The accepted narrative says linear TV can no longer provide what modern advertisers want. The real story is more complicated.
Fragmented linear audiences are harder to reach, but they’re not gone. Sophisticated targeting, measurement and optimization are harder to execute in linear, but not impossible.
The bigger barrier is operational fragmentation. For all but the largest agencies – and maybe even these – making linear TV work the way buyers and advertisers expect has become too expensive and too labor-intensive.
But here’s the danger in confusing “difficult” with “obsolete.” Linear is still home to target-rich audiences and meaningful advertiser value. The challenge therefore is modernizing how the industry transacts linear TV.
Operational friction is real, so let’s fix it
Audience fragmentation has made planning dramatically more complex. Reaching meaningful scale often means combining more networks, programs, dayparts, markets and inventory sources – all while meeting modern expectations around targeting, flexible activation, optimization and measurement. Every layer of sophistication introduces more operational work, including more inventory relationships, data sources, monitoring, reporting and coordination.
The difficulty is very real, but the accepted narratives have mistaken workflow limitations for limitations of the medium itself.
Linear still offers tremendous value in the right campaigns. It can uniquely deliver broad reach and frequency, has strong local market penetration and potentially lower CPMs than highly targeted CTV.
Linear’s complexity hits independent and in-house agencies hardest
Large holding companies can absorb the complexity of linear TV across large teams and large volumes of spend. They have dedicated national and local buyers, buying teams for cable and broadcast and teams for managing traffic, analytics and reporting. They also have longstanding seller relationships along with proprietary systems and years of pricing data.
Smaller agencies and in-house agencies can’t copy that model. Leaner independent agencies have one media buying team that works across channels. They can’t justify dedicated teams and specialized personnel just for linear TV, nor can they justify expensive audience and measurement tools or the heavy lifting of data integrations.
Linear’s value is a competitive opportunity for independent agencies
These independent agencies are competing for clients that expect holdco-level capabilities and agencies that build plans based on media value, not margin value.
Moreover, as advertisers crowd into the same digital environments, linear can offer value that competitors are largely overlooking. Linear audiences may be fragmented, but they’re still there, and linear’s audience has massive discretionary income and spends across multiple consumer verticals.
Done well, linear can deliver incremental reach and more efficient pricing.
Agencies have an opportunity to tell a compelling, differentiated story by contradicting the accepted narrative that linear TV is dying.
Capturing linear’s value demands a different operating model
When any channel is underused – and value left unrealized – because it’s difficult, the obvious answer is to solve for the difficulty. In this case, we need to build the infrastructure to resolve operational fragmentation in linear TV.
But no individual broadcaster, cable provider or inventory owner controls enough of the ecosystem to solve this operational fragmentation alone. This created an opportunity for independent technology providers to build the connective infrastructure the industry never had.
At Continuum, we’ve spent years building that operating layer, connecting inventory, pricing intelligence, workflow automation and reporting into a platform that functions as a white-labeled extension of an agency’s TV team.
This kind of modernized TV platform allows independent agencies to continue owning strategy and client relationships while relying on connective infrastructure to handle the operational complexity of executing sophisticated linear campaigns.
Modern TV infrastructure changes the economics of linear TV
Modern TV infrastructure gives independent agencies many of the capabilities they’ve come to expect from digital, from faster activation and more flexible market planning to pricing intelligence, in-flight optimization, audience-informed measurement and consolidated reporting.
These capabilities fundamentally change the agency economics of linear TV. Streamlined workflows give independent agencies better margins, while preserving more team capacity, allowing them to be more responsive for clients. These capabilities also empower independent agencies to compete for larger, more sophisticated accounts without adding dedicated linear TV staff.
But, perhaps most importantly, removing these operational barriers in linear allows independent agencies to get back to a core principle: evaluating channels based on potential media value for the client and campaign, rather than media-planning decisions being heavily shaded by the operational burden required to execute on that channel.
Linear TV’s next era
Linear is not the same as it was 30 or even 10 years ago. The fragmentation of both audiences and operations has drastically increased the complexity of transacting in linear.
Modern TV infrastructure finally gives independent agencies a practical way to overcome that complexity, compete with holding companies and evaluate linear based on its media value – not the burden of executing it.
The goal isn’t to put linear back into every media plan. We just need to make sure operational friction isn’t the reason it’s left out.
