By Ray Green (+ai), Contributor
Connected TV (CTV) advertising is no longer a “next big thing” — it’s the current direction of digital media, and it’s picking up speed.
In a landmark forecast, eMarketer projects that U.S. ad spending on CTV will surpass linear TV by 2027. This isn’t just a milestone. It’s a signal that marketers are fully embracing the precision, flexibility, and efficiency that digital television environments offer over their traditional counterparts.
“CTV combines the mass reach of television with the targeting and measurement capabilities of digital,” eMarketer notes in its recent CTV trends report.
For companies like Loyal, which specialize in privacy-safe, contextual targeting across mobile apps and CTV environments, this shift presents not just opportunity — but strategic alignment with where the market is going.
From Broadcast to Precision: Why the Budget Shift Is Happening
Linear TV, while still powerful in reach, continues to lose ground as consumers cut the cord and shift their viewing to streaming services. Advertisers are following that audience migration.
CTV is on pace to generate $33.35 billion in U.S. ad spend by 2025, according to eMarketer, with spend accelerating each year thereafter (source). By contrast, traditional TV ad spend is expected to gradually decline.
CTV’s appeal isn’t just its growing viewership. It’s the ability to reach audiences with greater precision, control frequency, and measure performance in near real-time.
And as Innovid’s 2024 CTV Advertising Insights Report shows, these platforms aren’t niche anymore. In fact, CTV accounted for 53% of all video ad impressions across their network in 2023 — a 12% year-over-year increase (source).
What’s Driving CTV’s Acceleration
Several factors are behind the shift:
- Audience reach: More than 90% of U.S. households have access to a CTV device.
- Shift to streaming: Viewers are spending more time with platforms like Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, and FAST (Free Ad-Supported TV) channels.
- Ad innovation: Brands can now deliver more dynamic, personalized messages — something that wasn’t possible with traditional TV buys.
Advertisers are no longer just “buying spots and dots.” They’re investing in data-enriched environments that allow for smarter segmentation and stronger engagement.
The Contextual Edge: A Strategic Advantage for Loyal
With the deprecation of third-party cookies and stricter privacy regulations, behavioral targeting has become more difficult. That’s why contextual targeting — delivering ads based on the content being consumed, not the individual viewer’s identity — is making a powerful return.
A recent Proximic by Comscore report revealed that 78% of advertisers plan to increase or maintain their contextual targeting spend in 2024 (source).
Loyal’s platform is well-positioned for this evolution. The company’s contextual exchange has indexed over 170,000 mobile and CTV apps, assigning each environment real-time contextual signals. This allows advertisers to align their messaging with specific moments of user intent — for example, targeting food delivery ads during cooking content or fitness brands alongside workout streams.
This approach is not only privacy-compliant but also highly effective in today’s fragmented media landscape.
What Agencies and Brands Should Do Next
If you’re an agency or advertiser, now is the time to reevaluate your media mix:
- Are you investing enough in CTV, given where audiences are headed?
- Are you prepared for a world without third-party cookies?
- Are your campaigns leveraging context to improve resonance and reduce waste?
The good news is, tools now exist to help answer “yes” to all three. Loyal offers custom contextual PMPs designed for high-intent audiences — such as fitness enthusiasts, auto researchers, and tech shoppers — based on the content they’re engaging with at the moment of impression.
Final Thoughts
The shift from linear to connected TV is more than just a budget reallocation. It’s a rethinking of how we engage audiences at scale. Contextual advertising, CTV’s flexibility, and the need for privacy-safe solutions all converge here — and companies like Loyal are engineering the infrastructure to support it.
In many ways, 2027 won’t be a turning point — it’ll be a confirmation of a transformation already well underway.
Sources:
- eMarketer - CTV Ad Spend Trends to Watch in 2025
- Innovid - 2024 CTV Advertising Insights Report
- Business Insider - Nexad Raises $6M to Power Contextual Ads in AI Apps
