Issue #68: Attention as a Service

☕ Morning, automation aces

This is First Impressions - a weekly spotlight on adtech start-up stories.

📖 First Impressions - VISTY

For this edition of First Impressions, we spoke with Ronan Lundy, Founder at VISTY, about the wasted spend holding back mid-market brands, and how his company is building an Attention as a Service model around transparent video buying.

What problem did you become obsessed with and why?

After 12+ years in adtech, two problems kept showing up with mid-market brands.

First, budget wasted on cheap impressions. Ads running on random, low-quality sites that had no business being anywhere near their brand.

Second, access. The big enterprise brands and holding company agencies had the tools and relationships to buy premium inventory. Mid-market brands largely didn't. They were getting a worse product and often didn't even know it.

That gap bothered me for a long time. And with that, VISTY - and the category we're building around it, Attention as a Service - was born.

How does your company solve this problem?

Simply and transparently - which sounds obvious, but isn't always the default approach.

Every client gets a curated “allowlist” of premium publishers before a single dollar is spent. No surprises. No mystery domains. But it's not just about the right publishers - it's also about the right formats. We focus exclusively on video; instream pre and mid-roll, and outstream on medium and large players only. No post-roll, no small players, no low-attention placements. That's where the waste hides, and we cut it out entirely.

We buy programmatically, we charge on a completed video view basis, and we manage everything - so brands can stay focused on strategy rather than yet another dashboard to learn.

What do you do differently from other businesses trying to solve this problem?

Two things.

First, we optimise for attention - not just impressions or clicks. Attention metrics have been a hot topic in adtech for years, but the benefits have mostly flowed to the biggest brands with the biggest agencies. We're bringing that to mid-market brands as a standard part of the product, not a premium add-on.

Second, the business model. We call it Attention as a Service. Clients choose how many people they want to reach and how often, and pay a flat monthly subscription - on a completed video view basis, on premium inventory, optimised for attention. Predictable pricing. No surprises. That's a fundamentally different relationship than brands are used to having with programmatic media. 

What do you get right early on to build the best vendor-client partnerships?

Transparency from day one. Clients see the publisher “allowlist” upfront. They know what they're buying, what it costs, and what success looks like - before any campaign goes live.

A lot of mid-market brands have been burned by open web advertising. Opaque reporting, murky pricing, inventory they'd never have approved if they'd seen it in advance. We flip that entirely. The feedback we've had consistently from clients and agency partners is that the clarity is refreshing, and rare.

What are you paying closest attention to in adtech over the next 12 months?

Attention. Genuinely.

Social channels are saturated. Everyone is chasing the same 5% of customers who are in-market right now - and with ecommerce barriers lower than ever, that race gets more crowded by the month. The brands that win long-term are the ones investing in the other 95%. Building awareness. Staying memorable. Playing a longer game.

Media that actually captures attention is central to that. It's not a nice-to-have anymore.

Which other companies in adtech do you admire, and what do they do well?

Lumen Research and Adelaide. I first saw Lumen present at an IAB Ireland event around 2018 and it genuinely changed how I thought about media quality. Adelaide have been building the measurement infrastructure that makes attention actionable at scale. They're also very much on our roadmap - watch this space.

Got feedback, suggestions or interested in partnerships? Hit reply and let us know.

See you next time,

Access Adtech