The Video Advertising Bureau said on November 4, 2026 that The Impression Gap, its report comparing 21 premium streaming platforms with YouTube on connected TV, has won a 2026 Platinum MarCom Award. The report was first released on February 24, 2026, and rests on TVision panel data collected between July 1, 2024 and June 30, 2025. VAB's announcement contains no new figures. Platinum is the top tier of a competition run by the Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals, whose judges score entries as marketing and communication work.

In Short

A trade group for TV networks and streaming services won a top marketing prize for a report saying ads on apps like Netflix, Hulu and Pluto TV get more attention than ads on YouTube when people watch on a TV set. The prize scores how well a piece of marketing is made and communicated, with no published step for checking the data, and the group that won it represents the companies its report favors. The numbers are the same ones published in February, including a rule that counted a YouTube viewing session after 30 seconds but a session on the other apps only after five minutes.

What VAB announced

VAB sent the news by email on November 4 under the subject line "We Won a Platinum MarCom Award!" According to the message, "The VAB team is excited to share that our report, The Impression Gap, has won a 2026 Platinum MarCom Award!" The trade body summed up the work in two sentences: "With this report, we sought to bring greater clarity to the increasingly complex CTV marketplace. To do so, we partnered with TVision to conduct a year-long study across 21 Premium Video Platforms and YouTube on CTV."

The email does not name the category the report was entered in, and it gives no score. It points to a page about the award and to a download of the full report, which remains gated. According to VAB, "Marketers, Agencies, and VAB Members get free, immediate access to our full library of guides, glossaries, case studies and more." Each page of the report carries the line "This information is exclusively provided to VAB members and qualified marketers."

The November 4 email is not the first time VAB has used the prize. When it sent its "Spot the Difference" infographic on October 20, VAB already described the study as MarCom award-winning, PPC Land reported at the time, without giving a year or category. That was five days after the October 15 entry deadline for the 2026 competition, which said all results would be posted by November 1.

What a Platinum MarCom measures

MarCom is administered by the Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals, founded in 1995. According to the competition's website, about 6,000 print and digital entries arrive each year from dozens of countries. Entering costs $125 for a single piece and $195 for a campaign or plan. The 2026 round opened on August 1, 2026.

Scoring is absolute rather than comparative. According to MarCom, entries scoring 90 to 100 points are Platinum winners, 80 to 89 earn Gold and 70 to 79 receive an honorable mention. Entries are judged at random rather than against others in their category, decisions are reached by consensus, and there is no preset number of winners. The judges are senior marketing and communication professionals working in AMCP facilities in Dallas and Washington, D.C.

The category list includes Research/Study under Strategic Communications, alongside white papers, guides and infographics. Nothing in MarCom's published rules describes a review of an entry's underlying data or statistical method. So the Platinum score rates the report as communication. It is not an independent check of TVision's measurements or of VAB's conclusions.

VAB has won at this level before. Its website lists a 2021 Platinum MarCom Award in Strategic Communications for what it called Audience-Based Buying Insights & Communications.

The study behind the prize

The findings have not changed since PPC Land covered the launch in February. Across viewers aged two and older, premium platforms averaged 60% co-viewing, the share of impressions with another viewer in the room, against 45% for YouTube, a 33% gap. Sessions lasted 1 hour 18 minutes on average on premium platforms and 52 minutes on YouTube, 26 minutes longer, which VAB states as 49%. Three attention indices, each set so that 100 equals the CTV viewing norm, showed smaller gaps: 102 against 97 for presence to active, 108 against 95 for attention to presence and 110 against 93 for attention to duration.

According to the report, "We found that the hardest working impressions on CTV live within Premium Video Platforms." The title of its own presence chart is more measured: "Premium Video Platforms and YouTube deliver similar levels of viewer presence for CTV viewing sessions."

The premium group spans 11 hybrid ad-supported and subscription services (Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max, Peacock, Prime Video, Paramount+, BET+, Netflix, Discovery en Español, AMC+ and Univision's NOW), three vMVPD services (Xfinity, Spectrum and YouTube TV) and seven FAST services (Pluto TV, Xumo, Tubi, Roku, Plex, Fawesome and Canela.TV). YouTube TV, Google's live TV subscription, therefore counts as premium. The comparison target is the main YouTube app.

Age changes the size of the gaps. Co-viewing differs most among viewers 55 and older, 55% on premium platforms against 37% on YouTube. On attention to presence, the widest difference is among viewers aged two to 17, 96.0 against 82.5. And YouTube's viewing is concentrated in shorter visits: 35% of its impressions fell in sessions of up to 20 minutes and 40% in sessions of 20 to 84 minutes, leaving 25% in longer ones.

