• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, 2 hours ago

TV ads sell stuff, and always have -- whether to put butts in seats for fast food and movies, heads in beds for hotels, or moving stuff off shelves for consumer packaged-goods brands.

But the rapid growth of performance advertising on connected TV (CTV) and the billions of dollars in recently announced M&A deals in the space — Pinterest and TVScientific late last year and Walmart and Vibe.co last week — have propelled the entire concept of performance TV across the advertising and media ecosystem. Some chronology:

TV's simpler time. When the media world was simpler in the ‘80s and ‘90s, no one questioned its effectiveness. The dominant control of TV media supply by just a few companies meant marketers had little control over the actual spots they could buy.

Marketers had little chance to proactively optimize their ads for content, granular audiences, sales tracking data or creative units in any way, other than the most blunt and time-delayed methods: basically, changing creative units and media weights within large, blunt rotator packages.

Legacy world of brand versus DR. This meant virtually all TV ad campaigns fell into two overly broad buckets: brand ad campaigns where sponsors anchored key programming and dayparts, and paid significant premiums to control them, and DR (direct-response) campaigns, where the focus was buying up lots of leftover inventory in bulk at low prices, frequently pre-emptible (meaning that your spot might be traded off to someone else at the last moment), with performance based on consumer phone calls, postal mail and store sales.

Buyers of brand ads were experts in curating the most desired and brand-favorable content. Buyers of DR were experts at buying cheap and “proto-optimizing” with teams manning phone banks and fax machines dealing directly with the owners of TV networks, programmers and stations.

Brand and DR operated in separate silos, with different objectives, teams, and companies, frequently in conflict. Not only didn’t they coordinate much, they generally didn’t like each other much.

And yes, they generally dressed, talked and operated quite differently. Brand was about Cannes, and DR was a backwater.

No more.

Performance was put on the map by digital. Digital banner, search and social advertising over the past two decades moved performance advertising from the DR backwater to the industry’s forefront.

The dynamic delivery of ads combined with granular data on audiences, behaviors and contexts and closed-loop reporting on results enabled marketers to “buy sales” so effectively that digital performance advertising now captures the lion’s share of all commercial communication spend.

Digital/TV divide collapsed by CTV. Now, with connected TVs (CTV) in many tens of millions of homes in the U.S., and many companies — from TV manufacturers like Vizio, LG and Samsung to operating system providers like Roku, Apple and Google — creating a digital ad ecosystem on these TVs, we’re finally seeing the merger of the living room TV screen and its immersive viewing experience, with digital targeting, measurement and performance optimization.

CTV ad companies’ targeting, measurement and “programmatic” workflows seem familiar to digital ad buyers and marketers, from large agencies to small businesses.

It’s like buying on Meta. Finally, performance-focused digital ad buyers can buy TV ads on systems they know and understand, and they can do it without having to learn the legacy linear TV tech, its nuances and its language.

They can now get their ads on TV screens without having to deal with TV’s spend requirements, the blunt ways it packages spots, its archaic measurement, and its sellers.

Digitally driven linear is the next explosion in performance TV. While CTV ad inventory is growing fast, the largest pools of TV ads are still in linear delivery channels: broadcast, cable and satellite — more than 80%, since so much streaming TV is ad-free or ad-light.

While the linear volume is declining, it is still massive, and will still be significant for the better part of the next decade.

Thus, we will certainly soon see a merging of the digital-driven, automated buying approaches that CTV ad companies have leveraged to serve digital marketers and buyers with under-optimized pools of linear TV.

For sure, we will see this inventory from data-driven linear platforms being automated for digital buyers, with agentic and programmatic transaction platforms to deliver desired audiences and outcomes on linear TV identical to those on CTV.

With those buyers very focused on performance and return on ad spend, the fact that linear TV ad spots are generally priced dramatically lower than CTV spots will certainly help accelerate that adoption as linear spots become available on interchangeable buying platforms.

What do you think? Has CTV electrified performance TV? Is automated, data-driven linear inventory next?