53% Better Brand Recall: What APAC's CTV Boom Reveals About Attention
Co-viewing drives 70% higher ad engagement and 53% stronger brand recall in APAC. Research reveals how marketers can profit from the CTV boom.
Saturday evening. A family settles onto the couch in Manila, Singapore, or Mumbai. The TV goes on, and so does something else: a shared attention environment that advertisers have been systematically undervaluing.
New research from PubMatic, based on 3,500 respondents across seven Asia-Pacific markets, puts a number on what intuition has long suggested. When people watch TV together, ads perform dramatically better than when someone watches alone. For marketing leaders rethinking how to spend their 2026 budgets, the implications are significant.
The findings arrive at a moment when APAC's TV advertising landscape is transforming fast. Connected TV (CTV), the umbrella term for streaming video watched on a TV screen via internet connection, is growing at 14.4% annually across the region. Ad spend on CTV grew 128% year-on-year in 2024. The audience is there, the inventory is there, and now the behavioral science is there too.
The Numbers Behind Shared Screens
PubMatic's study captures what happens when viewers watch content together rather than alone. The difference is striking.
70% of co-viewers say they are more likely to take action after seeing an ad, compared to solo viewers. 42% report paying closer attention to ads when watching with others. 44% feel a stronger emotional response to advertising. And perhaps most usefully for marketers: 43% discuss or react to ads in real time during the viewing session.
Brand recall is also stronger. 53% of co-viewers remember brands more effectively than solo viewers do. CTV as a medium already delivers a 25% lift in brand awareness and a 25% improvement in ad recall compared to other digital channels.
As Luke Smith, Senior Director CTV APAC at PubMatic, puts it: "When advertisers align their buying strategies to co-viewing behaviors, accounting for everything from timing and content genre to device choice, they can access premium moments that consistently drive stronger recall and meaningful post-ad action."
Where and When Co-Viewing Happens
The research confirms that co-viewing in APAC is not random. It is concentrated and predictable. 78% of co-viewing happens on CTV (not mobile, not desktop). It clusters around Saturday evenings, prime-time between 5pm and 9pm, and late evening between 9pm and 11pm. Family movies, TV series, and live events attract the most shared audiences.
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This matters because it makes co-viewing targetable at scale. Advertisers can plan buys against these windows rather than hoping to catch people in the right context. The programmatic infrastructure to do this now exists across the region. APAC already accounts for approximately 37% of all global programmatic live CTV ad buys. Open programmatic CTV ad spend in Southeast Asia alone surged 43% in the first quarter of 2025 compared to 2023.
Netflix's programmatic partnership with The Trade Desk in Japan, Korea, and Australia has opened up premium co-viewing inventory that was previously unavailable to automated buyers. Viu, Southeast Asia's largest streaming platform with 60.7 million monthly active users across 16 Asian markets, now offers programmatic ad inventory through its ad-supported model. The supply is catching up to the demand.
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Southeast Asia Leads the Co-Viewing Effect
Among APAC sub-regions, Southeast Asia shows the sharpest co-viewing signals. 73% of SEA co-viewers report being more likely to act after seeing an ad, three points above the APAC-wide figure.
Co-viewing in SEA also skews slightly more spontaneous than the regional average. Shared screens form organically in real time, which means programmatic buying in the region can activate against these moments as they happen, not just in advance. That combination of high conversion intent and real-time addressability makes SEA particularly attractive for performance-oriented CTV campaigns.
Results from the market reinforce this. Hyatt Asia Pacific achieved a 47% increase in brand lift using programmatic CTV. India retail brands running dual-CTV campaigns via The Trade Desk saw double-digit improvements in purchase intent. These are not awareness-only outcomes. CTV's co-viewing effect is operating across the full marketing funnel.
The Planning Gap APAC Teams Need to Close
Despite strong results, most APAC media plans still treat CTV as if it were a one-to-one digital channel, the same logic used for social media feeds and display ads. Applying that individual-impression mindset to CTV systematically undercounts the audience reached and undervalues what those impressions are worth.
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The co-viewing multiplier is real: one ad impression in a household of three generates three sets of eyes, three emotional responses, and three conversations. Pricing media on a cost-per-person basis without accounting for household context leaves money on the table, or more accurately, overpays for reach frameworks that don't reflect how people actually watch TV.
There is a measurement challenge to acknowledge. CTV's shared-device nature makes individual attribution difficult, and invalid traffic rates in APAC CTV reach 36%, which requires careful fraud controls. Advertisers relying only on last-click or household-level metrics will miss a significant portion of co-viewing's actual contribution.
But the direction of travel is clear. Attention measurement tools are now being integrated directly into real-time CTV advertising auctions, meaning attention-optimized co-viewing buys are becoming operational, not aspirational. For APAC marketing leaders planning 2026 media investments, the question is no longer whether CTV co-viewing works. It is whether your media plan is built to take advantage of it.
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