Winning Attention with Emotion: Jill Rosengard Hill’s Takeaways from CTAM 2025

Every year, CTAM brings together the sharpest minds in cable, streaming, and entertainment marketing. The people who live at the center of one of the most competitive battlegrounds in media. The fight for winning attention.

This year, that fight felt more urgent than ever. And Magid’s Jill Rosengard Hill was right there in the middle of it, sharing, listening, observing, and ultimately bringing clarity back to winning attention in a landscape drowning in noise.

Her takeaway was simple, and it echoed across the conference floor:

Reactive is obsolete. Predictive is unstoppable.

The Industry Is Drowning in Content… and Still Missing What Matters Most

Walking through CTAM sessions, one theme kept returning. Even with more data than ever, most entertainment brands still struggle to understand what actually drives viewer choice.

• Most marketers rely on selective behaviors and miss emotional sensibilities, the drivers behind 80–90% of consumer decision-making.
• Strategic briefs vary widely in quality and often target the wrong audience.
• And it still takes far too long to create briefs.

Jill’s reaction matched what Magid sees every day. The industry isn’t struggling from a lack of data. It’s struggling from a lack of the right data and the right tools to act on it.

Emotion Is the New Differentiator

CTAM organizers framed the conference around “The Race to Win Attention,” and the truth is undeniable. Winning attention doesn’t happen with logic alone. You win it with emotion. This principle is the backbone of Magid’s EmotionalDNA® (eDNA) dataset, a system that has captured:

• 1M+ consumers
• 11,000 entertainment titles
• 50 streaming services
• 1 trillion emotional data points

Jill emphasized this in her conversations at CTAM:

The brands that understand the emotional connection behind a viewer’s choice (whether they’re seeking escape, comfort, velocity, wit, or intensity) are the ones breaking through.

• Emotional subgenres like “Feel Good,” “Ominous,” and “Complex Lives” predict engagement and indispensability far better than traditional genre labels.
• Streaming platforms win when they identify emotional whitespace. The unmet needs that audiences crave but aren’t being delivered.

In Jill’s words, “If you want to compete in a crowded marketplace, stop marketing content. Start marketing how the content makes people feel.”

CTAM Confirmed What Collaborator Strategy Was Built For

The CTAM audience didn’t just want to understand emotions. They wanted a way to use them.

Which is exactly why Magid built Collaborator Strategy, our AI-driven platform that turns emotional intelligence into full strategic marketing briefs in minutes instead of weeks.

CTAM highlighted several industry challenges:

• Siloed or partial data
• Slow synthesis
• Inconsistent strategic frameworks
• Difficulty identifying competitive whitespace
• Unclear emotional positioning

Collaborator Strategy addresses all of them:

• It ingests all brand, performance, research, and eDNA data into one core intelligence system.
• It applies customized templates and frameworks rooted in best-in-class marketing practices.
• It produces detailed, actionable briefs. The kind that marketers can activate immediately.

Bringing CTAM’s Momentum Into 2026

CTAM 2025 underscored a truth Jill has championed for years:

If you can understand human emotion, you can win human attention.

If you can operationalize it, you can win the market.

Magid is ready to help the industry do both. Reach out to Jill to get a copy of Magid’s CTAM content or for more information about Magid’s experience at CTAM this year. Find out how eDNA and Collaborator Strategy can help win your brand attention in 2026.