Whitepaper
Advertising Under Pressure: Your guide into Golden Quarter 2026 and beyond
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Connected TV (CTV) is television watched over the internet, on smart TVs and connected devices. A CTV advertising partner helps you plan, buy, target and measure campaigns across that inventory.
Unlike linear TV, which is bought by broad time slots and age bands, CTV can be planned around real audiences and measured against real outcomes, which is a large part of why budgets are shifting towards it.
The viewing base has reached the point where CTV is a mainstream buy rather than an experiment. By the end of 2024, 23.6 million of the UK's 27.7 million TV households, around 85%, had their main TV set connected to the internet, up from 75% in 2019. In the UK, ad-supported inventory sits across the commercial broadcaster VOD services such as ITVX, Channel 4 and My5, alongside the ad-funded tiers of the major streamers and a long tail of smaller AVOD platforms.
For all its momentum, CTV brings a set of concerns that come up in almost every planning conversation. Most trace back to the same root: the channel is fragmented, and that fragmentation makes it harder to know who you are reaching and what your money returned.
The first concern is knowing who you are actually reaching. CTV still reaches the shared television screen, but it also reaches personal devices like phones, tablets and laptops, which should make individual-level targeting easier. In practice, several people signing into one household streaming account reintroduces that household complexity, even on a personal device. Device-level signals alone cannot reliably tell you which person watched, third-party cookies are fading, and GDPR sets clear limits on how audiences are built and tracked across the UK and EMEA. Recognising real people therefore depends on a durable identity method across channels and devices to rationalise actions to a real consumer journey, rather than hopeful guesswork.
Frequency is the same problem seen from another angle. Two-thirds of UK households now subscribe to at least one of Netflix, Amazon Prime Video or Disney+, and many hold several, so the same viewer is split across multiple services. If you cannot recognise that viewer from one app to the next, you will show some people an ad far too often while missing others entirely. Solve the recognition problem and frequency becomes manageable, which is why the two sit together.
Cost is another common worry, and it is partly a matter of where attention goes. Brands tend to fixate on the biggest, most expensive platforms and overlook the long tail of other AVOD services, which can deliver comparable audiences at a more sensible price. The channel often looks pricier than it needs to because the buying conversation starts and ends with the household names, so widening the shortlist is usually the first saving available to you.
Creative is a related sticking point, with many brands assuming CTV demands the kind of production budget attached to a traditional TV spot. That is less true than it was. Newer formats such as pause ads, which appear when a viewer stops playback, ask far less of your creative. Alongside them, technologies that generate creative iterations and build lightweight dynamic ads let brands get up and running without a heavy upfront commitment.
The harder concern sits around impact. Many brands can prove delivery, things like completion rates and impression volumes, but struggle to connect CTV to real action, whether it be shifts in brand recall, increases in search activity, store visits or sales.
Taken together, these concerns are real but not disqualifying. Cost and creative are largely in your own hands from the outset. Reaching the right people at a sensible frequency, and proving genuine impact, depend far more on the partner you choose, which is where a shortlist starts to matter.
Before comparing partners or platforms, get clear on two things: the audience you are trying to reach, and the outcome you want the campaign to drive. Those two answers shape everything that follows, and they keep you from being drawn in by reach figures that look impressive but say little about relevance.
You can act on some of the concerns above straight away. Look past the largest platforms to the wider pool of AVOD inventory to keep costs honest, and test lighter formats or repurposed content before committing to full-scale production. The rest comes down to the partner. Press each one on how they recognise audiences, how they control frequency, and how they tie exposure to online and in-store actions rather than stopping at impressions. Plain answers are a good sign; vague ones are a useful warning.
Our CTV Buyer's Guide turns these concerns into a practical checklist, with the full RFP question list, the capabilities to look for and an industry report card to compare partners against.
Download the CTV Buyer's Guide to assess your shortlist with confidence.
