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Capturing consumer attention has never been more challenging. Audiences are moving across more screens, platforms, and content environments, leaving advertisers to look for formats that stand out without adding more interruption.
Pause ads on TV are emerging as a powerful way to meet that moment, turning natural viewer behaviors into high-impact, non-disruptive opportunities for brands to connect.
That’s why Universal Ads is excited to announce that we’re building the foundation for pause ads, starting with a select group of advertisers, and a general launch later this year.
Picture this: you’re finally sitting down to catch up on your favorite reality series. You hit pause to reply to a text from a friend asking where you should go for dinner. When you look back at the screen, you see an ad from a new local pizza restaurant has taken over the TV. And just like that, dinner plans are settled.
That’s the impact of pause ads – they appear in an intentional moment, creating a full-screen brand experience that the viewer initiates when they choose to pause their content. Instead of interrupting a program or competing within a traditional ad break, the format meets consumers during a natural pause, when the screen is still active. This moment often translates to increased brand performance, with industry research suggesting that pause ads are 43% more memorable than standard ads, and over half of surveyed viewers reporting they took an action after seeing a pause ad.1,2
That makes pause ads valuable for both advertisers and consumers. For advertisers, they unlock new premium inventory beyond standard ad placements and create a more visible, full-screen canvas for simple, action-oriented creative that capture consumers’ full attention. And for the viewer, they offer a less intrusive experience because the ad appears during a break they choose, rather than in the middle of the content they are watching.
Universal Ads is introducing pause ads to make this emerging format more accessible to advertisers of all sizes. As well as making pause ads available as a self-serve option versus traditional one-off direct deals, the new offering will give brands a way to capture premium screen real estate when viewers pause what they’re watching, with a persistent, full-screen format designed to support clear messaging and simple calls to action.
Through the self-service platform, advertisers will be able to create a campaign across premium TV publishers with pause ads just as easily as they would with a standard streaming ad, while leveraging the targeting and measurement tools already available in Universal Ads.
That means reaching the right audience and driving results that you can measure.
Among the early testing partners for the availability of pause ads within the Universal Ads platform are digital advertising agency SearchKings and healthy snack brand BUFFS.
"Our network of more than 6,000 advertisers continues to invest in premium video and many are looking for new and performant ad formats,” said Darryl Margaux, CEO and Co-Founder, SearchKings. “We're excited to partner with Universal Ads to test pause ads and bring another innovative option to our clients."
“Snacking and TV go hand in hand. So, pause ads are a natural fit for us,” said George Zhou, Co-Founder, BUFFS. “Universal Ads made it as easy to test pause ads as running our streaming and social ads, which is what an emerging brand like ours needs.”
As advertisers continue to look for better ways to reach engaged audiences across premium video, pause ads represent a timely step forward. By bringing pause ads into Universal Ads, we’re making high-impact, viewer-friendly creative easier to test, learn from, and scale.
If you’re an existing client interested in discovering what pause ads on Universal Ads can do for your brand, reach out to your account representative to learn more. If you’re new to Universal Ads and want to see how you can grow your brand with TV, drop us a line.
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