2026 is the year CTV bridges upper funnel and lower funnel.
Maybe you’ve heard “performance TV” as the new buzzword for TV’s push into outcomes and lower-funnel goals.
While TV has always been a performance medium, with GRPs driving sales, digital-style measurement and attribution is making it easier for marketers to connect the dots between a TV commercial and a sale.
Take Netflix, which built a conversion API (CAPI). Or Comcast, which built its own conversion API for Universal Ads. These APIs make it easier to tie ad exposures to sales. The technology is similar to the CAPIs adopted by major digital platforms, from Meta to LinkedIn to Pinterest. But given the lower costs for social platforms, does adopting a like-for-like technology ultimately help programmers – or hinder them?
Then, we talk about the rise of live sports. Sports rights are moving to streaming, like Amazon’s Thursday Night Football. And events like the Super Bowl and the Olympics were simulcast across Peacock and linear TV.
But the shift in who controls live sports rights will not happen without regulatory friction. There’s been litigation over NFL’s Sunday Ticket and a Fubo TV lawsuit against the joint venture Venu. Changes in sports rights, especially ones that require consumers to pay for a subscription to access content that’s historically been available via free broadcasts, will face legal challenges in the years ahead.
Finally, we talk through Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. The move will bring more scale to each company – though the media spend each of these mega-programmers can command from agencies is still dwarfed by the likes of Google, Meta and Amazon.
