The Road to CES 2026: Planning and Buying CTV the Way Viewers Watch, a Beet.TV Leadership Series, presented by Gracenote

LAS VEGAS – Contextual signals are becoming central to how connected TV inventory is bought and sold, as advertisers look for relevance at scale without relying on user identifiers. Ryan Kenney, svp of revenue for SpringServe at Magnite, said viewer choice and passion for content make context a natural fit for the TV environment. “In […]

LAS VEGAS — Targeting ads to specific scenes within TV content sounds like the ultimate precision play. The challenge is that precision without scale doesn’t spend budgets, and most scene types don’t appear frequently enough to matter. “Someone’s in a shower scene, going to sell them soap. How many shower scenes are there? There’s not […]

LAS VEGAS – As viewers gain more control over what they watch and when they watch it, Horizon Media is reshaping how it plans for connected TV. Speaking with Beet.TV at CES 2026, strategic investment lead Samantha Rose said CTV can no longer be treated as a single bucket. Instead, Horizon plans across distinct subcategories, […]

LAS VEGAS — Creative and media teams frequently operate in isolation and optimize independently despite opportunities to integrate contextual signals across both functions for improved campaign performance. “Too often they’re in silos and optimize separately,” Christopher Murphy, svp, strategy and business development at Innovid, told Beet.TV Editorial Director Lisa Granatstein at CES. “The fidelity of […]

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 […]

LAS VEGAS — The connected TV advertising market has exploded in scale, but some in the industry say it’s still searching for the fabled combination of right-moment, right-message. That’s the philosophy driving a renewed focus on “context-first planning”, which moves beyond demographic proxies. “We are big believers in context-first planning, and that’s important because it […]

As connected television matures, contextual targeting is set to become more intelligent, more dynamic and far more creative, according to Jessica Brown of WPP Media, speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan. Looking ahead to CES, Brown said she’s focused on three key trends in contextual CTV: using AI to scale relevance, bringing context into live […]

For all the talk about artificial intelligence complicating the business of advertising and media, there’s an argument to be made about how it simplifies the challenge of content discovery. For Gracenote, the path to easing consumers’ desire to find what they want to watch on TV involves allowing advertisers to upload brand briefs into large […]

The long-held ambition for connected television advertising is finally coming into focus: recreating the immense, immediate reach of traditional linear TV, but with a new layer of intelligence that its predecessor could never offer. As viewers increasingly self-select their content, ad spending is following them into the streaming world, with US CTV ad investment projected […]

RANCHO PALOS VERDES, CALIF. — Contextual targeting has evolved from supplementary tactic to primary solution over the past year, enabling advertisers to move beyond inconsistent audience-based signals toward more robust and reliable connections with consumers. “A year ago at CES, we started talking about the idea of leveraging these signals in more interesting and meaningful […]