LAS VEGAS — For years, streaming advertisers operated in the dark. They could target specific households with precision, but had little visibility into what those viewers were actually watching when their ads appeared.
That opacity may be finally lifting, as publishers are sharing more content data, aggregators like Gracenote are stitching it together, and AI platforms are making sense of signals that would overwhelm human planners.
“What’s been missing in the last decade or so in streaming is real visibility from an advertiser perspective in terms of where they’re running their ads,” said Moe Chughtai, global VP of strategy and partnerships at MiQ, in this video interview with Beet.TV’s Lisa Granatstein.
Beyond audience-only strategies
MiQ offers programmatic campaign solutions including data analytics, creative build and trading insights, plus analytics and tech solutions.
The company sees advertisers moving away from pure audience targeting toward a hybrid approach that incorporates contextual relevance. It’s a recognition that reaching the right person matters less if the moment is wrong.
“A good example is if you’re a CPG advertiser and you want to reach brand loyalists, and you’ve got different ad opportunities in streaming to reach them, whether that’s when they’re with their family watching a comedy special or they’re watching a true crime documentary,” Chughtai said. “Those are fundamentally two very different brand experiences.”
When brands match creative to content type, “ad recall and brand favorability go up massively,” he said. Identity-based targeting remains valuable, but contextual data helps advertisers find consumers “in environments where they’re ready, relevant for the advertising message.”
Scale demands automation
The CTV market supports such investment. U.S. CTV ad spending is projected to reach $40.90 billion by 2027, according to eMarketer, up from $25.09 billion in 2023. MiQ has positioned itself to capture that growth through recent partnerships including its addition to YouTube’s Activation Partners program in October 2025.
Linear television offered planners a manageable universe: a few hundred channels, a half-dozen dayparts. Streaming presents millions of individual content pieces at any moment, creating what Chughtai called “such a different challenge when it comes to media planning.”
Human analysis cannot keep pace. MiQ launched its Sigma platform last year with a TV intelligence planning suite that lets advertisers select audiences using multiple data signals, then drill into which channels and content those viewers consume across streaming, YouTube and social video.
“The only way an advertiser can at scale take advantage of those is by leveraging the power of AI,” Chughtai said. The company added a trading agent last year that sits atop ad buying platforms. This year, it is expanding into planning tools that surface insights before campaigns launch.
You’re watching “The Road to CES 2026: Planning and Buying CTV the Way Viewers Watch”, a Beet.TV Leadership Series, presented by Gracenote. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
