Driving sustainable brand growth with streaming TV

Marketers intuitively recognize the value of investing in long-term brand building and that brand is a critical growth driver. In a recent global study published by dentsu, 60% of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) said that, when prioritizing their media investment, they lean towards investing more in long-term brand growth activity than in short-term performance activity.¹

However, making a compelling case for brand investments with other stakeholders within the business and turning it into a growth strategy that gets buy-in across the organization can prove quite difficult. The inherently measurable nature of performance-driven activity often whets the appetite across the business with requests to either slightly adjust, or altogether rethink, priorities in favor of investments for which returns will be more immediately measurable. The industry has lacked a way to demonstrate the ROI of brand-building investments, and the proliferation of digital channels has tipped the scales of short-term performance activity investments even further.

The Brand Reset, a new study released by dentsu earlier this year, fills this gap. Combining Lumen's definitive attention data, Kantar's decades of expertise in pre-testing, brand tracking, and financial performance, along with expert commentary from industry pioneer, author, professor, and marketing consultant Les Binet, the framework is underpinned by a dataset broken down into second-by-second effectiveness, allowing marketers to understand precisely when and where brand impact is generated by video formats. This level of granularity enables more informed planning decisions, arming marketers with the knowledge required to fully unlock the power of attention.²

One of the key findings is that digital video, including short-form formats, can deliver multi-year brand-building effects. For years, the perceived superiority of linear TV rested on its ability to deliver high attention, high-quality exposures. The Brand Reset findings challenge that assumption directly, noting that modern connected TV (CTV) environments can now deliver nearly equivalent long-term brand effects. And unlike linear TV, streaming TV ads on Amazon channels like Prime Video connect brand exposure to shopping signals through verified households, giving brands not just comparable brand-building power in regard to reach, but enabling them to tie campaign performance back to business outcomes.

What this means for advertisers and media planners

This marks an important structural change in the media landscape that reflects how audience behaviors have evolved. With global CMOs noting that the difficulty in understanding if the new video marketplace will deliver as effectively as linear TV was the #1 challenge preventing further investments in this area,³ being able to demonstrate and quantify the impact can make all the difference when making a case in the boardroom. Below are some considerations for advertisers and planners who are looking to reassess their approach to connected TV investments.

Cultural moments are moving to streaming

Today, audiences are increasingly consuming long-form content through streaming services and now major sporting competitions, awards shows, and other cultural moments are also moving to streaming TV across the globe. Formats are being built and planned with a new mindset around linear versus streaming TV, and increasingly, a combination of the two.

Voluntary attention builds brands differently

The Brand Reset study also shows that voluntary attention works harder than forced attention. Interactive video ads from Amazon Ads invite audiences to engage directly — exploring products, adding to cart, or learning more within the ad experience itself. These interactions create voluntary attention signals that, according to the study, work harder for long-term brand building than passive forced exposures, supporting the notion that CTV brings to the table something unique in terms of brand-building support.

Planning video as one connected format

In many cases, video is still being planned in a disjointed way, with a traditional broadcast approach and metrics siloed from the approach taken with streaming channels and beyond, with no unified view of how brand investment connects to business outcomes. For our clients investing in streaming TV ads on Amazon channels like Prime Video, Amazon Marketing Cloud allows them to connect streaming TV exposure signals to downstream shopping behaviors, providing a closed-loop view of how upper-funnel investment translates into measurable results. Just like in the case of brand vs. performance-focused investments, this is not a matter of dwarfing one strategy in favor of the other, but about balancing investments and taking into consideration which opportunities across each format (e.g., linear TV also continues to guarantee high brand effects) are best suited for a specific product, campaign, message, or creative, given the desired audiences.

Sources

^{1, 3} CMO Navigator – Rethinking Marketing in the Age of AI, dentsu, 2025

² The Brand Reset: Capturing Short-Term Sales Impact and Long-Term Brand Growth from Attention, dentsu, 2025

About the author

Ewa Zawol is a global media leader with over 20 years of international experience shaping how brands grow. As Global Partnership Director at dentsu, she focuses on evolving video and media effectiveness across today’s fragmented advertising landscape. With experience spanning the U.S., Europe, and the U.K., Ewa speaks about attention and video ecosystems and the balance between brand and performance, bringing a pragmatic, future-focused perspective grounded in real business outcomes.