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As the connected TV (CTV) market matures, new ad formats are giving brands tools to capture attention in cluttered streaming environments. India鈥檚 Smart TV OS CloudTV launched a 3D ad unit on Thursday across its OS-powered devices, with the goal of providing a premium user experience and outperforming traditional ad formats in attention capture. CTV is a critical investment for advertisers looking to capitalize on the shift to digital, and 3D ad formats鈥� innovative ability to engage fragmented viewers will become increasingly important as the market expands.

But as streamers ramp up live programming, it鈥檚 unclear whether ad breaks in live streaming will earn the same leniency as traditional live TV. Only 35% of users say they pay more attention to streaming ads鈥攂arely up from 33% in 2024.

The news: NBCUniversal will charge $8 million for 30-second Super Bowl LX spots, per an Adweek report citing those familiar with the matter. Ads for Super Bowl LX were reportedly going for around $7 million for 30 seconds鈥攂ut that number has been increased due to high demand. Our take: The Super Bowl is likely the most lucrative advertising opportunity for US brands, as football continues dominating live TV鈥攎eaning advertisers are willing to invest despite the high cost. Live sports events, especially the Super Bowl, offer a rare combination of scale, immediacy, and viewer engagement.

Millions of households still watch live TV, making it a powerful tool for reaching broad audiences. Integrated strategies accounting for the reach of traditional TV with the targeting capabilities of CTV will be most successful.

Looking at advertisers: As streaming platforms continue to erode traditional TV viewership, the merger positions the combined entity to better compete by offering bundled services and enhanced content delivery鈥攑otentially opening avenues for advertisers to engage audiences as they shift away from traditional TV.

Amazon is betting that streaming鈥檚 future lies not in replicating traditional TV鈥檚 broad reach, but in offering the precision and accountability that traditional media cannot match. By addressing the streaming industry鈥檚 transparency problem, Amazon positions itself to capture traditional TV budgets from advertisers who may have been more hesitant to migrate to digital.

Connected TV (CTV) and traditional TV collectively draw far more consumer time than mobile devices do. How to interpret this report. This report compares our US time spent with media forecast with our US ad spending forecast.

Declines in linear TV viewers, time spent with linear, and the number of linear addressable TV households, combined with streaming services outpacing traditional TV subscription revenues, makes it unclear whether linear ad spend will continue growing.

Traditional TV buying relied on assumptions鈥攑airing ad messages with content categories to capture the right viewer. The growth of CTV brings certainty. 鈥淢odern advertising allows you to target people鈥� based on who they are, regardless of the specific content or device,鈥� Lerner said. Instead of relying on TV programs, genres, or time slots, advertisers can access identity-based audience segments.

Traditional TV buying relied on assumptions鈥攑airing ad messages with content categories to capture the right viewer. The growth of CTV brings certainty. 鈥淢odern advertising allows you to target people鈥� based on who they are, regardless of the specific content or device,鈥� Lerner said. Instead of relying on TV programs, genres, or time slots, advertisers can access identity-based audience segments.

Active TV users still love their TVs, but sub OTT users are headed for a similar level of engagement. TV loyalists remain highly engaged even as cord-cutting proliferates. In 2025, over 184 million US adults will still actively watch TV. Some may catch only a few shows or sporting events each month, but others鈥攑articularly older cohorts鈥攕pend an enormous amount of time consuming traditional linear TV.

Traditional TV has long been losing time, and even some digital media鈥攍ike social networks鈥攁re starting to go backward. In this context, sub OTT鈥檚 4.5% growth this year seems relatively strong. Sub OTT is the most time-consuming digital media and trails only traditional TV among all media. Consumers spend far more time with sub OTT video than with social media or digital audio.

The 2023 upfront market will likely be the last one transacted primarily on Nielsen鈥檚 legacy currency. A shift from traditional TV to digital video advertising is the main factor driving this change.

Paramount鈥檚 Q3 results reflect strong streaming growth: To attain 3.5 million new subscribers and $49 million in DTC profit, it鈥檚 leveraged cost cutting and content innovation to balance revenue pressures from traditional TV.

The trend: At Cannes Lions 2025, Meta, TikTok, Google, and others made clear that AI-powered ad automation is no longer an experiment鈥攊t鈥檚 the plan. The news: Meta and TikTok each emphasized agency relationships, but both platforms expanded generative AI tools that let brands generate and manage campaigns without intermediaries. Amazon, Comcast, and Google are doing the same, pushing toward platform-native, self-serve ad models. Our take: As automation replaces traditional support services, agencies face existential pressure. To stay relevant, holding companies will need to prove they offer value that AI can鈥檛 replace鈥攆ast.

YouTube is the dominant platform where they discover new toys, far outpacing traditional TV and gaming platforms, according to a May 2024 Precise TV and Giraffe Insights survey. It鈥檚 also Gen Alpha鈥檚 top platform by time spent, at 84 minutes daily, per Qustodio, a third-party parental control and monitoring platform offered by Qoria. Shopping independently is not commonplace.

Digital ad spending is starting to run out of traditional ad dollars to poach. US digital ad spending now stands at 81.8% of total ad spend. Although traditional TV still generates tens of billions of dollars in ad spend, most new digital ad spending will be incremental instead of switched from traditional. Tariffs haven鈥檛 cut ad spending as much as feared.