As marketers finalize their advertising budgets for 2025, one topic remains top of mind: How best to integrate linear and connected television to optimize ROI.
To be sure, there’s no consensus on what constitutes a magical mix. Some remain heavily in the linear camp, relying on the power of legacy structures and the promise of mass reach; others are more robustly embracing the targetability and data clarity of CTV. But as advertisers weigh factors including audience segmentation, reach, precision, and frequency of exposure, it’s become clear some combination of the two is necessary in today’s new era of television consumption.
“Advertisers really need to look at the whole audience, especially as we’re seeing the shift towards combining linear TV and CTV buys, with over half of CTV budgets now managed by hybrid or integrated teams,” says Peter Jones, head of sales at Premion. “If you're leaving CTV out, you're essentially shortchanging your media plan and missing a huge part of your audience. Integrating CTV as part of a complete TV strategy is key to reaching and engaging today’s diverse viewers."
Even the most strident fence-sitters sat up in August when NBCUniversal unleashed its integrated strategy for the summer Olympic Games in Paris and shared its winning results.
Gold medal stats included an average total audience of 30.6 million broadcast viewers in afternoon and primetime viewing, according to Nielsen, a leap of 82 percent over the previous summer Olympics in Tokyo. On the streaming side, NBCU reported 23.5 billion minutes of coverage were streamed, most of them on Peacock, representing a 40 percent jump over all prior summer and winter Olympics combined, since the advent of streaming. On any given day of the 17-day Games, 4.1 million viewers streamed NBC Sports coverage, either via Peacock or the NBC Sports app, according to the company.
“NBC did an excellent job of leveraging all their assets,” says Becky Meyer, Senior Vice President, National Sales, at Gray Television. “They’ve been able to build the case for how dollars work really well together—both streaming on Peacock and their linear piece.”
Setting Expectations
With case studies proving out around tentpole and big sporting events, advertisers are getting comfortable with the idea of a blended offering. Most, however, are still very much in the education phase as they activate custom campaigns and use learnings to help determine next steps, sorting through results that often are not apples-to-apples comparisons. Take, for example, gauging reach and frequency. On the linear side, reach is a projection based on an audience-centric model. On the streaming side, with its one-to-one dynamic, brands know they are hitting X number of households with X amount of messages.
Among other considerations are whether linear and connected television activations will yield different results for new brands vs. established brands and/or new offerings vs. legacy offerings. Some executives compare weighing the options to buying in the Upfront and then scatter market, where brands need to determine their baseline “must-haves” and then fill in the rest taking into account the balance of wanting to serve a particular audience, and wanting to be adjacent to a particular program and on a specific network.
Tracy Chavez, Executive Vice President at Publicis Groupe, says when working with clients on local ad sales, foremost in her mind is “the shift from linear into more CTV, and making clients feel comfortable with a larger percentage than they have historically placed. If you’re sitting at the 20 to 30 percent share of audience delivery, then you probably should be exploring increasing. And that’s a jump for some clients. Different clients have various experiences in the space and are still discovering the value in CTV,” she says.
Clients also are working through the mindset shift away from knowing exactly when and where they’ll see their ads in the linear environment, she notes. “That whole mentality, of, 'If I don’t see it, is it happening' still exists. Many clients aren’t comfortable with the fact that they may not see their streaming ad. They may not see it because we may be using FAST channels they may not subscribe to; it’s just a matter of getting them comfortable not having the same level of transparency they are accustomed to… Stepping out of their comfort zone with a company’s budget might be a scary thing.”
Those clients that have begun to make the shift to CTV, she says, “want to use all the bells and whistles. So, a product like PMX Lift, which we have created and prefer, is really exciting for our clients because they feel like now they can get into a position where they can still combine linear and CTV while extending reach by deduplicating inventory and not overserve the same people time and time again. In linear TV it can seem like we live with the 80-20 rule of audience delivery and we’re expanding that out to where more people see the ads.”
