CTV has long been viewed as the inroad to audience-based targeting on the biggest screen in the house. A decade into the CTV revolution, CTV has yet to deliver on this promise. At the same time, marketers are now looking to CTV for brand building, but they’re still approaching the channel with performance-based tactics.
Brand awareness is marketers’ top objective for their CTV ad spending
– 2025 Gracenote CTV advertising survey
User-based targeting is great for delivering performance, but people don’t watch TV ads the way they watch ads on social media. That’s why, for the road ahead, marketers should be complementing their audience-based strategies with initiatives that engage people who aren’t already customers.
That means focusing on what people are watching in addition to who’s doing the watching. This will help marketers better meet their top objectives and achieve the scale that audience-based targeting can’t deliver on its own.
TV audiences have shifted; ad dollars have not
Advertisers see the potential of CTV, but they’re hesitant to reallocate budget from linear TV because of a lack of information.
Precision at scale
Case study: Mexican beer brand Dos Equis successfully scaled a niche live sports strategy in CTV with zero waste.
Missing metadata in FAST programming may be hindering ad revenue
FAST channels will become increasingly dependent on metadata to inform ad buys in programmatic systems.