Challenges AdTech Companies and Advertisers Face With Advanced TV
The migration away from traditional television is well underway. As Advanced TV audiences grow, the medium has become impossible to dismiss as an advertising platform — and the pressure on advertisers to adapt is mounting.
Traditional TV is technologically long past its prime. The industry has developed its own vocabulary for the audiences departing cable: nevers, cord cutters, and cord shavers.
Nevers are people who never considered cable or premium subscription TV a relevant medium. They may still consume plenty of video, but through streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, or HBO Now. Cord shavers still maintain some kind of subscription television package but have trimmed it back and increasingly fill the gap with streaming. Cord cutters have cancelled subscription TV entirely, shifting their viewing to streaming platforms.
Over-the-top (OTT) and Advanced TV advertising may be the only realistic path for advertisers trying to reach these groups and recover the revenue that has migrated out of traditional TV. That said, despite meaningful budget growth in the space, Advanced TV still faces a set of genuine obstacles before it can match the maturity of digital programmatic.
Challenges of Advanced TV
Advertisers, agencies, and TV-network executives alike have raised concerns about where Advanced TV currently stands, and where it's headed. The most common friction points include:
- A lack of understanding of how the underlying technology actually works
- Limited available inventory
- The transparency problems that already plague programmatic in the open web environment
- Organizational hesitation to experiment with new platforms
- Fear that embracing OTT will devalue existing linear TV ad inventory
Most of these issues are likely to ease as programmatic TV matures — but advertisers who wait for a fully resolved ecosystem before getting involved risk falling behind competitors who are already building expertise.
Viewability and Delivery
Viewability in programmatic TV doesn't mean the same thing it does in display advertising, where partial or full concealment of an ad unit is the central concern. The challenges here are different in nature:
- Ads are delivered to households, not individuals — meaning any member of that household might see the ad, making truly personalized targeting difficult.
- The fragmentation of TV formats (digital TV, streaming, video-on-demand, and others) means advertisers need to keep pace with a constantly evolving inventory landscape.
- TV viewers can't click on ads, so the standard engagement metrics used in online advertising simply don't translate. Measuring whether an ad drove meaningful attention is considerably harder.
Opportunities in Advanced TV
Like other media channels that have adopted programmatic buying, TV is positioned for substantial growth — and the advertising dollars are beginning to follow. There are several meaningful advantages that programmatic TV offers.
No Ad Fraud
OTT advertising inventory is fragmented and standards remain inconsistent, but there is an upside: because streaming platforms are closed environments, ad fraud has no real foothold in the way it does across open web display. For advertisers, that translates into more efficient spend.
No Ad Skipping
Viewers consuming content on OTT devices can't simply close a window, jump to another tab, or install an adblocker to eliminate ads. The experience is much closer to broadcast TV than to web browsing — ads play, and audiences largely watch them.
Measurable Results Through Addressable TV
One of the most compelling aspects of programmatic TV is the measurement potential. Addressable TV works by layering audience data from networks with first- and third-party user data to build household profiles. With those profiles in hand, advertisers can target specific demographics with meaningful accuracy.
An online sports-equipment retailer, for instance, could configure a campaign to serve ads exclusively to households where viewers fall between the ages of 25 and 35. By then analyzing online sales data for that age cohort, the advertiser can assess whether the campaign drove actual purchase behaviour — and make adjustments accordingly. That kind of closed-loop attribution is difficult or impossible with traditional linear TV.
Budget Optimization
Better audience targeting means fewer wasted impressions. Programmatic TV's ability to show ads only to the relevant target audience produces more efficient campaigns and frees up budget that can be redeployed — whether toward mobile, display, or video advertising — or reinvested into programmatic TV itself, further accelerating the channel's development.
The Bigger Picture
For marketers, Advanced TV represents a genuine path forward in a world where linear TV reach continues to erode. Its potential remains largely untapped, which creates real opportunity for early movers. OTT ad revenue is projected to grow from 45% to 60% of the overall TV advertising mix over the next decade — making the case for getting comfortable with this channel sooner rather than later.