Market Still Maturing
Crystalizing the goals of a given campaign can help illuminate the best path. For KPI-driven efforts, streaming offers a solid solution. For broader branding campaigns, linear activation can enable a brand to stretch its messaging across a wider pool.
“With linear and digital campaigns, you’re hitting different parts of the funnel and depending on the brand and the product, you’ve got to be everywhere all the time. There’s so much noise you have to break through,” Meyer notes. “Does the funnel look different with unified campaigns? That’s my pitch.”
A big part of the puzzle is that the advertising realm in the connected television market is a work very much in progress and there is a lack of ad load scale on the largest platforms to carry a nationwide campaign, much less one where a brand is trying to dive into a specific DMA, according to industry observers.
Hopes were high when Netflix launched its ad tier in November 2022, but nearly two years later many note the needle has not really moved, with only 22 million viewers subscribing to the tier according to HarrisX data. Amazon Prime rolled out its ad model in January 2024 and, as one executive shares, if the ad load doesn’t shift the industry is going to be having the same circular conversation12 months from now.
“I think it’s been a non-event,” says Meyer of Netflix’s ad-supported tier. “With 20 million, there’s just not enough scale. You’ve almost got to look at establishing partnerships that are going to give you scale to bring to the marketplace... and that can be done more easily in the digital space -because there are too many rules with linear.”
United We Stand
One trend that’s helping drive forward the value of combined linear and CTV campaigns is more unified buying across both realms at all levels. This progression means both less silo’d thinking and executing.
"We're seeing a growing shift toward integrated buying across linear TV and digital, and our study with Advertiser Perceptions confirms it —over 56 percent of CTV/OTT budgets are now managed by hybrid or integrated teams,” says Premion’s Jones. “KPI-driven campaigns tend to perform better on streaming, while brand awareness efforts often favor traditional TV spots. Even as we move toward audience-based buys in CTV, we’re finding that some advertisers remain focused on securing ad placements in specific shows."
Also driving excitement for bringing CTV into the mix is its ability to deliver campaign results more quickly, and at a more granular level that enables marketers to track whether people are clicking, scanning, or engaging in real time.
Chavez notes clients “want results faster and quicker and I think CTV gives them some of those answers, with much more granular data, depending on how you set it up. In some cases, I do think there is less patience as linear begins to erode and then convincing them that it's still needed, that linear television houses 50 percent of the viewership. You can't just throw that out. The best use cases we have seen are a combination of linear and CTV where one supports the other deduplicated to extend reach.”
CTV is also “opening up incredible opportunities for dynamic creative,” says Jones. “We're just at the beginning, but as engagement with ads grows, we'll see a lot more interactive elements—whether it's a QR code, a 'click here' option with your remote, or other call-to-action overlays. Advertisers now have more creative options to make their spots interactive, from sequential messaging to personalized content. The more inventive we get with ad engagement, the more impactful these campaigns will be."
Meyer concurs, noting whereas it used to be more difficult to get digital video spend, the script is flipping although “there’s still a long way to go” in true unification. “It’s all very custom at this point. There’s no generic recipe for a media mix, whether you are automotive or QSR. The book is being written now, but it’s hard to put the story together when it hasn’t played out. We need to think about what we want it to be from a sales perspective and put the two sides together because we all need to get on the same page.”
Author: Media Ad Sales Council (MASC) founded by Mark Gorman, CEO, Matrix Solutions and Brenda Hetrick, President, Matrix Solutions and consisting of members: Becky Meyer, Senior Vice President, National Sales, Gray Television, Peter Jones, Head of Local Sales, Premion, Joe Lampert, Practice Lead, OmniMedia Solutions Group, Michael Barbetta, Senior Director, Revenue & Strategy, E.W. Scripps, Al Lustgarten, Media Industry Consultant and former Senior Vice President, Technology, Hearst Television, Michael Spiesman, Vice President Sales & Marketing, Allen Media Broadcasting, Debbie Presser, Vice President, National Sales, Nexstar Media Group, and Jennifer Donohue, Senior Vice President Local, Disney Advertising.