MIAMI — Television planning and digital video buying evolved as separate disciplines with distinct trading audiences and methodologies, but audience fragmentation across streaming platforms and emerging video environments is forcing industry convergence around content quality and emotional engagement rather than channel definitions.
“I grew up in a world where I learned how to be a TV planner and it worked in a very particular way. The audiences you buy, the trading audiences were very different to how digital is bought,” Paul Frampton, group CEO of Goodway Group, told Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at POSSIBLE. “These days, I think it’s almost one and the same. The skillsets are much more blended.”
Viewership now spans platforms including YouTube and TikTok that wouldn’t historically be classified as television, forcing brands to prioritize audience discovery over channel categorization.
Content context drives emotional reaction
Television’s definition expands beyond traditional boundaries to encompass any audio-visual content that generates leaning behavior through high-quality context and emotional response, regardless of screen type or platform designation.
“Really for a brand, it’s where can I find my audience? Where can I actually get that leaning behavior by being around content that’s high quality, has great context and actually drives some emotional reaction?” Frampton said. “If you consider that to be television, then television’s everywhere, all around us.”
This audience-first approach prioritizes right moment and right context identification over channel-specific strategies.
Performance versus brand debate persists
Different marketer backgrounds create ongoing tension between brand builders focused on long-term development and performance marketers comfortable with Meta, Google, and commerce media, though all channels can serve dual purposes.
“There are different breeds of marketer that are comfortable in one world or the other even today,” Frampton said. “It’s a fallacy that digital only does performance and it’s a fallacy that TV cannot drive performance and is only for brands.”
Consumer behavior resembles “snakes and ladders” rather than linear funnels, with touchpoints spanning large language models, mobile devices, television ads, and peer reviews in non-segmented patterns.
Testing accessibility democratizes TV
Connected TV enables budget-efficient testing that previously required millions of dollars, allowing local brands and smaller advertisers to experiment with television’s engaging, emotional reach alongside digital’s targetability benefits.
“What I hear a lot more from CMOs is, ‘Can I test and experiment with TV with a smaller budget than I thought I could?’“ Frampton said. “With the same budget you might put into a test in digital, you can test CTV in a very targeted way.”
This accessibility extends television beyond big-budget national advertisers to local brands seeking geographic precision without unnecessary reach expansion.
Connected ecosystem drives next chapter
Television’s evolution toward connected ecosystems enables progression from awareness and consideration through action prompting, with Amazon’s Prime TV data targeting demonstrating how television becomes response channel rather than awareness-only medium.
“Amazon has changed that. You can use Amazon data to target people on Prime TV and suddenly television becomes a response channel,” Frampton said.
Future success requires connecting ecosystem components around role-based channel thinking and audience targeting rather than format-specific categorization that fails to serve marketer objectives effectively.
“We just need to connect the ecosystem back up, think about the role that we need a channel to play, think about the right audience, and then look at all of the available opportunities and tactics,” Frampton said.
You’re watching “The New TV Equation”, a Beet.TV Leadership Series at POSSIBLE 2026, presented by Tatari. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
