TV Advertising Touts Outcomes. But TV Fragmentation Gets in the Way.
Amazon's Moss on blending retail media with CTV
This post is part of a special upfront week partnership between Next in Media and DirecTV Advertising
Kicking off TV’s upfront week, one of the first things out of NBCUniversal’s Global Advertising & Partnerships lead Mark Marshall’s mouth - after talking up the big audience numbers for the Olympics and Thanksgiving Day Parade of course - was outcomes.
Within the first few minutes of NBCU’s splashy presentation, which featured the likes of Vin Diesel and Jennifer Garner, Marshall was talking up both “Live Total Impact” and “Performance Insights Hub.” Both products were aimed at aping aspects of the giant digital platforms - promising to help advertisers retarget viewers across linear and digital TV, and use AI to better reach consumers at the right moments - and of course gauge whether ad campaigns delivered.
“We’ve always known that premium performs,” he said. TV just needs to prove it - like Meta and Google seem to be able to do every day.
After all, TV advertising is under pressure, as the overall “shift toward performance” in the media industry is “structural,” not “cyclical,” wrote Madison and Wall in a recent post.
“The reality of 2026 is that outcomes are the only true connective data in a fractured world,” said Kevin Krim, CEO, EDO.
But ironically, while the TV ad business is largely concentrated among roughly a dozen key players, even this level of fragmentation gets in its way. The more that big TV companies like NBCU or newer players such as Amazon look to track outcomes using their unique data sets, identifiers, audience graphs, and the like - the more they add to advertisers’ challenge in evaluating how well TV performs, and is worthy of their investment.
“Agencies and advertisers have told us they need help navigating fragmentation and delivering measurable outcomes all year long across a full-funnel offering,” Alan Moss, VP Global Ad Sales, Amazon, told me on the Next in Media podcast this week.
Moss said that his company sees the performance heavy worlds of Retail Media and TV increasingly coming together. Naturally, he talked up Amazon’s ability to use its ID and shopping data to reach 90% of homes in the US thanks to deals with Netflix, Roku, Disney, Spotify, SiriusXM.
“We see a tangible shift from just content-first decisions [in TV ad buying] to a much more integrated approach where content, authenticated signals, and ad tech are developed and activated together,” Moss said. “I think the big story this year is going to be the integration of premium content and ad tech, like AI agents to drive measurable outcomes all year long.”
Of course, the challenge is that not every product lends itself to being added to your Amazon cart. And how many agencies or brands will be satisfied with just using Amazon data and tech to plan and buy across all of their TV spend (just as they don’t want to optimize just on NBCU properties or Paramount, etc).
The problem for the traditional players is that they don’t have a retail media business or a massive logged-in user base to lean on.
“These companies are feeling the squeeze,” said Tom Swierczewski, vp of media investment and partnerships at Goodway Group. Outcomes products from the likes of Paramount, NBCU and others “are incomplete solutions.”
“There is always some level of fragmentation [with any attribution system], but they are better than nothing.”
However, even YouTube, which has become a massive TV player, can’t satisfy any one brand’s identity and fragmentation challenges. So much of what YouTube sells is a connection with creators - which while undoubtedly powerful, isn’t easy to translate into tangible outcomes.
Things were certainly easier in the bundles cable TV, or so it seemed.
This week in fact, DirecTV Advertising is promoting a campaign in which it touts its ability to sell advertisers ad inventory across a slew of channels delivered by competing TV companies, using the current upfront week as a metaphor.
“The upfronts have always been about showcasing the best of TV, and when we stepped back and looked at the week as a whole, we realized that’s exactly what we do every day,” wrote Amy Leifer, Chief Advertising Officer at DirecTV Advertising.
Overall, TV’s challenges on the outcomes front are threefold:
The medium is structurally disjointed
It’s not interactive (by nature)
It lends itself to longer, considered purchases (its impact is felt over longer periods of time)
“We do need to be mindful of the nuances implicit to TV advertising, such as longer expected lag from exposure to outcome and the fact that outcomes occur on other devices,” said Beau Ordemann, VP, Head of Advanced TV, at Yahoo DSP.