TVision collected the data with in-home sensors that use person and facial recognition to detect who is in the room and whether they are looking at the screen, together with ACR fingerprinting and a meter that identifies the streaming app in use. The report gives no panel size. When Viant closed its $40 million acquisition of TVision on May 5, 2026, the panel was described as 5,000 US households.

Where the averages hide the spread

Individual premium platforms are not named in the rankings. Each appears as a type and a letter, such as Hybrid A or FAST B, and four Spanish-language apps are combined into one entry, which leaves 18 premium entries beside YouTube in each chart.

By PPC Land's count from those charts, YouTube trails every premium entry on only one measure, session length. Five premium entries score below YouTube's 96.8 on presence to active. Four fall below its 92.6 on attention to duration, two below its 95.0 on attention to presence, and one, an SVOD service at 42%, below its 45% on co-viewing. That same SVOD entry leads all three attention indices and reaches 174.0 on attention to duration, the basis for the report's claim that the best premium platform beats YouTube by 88% on that measure. The Spanish-language group swings furthest: first on co-viewing at 75%, second on attention to presence at 122.7 and last of all 19 entries on attention to duration at 65.2.

Rules that differ by platform

The report's definitions apply different inclusion thresholds to each side. A YouTube session counted once it reached 30 seconds, while a premium platform session needed five minutes; a new session began after a gap of more than 10 minutes in the same app. The rule bears most directly on session length. Brief YouTube visits stay in YouTube's average, while premium sessions under five minutes drop out of the premium figures. The report does not quantify the effect, which PPC Land noted in August can raise the premium averages.

Two smaller inconsistencies remain in the report VAB is now promoting. Its attention-to-duration chart labels YouTube as ranking 14th, yet 14 premium entries score above YouTube's 92.6, which makes it 15th. And the platform co-viewing chart dates its source "June 2024-July 2025," while every other chart and the definitions table give July 1, 2024 to June 30, 2025.

The TVision data records presence and gaze, not results. The outcome claims in the report come from other studies, among them a 23% increase in ad recall when watching with others, from Thinkbox (2024); 41% higher brand lift for campaigns using attention metrics, from Adelaide (January 2025); sales and ROI lifts of 30% and 10%, from a WARC guide (July 2024); and a 94% completion rate for long-form premium video, from FreeWheel (September 2023), the figure that headlined VAB's August email.

Why the prize lands now

The award comes as YouTube's share of the television screen keeps growing. Nielsen's August Gauge, published on October 22, put YouTube at a record 15.8% of US TV time, against 7.7% for Netflix. Alphabet said on October 28 that YouTube's advertising revenue rose 9% to $11.21 billion in the third quarter. VAB's membership is drawn from the networks and streaming companies competing for those television budgets, and The Impression Gap is their argument that a minute of YouTube on a TV set is worth less than a minute on their apps.

Who is in the room is itself contested. Google Ads began counting co-viewers in its reach metrics on June 2, 2026, and in September YouTube added a modelled "views co-viewed" estimate to creator analytics. Google's numbers rely on modelling. TVision's come from sensors in homes. Neither side has published a like-for-like comparison with the other.

VAB has also kept the same 12-month dataset in steady circulation. After the February launch, it promoted the report in June, when the 49% session-length figure was presented as engagement, again in its August summer school email, in the October infographic and now with the award. The November 4 email is at least the fifth time this year VAB has put the study in front of buyers. The fieldwork behind it ended on June 30, 2025, more than 16 months ago.

For the trade body, a Platinum MarCom adds a credential to that campaign. For media buyers weighing attention metrics across CTV inventory, the award changes nothing in the data: the averages, the anonymized rankings and the session rules are exactly as they were in February.

Timeline

Summary

Who: The Video Advertising Bureau, a trade body whose members include TV networks and streaming companies, which produced The Impression Gap with measurement company TVision, now owned by Viant. The MarCom Awards are run by the Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals.

What: VAB announced that The Impression Gap won a 2026 Platinum MarCom Award, the competition's top tier for entries scoring 90 to 100 points. The report claims premium platforms beat YouTube on CTV by 33% on co-viewing, 49% on session length and 5% to 18% on three attention indices, but its rankings are anonymized, several premium entries trail YouTube on individual measures, and YouTube sessions counted from 30 seconds against five minutes for premium apps.

When: VAB announced the award on November 4, 2026. The report was released on February 24, 2026, and its data covers July 1, 2024 to June 30, 2025. The 2026 MarCom entry deadline was October 15, 2026.

Where: US connected TV viewing, with the report distributed through a gated page on VAB's website.

Why: The award gives VAB a new credential for a study it has promoted at least five times this year, as YouTube reaches a record share of US TV time and the TV industry and Google argue over how to count the people watching. MarCom judges entries as communication work and its published rules describe no review of the underlying data.