In the current TV landscape, advertisers that want to meet audiences “where they are” must be agile and willing to seek them out across various screens and platforms. Over the past 18 months, 150 publishers and channels have been measured through TVSquared’s platform—a testament to audience fragmentation and the multitude of TV viewing options. As part of our recent CTV-focused analysis, we looked at the ways in which experimentation and diversification shifted among advertisers across categories.
Specifically, we found that both diversification and experimentation grew each quarter in 2020, with 21 publishers used in Q1’2020 and increasing to +130 by Q4’2020. Overall, advertisers also aired on an average of 3.8 different publishers for CTV campaigns throughout all of 2020. Dedicated streaming publishers accounted for nearly half of all volume (46%), often in combination with other channels. Meanwhile, broadcast publishers accounted for only 7% of the total 2020 CTV volume, despite taking in the lion’s share of linear TV ad dollars.
TVSquared has also seen a steep change in the adoption of programmatic CTV advertising, which is a channel that is becoming more and more reliant on measurement and attribution. In fact, we saw a 42% increase in unique advertisers leveraging programmatic in Q1’2021 compared to Q4’2020.
As media owners invest more heavily in their streaming strategies and audiences continue to fragment, advertisers’ CTV budgets will continue to diversify across platform types.
Download our full CTV insights, “CTV Accelerated: Keeping Up with the New Pace of Change,” here.