Indeed, even as streaming takes over consumption, TV’s nature and design is hard to change overnight.
“CTV has historically lacked the infrastructure that lets social platforms close the loop in the first place,” said Todd Randak GM, CTV, DoubleVerify.
Randak noted that walled gardens like Meta and Google boast of structured data, controlled environments, and “a feedback loop where every impression and most every conversion gets fed back into the same optimization engine. CTV has none of that out of the box.”
Instead, “every publisher has its own content taxonomy,” he said. “Every platform handles measurement differently. Identity is splintered across devices, households, and platforms. And legacy regulatory guardrails limit what individual-level data can flow. So even when an advertiser can tie a streaming impression to a downstream outcome, they’re often doing it inside one publisher’s report and can’t compare it to anything else.”
Which would mean that brands and agencies have one of two choices: either they wait and hope for all the big TV companies to work together on some kind of common identity and targeting system - or they build something that cuts across all players.
A big chunk of the TV world is trying just that. NBCU, Paramount, Fox, AMC, Hallmark, Warner Bros. Discovery, Televisa Univision and a slew of others have announced a new initiative in conjunction with the TV joint venture OpenAP designed to help media buyers execute and track outcomes-based campaigns across multiple media companies.
Specifically, the group is rolling out a Unified Conversion API for TV, which shoudl enable the sharing of conversion data across multiple platforms, as well as new common campaign workflows which should help brands manage inventory across multiple publishers.
This launch, which also includes Scripps and A+E, has the potential to serve a major step toward accelerating the growth of more trackable TV advertising - albeit one that raises a bunch of questions, including:
Will individual partners like NBCU (which didn’t mention this partnership during its upfront presentation) prioritize their own outcomes solutions over the new OpenAP-backed offering?
Will top quality ad inventory be available this way?
How will OpenAP and the partners promote it?
What about Amazon and Disney (which has it’s own Compass outcomes product)? Will they ever sign on?
In the meantime, some marketers, agencies and ad tech firms are attempting their own omnichannel approaches to tracking TV-driven outcomes.
“What we’re seeing is that the most successful brands are turning these marketplace measurement gaps into opportunities,” said Dan Rosenfeld, Head of Insights and Analytics, DirecTV Advertising. “They’re building out their own first-party data infrastructure and forming strategic partnerships with data, technology, and publishers who can reliably tap into that infrastructure,”
Swierczewski said his agency - which has its roots in performance advertising (rather than traditional linear TV brand building) - has built an internal measurement stack, which gets fortified by TV companies providing log files and bid stream data. They are also increasingly using custom media mix models to help.
“If you want to breach silos, you need to create infrastructure,” he said. Thankfully, “The TV guys are now more willing to share information.”
Not every big brand or agency is going to be in the same place, or have the same technological prowess. Which is why a third party that can help brands buy and optimize across TV might be ideal.
“Fragmentation shows up when those systems stay closed and advertisers end up with multiple views of the same user,” said Yahoo’s Ordemann.
“Programmatic overcomes fragmentation by reaching strategic audiences anywhere they consume content while controlling holistic frequency, overlap with linear, and optimizing in real time against many other aspects that impact performance.”
This assumes that the big TV players like NBCU are going to provide the right inventory access and data intel to allow such omnichannel orchestration.
That is not the inclination of many big TV players, who like to maintain pricing and inventory control - and save the Olympics and Thanksgiving Parades of the world for the biggest, highest-paying customers. And existing third parties have only made so much progress.
“The reality is that major measurement companies have yet to deliver a truly end-to-end, high-fidelity, and reliable cross-platform solution,” said DirecTV’s Rosenfeld. “It’s an incredibly tough nut to crack in today’s fragmented landscape, especially since publishers maintain direct consumer relationships, making it difficult for measurement companies to access scaled deterministic data—there are many walled gardens, both big and small.”
Regardless, the pressure is on to prove more than just big reach.
“At the end of the day, it’s about an advertiser’s business KPIs,” said Moss. “And that often has to do with driving sales. Yes, their intermediary [ways to track] building brand awareness, consideration, etc. But it’s all a means towards driving usage of their product and new customers.”