent with how the company has positioned itself across 2026. EDO describes itself as a television outcomes company, and it launched an AI agent called ChatEDO in early February 2026 that answers plain-English questions about creative performance and category trends within seconds. EDO extended its engagement rate methodology to Roblox in June 2026, applying the same benchmarks it uses across linear and streaming television to gaming inventory for the first time, which the company said closed a gap that previously left brands with no shared methodology for comparing a television campaign against a branded event inside a game.

In-lab biometric measurement, the third category, refers to custom studies conducted in controlled lab environments designed to mimic an at-home viewing experience. According to the guide, this approach enables brands to conduct controlled and repeatable experiments to determine how specific ads, ad formats, and ad platforms affect cognitive, emotional, and behavioral engagement. The guide names Affectiva, Neurons, and MediaScience as example companies in this space.

Three ad formats built to activate engagement, not just measure it

A final section of the guide shifts from measurement toward activation, describing three ad formats it says create exciting and innovative opportunities to engage audiences directly: interactive, shoppable, and dynamic placement formats.

Interactive formats enable audiences to take immediate action with a brand by actively participating with an ad. The guide's example describes audiences choosing their own adventure with an ad, sharing brand sentiment through an in-ad survey, or downloading an app by scanning a QR code. Shoppable formats enable audiences to make a purchase directly through an advertisement or piece of content, illustrated in the guide by shopping the products used directly within content, such as cookware featured on a cooking show or clothing worn by a sitcom character, accessed through a remote control or a QR code scan. Dynamic placement formats enable audiences to connect with a brand in a contextual environment through an ad placement inserted directly within content, described as targetable and unobtrusive, with a brand logo placed on a scoreboard during a sports broadcast offered as the guide's example.

According to the guide, innovative ad formats are advertisements that audiences can engage with directly using a remote control, a connected device, or by scanning a QR code with a mobile device. The proliferation of streaming, the guide states, has made these formats more commonplace and therefore more valuable to marketers looking for additional ways to engage and measure audiences.

That framing arrives alongside a run of format launches PPC Land has documented across the connected television market in 2026. Amazon extended interactive video ad capabilities with location-based variants in October 2025, and its Interactive Video Ads technology reached Samsung TV Plus in June 2026 through Amazon DSP, the first time the format had been deployed on a third-party free ad-supported streaming television environment. Standardization work has run in parallel: the IAB Tech Lab released ad format guidelines for digital video and connected television in December 2025, covering six formats including pause ads, menu ads, overlay ads, and in-scene insertions, and integrating with existing standards such as OpenRTB and SIMID for interactive advertising. Attention data tied to one of those formats has already produced measured results: WunderKIND Ads released the first benchmarks for programmatic connected television pause ads in June 2026, drawing on TVision second-by-second attention data across 15 verticals and finding pause formats roughly doubling the measured attention of conventional spots.

Four best practices to close the guide

The report ends with four condensed best practices for marketers. According to VAB, marketers should determine how they want consumers to engage with their brand and measure accordingly; utilize multiple engagement metrics to achieve a full-picture understanding of how audiences engage with a brand; understand the factors that impact engagement to more effectively create and measure campaigns; and use current technologies and methodologies to drive and measure engagement.

The guide was created by three named VAB staff members, consistent with authorship credited on the identity installment published the day before: Jason Wiese, executive vice president of strategic insights and measurement; Benjamin Vandegrift, senior vice president of measurement strategy and innovation; and Rohan Gosalia, associate director of measurement intelligence.

Why this guide matters for marketers

Advertising engagement guides rarely make headlines on their own, yet the timing and structure of this release place it inside a wider argument the Video Advertising Bureau has been building throughout 2026: that television and streaming measurement needs to move past counting impressions and toward quantifying attention, engagement, and business outcomes. That argument gained institutional weight when the Media Rating Council and Interactive Advertising Bureau finalized attention measurement guidelines in November 2025 after a public comment period, establishing minimum transparency and comparability requirements for vendors making attention claims.

The nine named vendors sit within a broader catalog VAB maintains separately. VAB's Advanced Measurement Solutions Directory expanded to 20 vendors on July 21, 2026, organized around the same four categories running through the "What's the Deal with" series. That directory update arrived, as prior PPC Land reporting noted, at a moment when the television industry is questioning who is allowed to grade its own advertising and which figures can be trusted, a concern sharpened by consolidation among the measurement vendors themselves. TVision, named here in the in-home biometric category, is a case in point: it no longer operates as a fully independent third party. Viant's 40 million dollar acquisition, which closed in May 2026, folded TVision's panel data into a single demand-side platform's proprietary stack, raising a question the guide itself does not address about whether a company named as an example of independent engagement measurement remains structurally independent once it belongs to one of the buying platforms it measures.

The guide functions less as an endorsement and more as a map of categories. It offers no comparative data on which named company within each category performs best, and no statistic quantifying how much engagement lift a marketer might expect from switching partners. That absence of comparative figures stands in contrast to VAB's own 12th annual streaming report, which cited 209.4 million United States ad-supported streaming viewers, and its analysis finding Netflix and Hulu viewers 49 percent more engaged than YouTube viewers on connected television, both sourced to specific figures the engagement guide's more conceptual framework does not supply.

As a trade organization representing premium multiscreen television providers and distributors, VAB has a structural interest in engagement approaches that support confident valuation of television and streaming advertising against social and other digital channels. That interest does not make the guide's descriptive content inaccurate, but it is a lens worth applying alongside the independent standards work already underway at the MRC and IAB, and alongside vendor-specific data such as EDO's and TVision's, before selecting a partner on category membership alone.

Two further installments in VAB's five-part series remain outstanding: a guide on outcomes and a forward-looking installment the organization calls "what's next" in measurement.

Timeline

Summary

Who: The Video Advertising Bureau, a trade organization representing premium multiscreen television providers and distributors, published the guide. It was created by three named staff members: Jason Wiese, executive vice president of strategic insights and measurement; Benjamin Vandegrift, senior vice president of measurement strategy and innovation; and Rohan Gosalia, associate director of measurement intelligence.

What: VAB published "What's the Deal with Engagement?", a report defining advertising engagement across three categories, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral, each tied to specific metrics. The guide lists six factors said to contribute to engagement, four criteria for evaluating a measurement partner, nine named vendors split across three measurement approaches, and three ad formats designed to activate audience engagement directly.

When: The guide was distributed by email on July 30, 2026, dated internally to July 2026, as the second installment in VAB's five-part "What's the Deal with" measurement series, following an earlier guide on viewership data collection and preceding the identity guide published July 29, 2026.

Where: VAB is headquartered at 220 East 42nd Street in New York, and the guide was distributed to VAB members and qualified marketers, with promotion through an email sent from the organization's Insights team at 16:30.

Why: The guide matters because it arrives inside a broader industry argument about moving television and streaming measurement past impression counts and toward quantifying attention and engagement, an argument reinforced by MRC and IAB standards issued in November 2025. Several vendors it names, particularly TVision, have undergone ownership changes this year that raise structural questions about measurement independence that the guide itself does not address.