Streaming TV: The Sweet Spot for Ad Buyers

(Originally published in TVREV’s Thought Leaders Circle for OrkaTV)

Problem 

As recently as 2019, Linear TV accounted for 80% of total video viewing for adults. Now it accounts for roughly 50% of TV usage, according to Nielsen. The medium is undoubtedly in structural decline.

But Connected TV (CTV), linear’s successor, has yet to see ad dollars meaningfully flow over. CTV has accounted for nearly 40% of time spent watching video content in 2023 but attracts less than 10% of ad spend. Part of this imbalance is explained by the amount of marketing spend flowing into other ad formats, such as mobile. 

But I think the issue is more fundamental than that. What if the bulk of TV advertising is still spent on linear because agencies and advertisers are overwhelmed by the jargon plaguing CTV?

Solution 

For linear TV ad buyers who are looking to shift budgets to CTV but don’t know where to begin due to all of the fragmentation, the answer is simple. Focus your ad dollars on the sweet spot developing in the ecosystem that we at OrkaTV like to call Streaming TV. Streaming TV has all of the prestige content you love to have your brand associated with on broadcast with none of the user-generated (UGC) and short-form content that floods digital. Streaming TV is FAST Channels and Services such as Samsung TV Plus, virtual MVPDs like Fubo, and the standalone AVOD app Fawesome. It’s blockbuster movies like Oppenheimer, episodic series such as Yellowstone, and the Super Bowl.

Streaming TV drives brand awareness at scale. It reaches households just like good old-fashioned linear, and the only things that changed are the TVs take up less space in your living room, cost less, and crucially got a whole lot smarter. The data Smart TVs collect provide audience data that gives Streaming TV a massive targeting advantage over linear. 

Advertisers will see great results when they focus on the overlapping values that Linear and Streaming TV offer. Streaming TV is for ad buyers who know the value of Linear TV but want to shift a larger portion of their budget to streaming to keep up with audience behavior changes.