Choosing between Linear TV Advertising and CTV Advertising? Try This Game-Changing Strategy
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Pathlabs Marketing |
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June 18, 2025 |
CTV Viewership Has Reached the Big Leagues
Total TV ad spending in the U.S. will top out at $61 billion this year, but nearly two-thirds of the US population is unreachable with linear TV advertising alone. How can almost 223 million Americans be out of reach of modern TV advertising backed by billions of dollars in ad spend?
Consider this. Today:
88% of US households own at least one CTV device.
65% of US households have ditched linear TV, with this number projected to reach 76% by 2029.
14% of US adults are cord-nevers, having never subscribed to a traditional TV provider.
Those numbers will only grow as CTV’s reach increases and more people grow up in cord-cutting households. Embracing CTV advertising has never been more critical, but advertising agencies shouldn’t cut the cord on their linear TV budget yet.
In fact, by combining CTV and a live sports-focused linear strategy, advertising agencies can spend more efficiently while benefiting from live TV’s massive audiences, detailed data, and precision targeting.
In this blog, we’ll explore a channel-flip strategy that blends linear’s strengths with CTV’s targeting power and how Pathlabs empowers agencies to execute it seamlessly.
What is Fueling CTV’s Explosive Growth?
It’s not just the convenience of on-demand content that attracts viewers to CTV. It’s the variety of content and services. Today, US viewers have access to over 800,000 unique titles. CTV advertising has also boomed, with revenue from Free Ad-Supported Streaming Television (FAST) expected to reach $6 billion this year. More on-demand content, with more pricing tiers, explains why CTV is attractive to consumers, and it’d be easy to attribute FAST growth to advertisers following potential customers to where there are more eyes and inventory alone, but that would be ignoring one of CTV’s most important benefits.
CTV Advertising Offers Unparalleled Targeting and Efficiency
CTV’s efficiency, made possible by precision targeting and granular data that traditional TV cannot match, makes it an excellent choice for agencies that want to reduce ad waste. In fact, 94% of ads reach only 55% of linear TV viewers.
Why?
Linear TV advertisers commonly use TRPs that show the percentage of a target audience that saw an advertisement. Since CTV is a digital channel, its most common KPI is CPMs, which shows the cost to serve 1000 ad impressions based on the actual delivery of the ads and not a representation sourced from an audience panel.
That means agencies can see what’s working and stop what’s not in real time. This difference is significant for independent advertising agencies that don’t have the resources to waste budget on inefficient advertising.
CPMs are far from the only advantages CTV has over linear TV. For example, CTV can provide footfall attribution that shows a link between ad delivery and a customer visiting a store. In fact, CTV offers all the measurements advertisers will find in programmatic channels such as display.
What It All Means for Agencies
The growing number of CTV viewers, their willingness to accept ads in exchange for lower subscription fees, and CTV’s outstanding targeting and efficiency are a strong message to every advertising agency: linear TV advertising budgets are flipping to CTV, and yours should too.
Adapting to a new channel strategy means navigating budget redistribution and retraining your teams. However, the channel-flip strategy we mentioned can ease your entry into CTV, supercharge your current efforts, and allow you to continue earning strong linear TV performance.
CTV and Linear Live Sports: A Winning Combination
The days of advertising only through linear TV are gone, but that doesn’t mean it’s time to advertise solely through CTV. Instead, agencies should redirect a portion of their linear budget towards CTV while focusing the remainder on live sports during the upfronts.
TV upfronts used to be a marquee media planning event. Still, their value has shifted as audiences moved to CTV and linear TV viewership became less predictable to advertising agencies, with one major exception.
Live sports continue to deliver massive reach for linear. CTV is a player in live sports that deserves attention from agencies, but it does not dominate linear like it does for other entertainment. In fact:
127.7 million viewers watched Super Bowl LIX across FOX, FOX Deportes, Telemundo, and Tubi.
93 of the top 100 U.S. TV broadcasts in 2023 were NFL games.
The 2025 NCAA Basketball tournament averaged 10.2 million viewers across TBS, CBS, TNT, and truTV, up 3% from the previous year.
CBS's final round coverage of The Masters averaged 12.7 million viewers, up 33% from 2024
These numbers could shift as more networks offer live sports through streaming services, such as Netflix’s partnership with WWE, but for now, live sports are a stronghold for linear TV. As a result, ad inventory for live sports events quickly sells during upfronts, leaving agencies few options for getting their ads in front of these reliably massive audiences.
With this strategy, agencies get the granular data and advanced targeting of CTV for a large portion of their ad budget while still placing ads in front of large, highly engaged audiences for live sports events. On top of that, the teams, processes, and relationships that helped an agency excel in linear advertising don’t need to be wholly repurposed.
Get the Best of Linear and CTV Advertising with Pathlabs
The value of combining linear live sports and CTV is clear, but executing our channel-flip strategy for maximum return is like hitting a bullseye.
Buying, executing, and optimizing CTV ads requires specific experience that agencies will either need to acquire or hire new staff to bring in-house. CTV viewers can access content from more platforms and devices, like smartphones and gaming consoles, than linear. Executing through that fragmentation is difficult enough, but there are other marketing attribution challenges as well. Without a way to reliably aggregate data, agencies will miss the value of behavioral, contextual, and first-party data needed to optimize.
Plus, there are more immediate challenges agencies channel flipping their budget will face, like:
How do I decide what percentage of budget do I move to CTV?
What percentage should remain in linear beyond just live sports?
How do CPMs and TRPs compare in actual cost and value?
Pathlabs answers these questions and more by making planning, executing, and optimizing simple through Media Execution Partnerships (MEP)
A MEP allows agencies to balance building an in-house team and completely outsourcing their media execution. Partner agencies work with a team of media experts who execute media, gather and present data in a single dashboard, and then collaborate with the agency to optimize performance.
MEPs also lower the financial risk of entering the CTV marketplace. Instead of paying for new platforms and vendors, an MEP gives agencies the same access through our service, allowing them to pass through the costs to their clients.
You don’t have to choose between linear television advertising and CTV. Adapt to CTV’s rise smarter and more efficiently today with Pathlabs.
