Why ad investments in CTV are lagging traditional TV spending

For TV audiences, the shift to CTV is well underway. For advertisers, not so much.

That’s not to say that brands and agencies aren’t leveraging CTV in their marketing strategies. They are. In fact, CTV remains one of the strongest growth engines across the TV landscape, with EMARKETER projecting total CTV spend of just under $38 billion this year.

But rather than adjusting budget allocations to align with viewing behaviors, brands and media agencies are simply growing their total spend to ensure that CTV is in the mix. As a result, CTV spending is growing, but its allotted share remains overshadowed by investments earmarked for traditional TV. 

The reason preventing planners and buyers from shifting linear dollars to CTV? A lack of information. Said plainly, without show-level data for CTV targeting and reporting, planners, buyers and programmatic traders are all flying blind.

In step with industry data, the media planners surveyed for Gracenote’s 2026 CTV advertising study cite significant linear TV allocations in their annual ad budgets. Across media channels, 42% say they allocate 41% or more of their total budgets to linear TV, with 14% dedicating 61% or more.

Importantly, media planners cite content data as a significant factor in their budget allocations, with 86% saying they would be able to shift more dollars to CTV if they had access to show-level data for targeting and reporting purposes.

At the execution level, linear buyers say they have the flexibility to shift budget between linear and CTV, but they cite the importance of show-level placement in campaign success. Here, 40% say the lack of show-level data puts CTV at a disadvantage, particularly as 75% buy CTV inventory programmatically.

Sentiment from programmatic traders is similar, as 91% say the lack of content- and show-level data is a limiting factor in their CTV campaigns. Limited content metadata is also at the heart of two of their top challenges in CTV advertising, although budget constraints could be linked to lackluster campaign reporting caused by missing content signals.

Outside of premier content, some of which is bundled into deals made during the upfronts, ads across the CTV landscape are largely handled programmatically. In its latest digital video spend report, the IAB highlights that 85% of CTV inventory is purchased programmatically, which is up from 75% a year earlier. Here, content signals are critical. But all too often, programmatic bidstreams lack concrete, reliable signals about the content people are watching. 

According to a March 2026 analysis of industrywide bid request data by contextual data company Peer39, only 40% contain usable program-level content signals. Within that 40%, however, data transparency is very limited, as 33% has some genre data available and 7% has shallow or inaccurate genre data.

Signal consistency is also an issue. Currently, individual publishers pick and choose which content signals they pass to advertisers in programmatic bidstreams. Sell-side providers (SSPs) are similarly inconsistent, providing varying degrees of program signals—even for content from the same publisher.

From a targeting perspective, genre—the lone signal in the Peer39 dataset—is only the tip of the iceberg, and it remains largely elusive. That fact notwithstanding, 95% of TV buyers agree that brand-building campaigns in CTV can deliver strategic value in the same way that linear TV can. And perhaps more importantly, the availability of this data would notably influence CTV budgets.

Content transparency represents a notable blind sport for advertisers, but there are ways to navigate the challenges. Knowing how to evaluate whether a campaign is flying blind is critical, as is knowing which content signals to demand from advertising partners. 

To learn more, download our 2026 CTV advertising report.