Programmatic Clicks Are Trash, Attention Is Currency -- Anders Lithner of Brand Metrics Tells the Truth

Advertising has always loved its own lies—clicks that pretend to be insight, dashboards that look like truth, and “engagement” that usually just means someone fat-fingered a banner while trying to close Candy Crush. In this episode of The ADOTAT Show, I sit down with Anders Lithner, CEO of Brand Metrics, to dismantle the entire circus.

Anders is Swedish, armed with data, and just dangerous enough to say the quiet part out loud: most marketers don’t actually want the truth—because the truth might get them fired.

We cover everything the industry doesn’t want you to think too hard about:

🔹 Why clicks are cheap dopamine and optimizing for CTR is “optimizing for stupidity.”

🔹 Why you can’t buy behavior—you can only influence minds and hearts.

🔹 How Whirlpool and Heinz prove that perception always precedes behavior.

🔹 Why publishers like the Guardian and Financial Times leaned into Brand Metrics to survive the CPM race to the bottom.

🔹 How millions of survey responses are now training predictive engines that may replace panels entirely by 2030.

🔹 Why attention ≠ viewability, and why frequency is misunderstood (hint: too little frequency kills campaigns faster than too much).

🔹 The brutal truth about CTV measurement: your TV being on doesn’t mean anyone’s paying attention.

Anders doesn’t pull punches. He tells us directly: “You can’t skip the step. You can’t buy behavior. You can only influence people.”

This isn’t about dashboards or vanity metrics. It’s about the future of brand measurement: predictive models, attention as currency, and brand lift as the new ROI. If you think your quarterly report is safe behind CTR and impressions, Anders has some news for you.

👀 Watch if you want the truth about advertising’s future.

💬 Comment if you think clicks still matter (spoiler: they don’t).

📌 Subscribe for more conversations where we ruin PR spin for sport.

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#Adtech #BrandMetrics #AdvertisingTruth #AttentionEconomy #CTV #MarketingMeasurement