Alex Kantrowitz

Instead of going to the bathroom or grabbing a beer during commercial breaks, TV watchers are increasingly turning to a new ritual: checking their phones until the show resumes.

For advertisers paying top dollar for TV ads, the trend is frustrating, presenting yet another challenge in their quest to gain a share of consumers' fragmented attention.

But Xaxis, the WPP-owned programmatic platform, believes it's found a way to reach these distracted consumers. The company is introducing a product called "Sync," which will give advertisers the ability to serve ads on TV watchers' mobile devices while their TV screens air the corresponding commercials.

Sync takes an educated guess as to which households are watching the TV show its clients' commercials are running on. To figure this out, it combines TV watching behavioral data from Kantar Media with geographic data and other signals, including whether a consumer's device is logged into a home Wi-Fi network and stationary.

When Sync thinks a person is likely watching a show, it will serve ads targeted to their mobile devices as its client's TV commercial airs. Sync connects to satellite data, getting a two-second heads-up on which commercials will run as the TV show goes to break. When a client's ad is set to play, Sync will turn on its ad campaign and keep it live for a few minutes.