Connected TV (CTV) continues to reshape how brands think about television advertising -- and the shift isn’t just happening among national advertisers with deep pockets.
Blake Hebert, Senior Director of Publisher Operations at Premion, shared the download on what’s really happening on the ground in CTV: the stepped-up confidence from advertisers, where friction still exists, and how companies like Premion are helping simplify an ecosystem that sometimes feels like it has more acronyms than inventory.
In a recent episode of Insider Interviews: With Media & Marketing Pros, sparked by Premion’s latest research with Advertiser Perceptions, he walked through just how marketers are thinking about CTV right now. Spoiler alert: they are - or plan to - invest more, are planning differently, and are especially looking for smarter ways to navigate and implement.
First, that survey headline: CTV investment is still climbing. Roughly 70% of advertisers say they plan to increase their CTV budgets, while essentially no one (okay, 1%) expects to pull back. That level of confidence reflects a broader reality: CTV is no longer being treated as an experimental line item but as a central component of today’s video strategy.
Hebert’s career path made him an ideal guide for the survey interpretation, having worked across both the buy side and sell side, agency and content side before moving to the operations side at Premion to help publishers and advertisers mitigate complexity. His takeaway? The question facing marketers now is not whether CTV deserves a place in the mix. It’s how those investments can be deployed more intelligently and cohesively.
Rethinking TV Planning: The Shift Toward Total TV
Part of that answer lies in rethinking how television planning itself is framed.
The fact is that the industry can still fall into the trap of perceiving viewers as choosing between linear and streaming. That framework may simplify planning conversations, but it doesn’t reflect how people actually watch. Hebert put it simply and smartly: “Consumers don’t decide to watch linear or stream; they just watch. They flip between Amazon Prime and Hulu and their local broadcast without giving it a second thought.”
So, as marketers, we have to stop siloing those channels and start planning around where people actually are. Simple in theory. Not always simple in practice -- especially for local and mid-market advertisers who don’t have the resources of the big holding-company agencies.
And, like a popular TV game show might reveal: “Survey Says!” four in five advertisers report that combining linear TV and streaming delivers stronger results across brand awareness, reach, ROI, and ad recall, reinforcing CTV’s role within broader Total TV strategies.
For local and mid-market advertisers, the implications can be even bigger. CTV now lets them combine television’s reach with the targeting and measurement tools of digital -- capabilities that used to require national-level budgets.
Making Fragmentation Work: The Role of Curation
Of course, the opportunity also brings complexity. The rapid expansion of streaming platforms means inventory is spread across dozens of services, while major platforms -- often called “walled gardens” -- operate with their own data and measurement environments.
That’s where curation starts to matter.
Rather than asking buyers to navigate dozens of platforms and supply paths on their own, curated marketplaces bundle inventory together and apply audience signals that help advertisers reach the viewers they actually want. In simpler terms, curation helps bring some order to what is otherwise a very fragmented marketplace.
When it’s done well, advertisers can still get scale and transparency while applying the audience insights that make CTV attractive in the first place. That’s the role Premion aims to play, Hebert says -- helping advertisers access streaming inventory across platforms without forcing them to piece the ecosystem together themselves.
For local and regional marketers especially, that kind of access removes a lot of the operational headache. Instead of needing the infrastructure of a large agency or holding company, they can participate in the CTV marketplace with strategies that look surprisingly similar.
Precision Matters. So Does Scale.
The other piece of deploying CTV more intelligently shows up in how targeting is handled -- particularly at the local level. Digital advertising has trained many marketers to chase increasingly narrow audience segments. But once campaigns are confined to smaller geographic markets, the math changes.
As Hebert explained, layering too many audience filters can quickly shrink the available inventory pool. What starts as a precision strategy can quietly limit scale and reduce campaign effectiveness. He says it’s something Premion actively helps advertisers navigate -- balancing precision with scale rather than over-constraining campaigns. His advice? Balance. Targeting should sharpen relevance -- not quietly erase reach.
For local advertisers in particular, the goal isn’t maximum specificity. It’s efficient relevance: reaching the audiences most likely to respond while preserving enough scale for the campaign to actually work.
Follow the Viewer
Taken together, these shifts -- Total TV planning, curated supply, and more balanced targeting -- point toward a more practical approach to CTV investment. Consumers, after all, aren’t navigating media the way the industry diagrams it. They simply follow the content they want to watch, moving easily between platforms. For advertisers, that means the smartest strategies will be the ones designed to follow those audiences wherever they are.
The opportunity in CTV is real. The complexity is real, too. But as planning tools, curated marketplaces, and measurement solutions continue to improve, the industry is getting better at managing both.
For a deeper look at how advertisers are navigating these shifts -- and how Premion is approaching them -- you can hear the full conversation with Blake Hebert on this episode of Insider Interviews: With Media & Marketing Pros.
Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.
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