Connected TV advertising
Television did not go away. It moved. Streaming now accounts for 48.5% of all television viewing in the United States — more than broadcast and cable put together — and the advertising money is following it every single year. We plan and buy Connected TV for the Twin Cities, and we report on it beside every other line on your plan.
Where the
viewing went.
Every figure on this page is a published number from Nielsen or eMarketer with its source and date attached. We do not round them up and we do not repeat vendor decks.
2026 is the year streaming outsold primetime
In the 2026 upfronts — the annual market where the big television money gets committed months ahead of air — Connected TV commitments came in at $17.73 billion against $16.98 billion for primetime linear television. That is the first time streaming has outsold traditional primetime in the upfront market, and it is the clearest signal available that this is a structural move rather than a fashion.
eMarketer projects Connected TV to pass all traditional television ad spending around 2028, at roughly $47 billion to traditional TV's $45 billion. Nothing about that requires you to abandon broadcast — we still buy plenty of it, and for good reasons set out on our television page. It does mean a plan built only on broadcast is now reaching a shrinking share of the room.
| Share of US television viewing | Share | Year-on-year |
|---|---|---|
| Streaming | 48.5% | Rising |
| Broadcast | 19.8% | Up from 18.5% |
| Cable | 19.5% | Down from 23.4% |
Nielsen, The Gauge, June 2026, total day, persons 2+. The three rows do not sum to 100% because the remainder is other tuning — gaming, physical media and unmeasured sources. Within ad-supported television specifically, Nielsen's Q2 2026 report puts streaming at 48.2%, broadcast at 26.6% and cable at 25.2%. Broadcast's year-on-year gain came largely from live sport: the FIFA World Cup on Fox and Telemundo, and the NBA Finals on ABC.
What Connected TV actually is
Connected TV means a television commercial delivered to an internet-connected screen — a smart TV, a Roku or Fire Stick, an Apple TV, a games console — inside streaming content. It is the same thirty seconds you would run on WCCO, shown to a household watching Hulu, Paramount+, Peacock, Tubi, Max, Netflix's ad tier or a free ad-supported channel.
What it is not is online video. A pre-roll ad on a phone, skippable after five seconds, half-watched with the sound off, is a different product sold on different terms. Connected TV inventory is generally non-skippable, full-screen, on the main television in the house. When someone sells you “video” and reports it beside CTV as though the two are interchangeable, that is worth a question.
Why an advertiser should care
- You can buy a zip code. Broadcast sells you a whole market — efficient when your customer is everywhere, wasteful when they are not. CTV can be bought down to postcode level, which for a remodeler working the south metro is the difference between paying for the audience and paying for the region.
- The people who left cable are still watching television. They are just unreachable on it. CTV is how you put a television commercial in front of a household that has not had a cable box in six years.
- It reports like digital. Completed views, frequency, reach against the plan, and in most cases the site visits that followed. Not a diary estimate.
- It stacks with broadcast rather than replacing it. Run both and you cover the households that only stream, the households that only watch live, and the ones that do both — without paying twice for the overlap, provided somebody is managing the frequency across them. That somebody should be your agency.
How we buy it
The same way we buy everything else: negotiated, scheduled, and reported against what it was supposed to do. A Connected TV line on an RA plan says which inventory, at what cost per thousand, against which geography, at what frequency, and how it will be measured — before a dollar moves.
CTV is the easiest place in media to spend money invisibly. Impressions arrive, a dashboard turns green, and nobody can say what it did. Every plan we build says in advance what the line is for.
Three things we insist on, because they are where CTV budgets usually go quiet:
- Frequency capped across the whole plan, not per platform. Uncapped CTV is how one household sees your commercial forty times in a week and your reach numbers still look fine.
- Transparent inventory. You should be able to see what you bought. “Premium streaming” is not an answer.
- Measured against the business, not the platform. Completion rate is a delivery check, not a result. Leads, calls, appointments and revenue are the result — see how we handle reporting.
Connected TV in the Twin Cities
Minneapolis–Saint Paul is the 15th largest television market in the United States, and one where the streaming shift shows up plainly: a metro with high household income, high broadband penetration and a spread-out suburban geography is close to the ideal case for buying television by zip code rather than by market.
It matters more here than in a compact market. A campaign for a business in Woodbury that buys the full Twin Cities DMA is paying to reach Chaska, Elk River and western Wisconsin as well. CTV lets that same budget concentrate on the east metro and buy frequency there instead of breadth everywhere.
Ask us what CTV would cost against your market.
Tell us the geography, the budget and the season. We will come back with a schedule that says what it buys and how it gets measured.
Connected TV,
answered.
Is Connected TV the same thing as OTT?
Near enough, and the industry uses them loosely. OTT (“over the top”) describes content delivered over the internet rather than through a cable or satellite subscription. CTV describes the device class — the television set doing the receiving. In practice, when someone says CTV they mean streaming ads on a TV screen, and when they say OTT they may also be including phones and tablets. Worth clarifying which one a seller means before comparing two prices.
Does Connected TV replace our broadcast buy?
Usually not, and we will say so plainly if your market and category do not support it. Broadcast still delivers a whole market faster and cheaper per thousand than anything else, and live sport in particular remains genuinely hard to replicate — broadcast's viewing share actually rose year on year in June 2026 on the back of the World Cup and the NBA Finals.
The right question is not which one, but what proportion. That is a media planning question and it depends on who you sell to.
What is the minimum budget worth putting into CTV?
It depends far more on geography than on the total. A tight zip-code buy can do real work on a modest monthly budget, because the impressions are concentrated. That same budget spread across the whole Twin Cities DMA buys a frequency of about one, which does nothing at all.
We would rather tell you a budget is too thin for the footprint than take it and report impressions.
How do we know the ads actually ran?
You get delivery reporting: impressions served, completion rate, frequency and reach against the plan, by inventory source. We reconcile that against what was ordered, and we hand you the discrepancy when there is one rather than passing the platform's number through unread.
Can you target our existing customer list?
In most cases yes — a customer list can be matched to households and either targeted or suppressed, which is often the more useful direction. Suppressing existing customers on an acquisition campaign stops you paying to advertise to people who already bought. What is available depends on the inventory and the list, so we will confirm it for your specific case rather than promise it in advance.
Sources on this page: Nielsen, The Gauge (June 2026) and the Q2 2026 Ad-Supported Gauge; eMarketer forecasts for US Connected TV ad spending and 2026 upfront commitments. Figures were current when this page was last built. If a number here has gone stale, tell us and we will correct it — we would rather fix a page than defend it.
Let's build the plan.
Tell us the market, the budget and what a win looks like. We will come back with a plan that says exactly where it goes and what it should return.