Converged TV: What It Means

Definition and Concept

If we ask media owners what Converged TV means, they would likely describe it as the integration of traditional linear television (broadcast and cable) with digital and streaming content, providing a unified viewing experience across multiple platforms and devices. It represents the convergence of various television distribution methods, including broadcast, cable, satellite, and streaming services, into a cohesive experience for viewers.

But let’s take a look at this term from the TV advertisers’ perspective. Here we can say that It is a de-siloed approach to planning, buying, measuring, and optimizing ad campaigns holistically across linear and streaming TV.

Why Converged TV is important for advertisers

A converged TV approach offers several key benefits that can significantly improve the effectiveness of ad campaigns.

• Extended Reach: By combining traditional TV's extensive reach with digital platforms' precision targeting, advertisers can engage a broader and more diverse audience.
• Managed duplication and frequency: with a holistic approach, advertisers can maximize unduplicated reach across linear and CTV and control frequency. Brands can zero in on the parts of their strategic audience unexposed to their linear ads and find them on CTV.
• Unified measurement: Fragmented data can lead to less effective spending. By gaining a complete understanding of viewing habits across linear and CTV, you can make informed decisions, optimize your media budget, and improve your reach.
• Holistically optimize budget distribution. Determining the budget allocation between linear TV and CTV is one of the most important decisions for running a successful holistic campaign. Outside of Simulmedia, there are very few resources in the market that help advertisers with their cross-channel planning activities. If you want to know about the optimal budget distribution across linear and streaming TV for a strategic audience, we encourage you to check out our Planning Insights tool for TV.

How to do Converged TV campaigns properly

Use data for smarter budget allocation

Determining the budget allocation to linear and CTV is one of the most important decisions you must make to run a successful holistic campaign.

Brands need to use media planning tools that leverage an extensive viewership model across linear TV and CTV to know what their audience is watching, when they are watching, and where (i.e., which app). These insights are available through specialized tools like Simulmedia’s Cross-channel Insights Dashboard. You can typically use measurement providers, but these tools are for measurement, not planning, and you typically need to pay extra for this data.

With the right Converged TV planning tools, brands can run scenarios and get recommendations on how to split their budget across linear and streaming TV. They can see how much incremental lift they can achieve by taking a Converged TV approach rather than a linear TV-only or streaming TV-only approach in isolation.

Synchronize execution

Synchronizing execution for Cross-channel Exclusion involves ensuring that media runs efficiently across both linear and CTV platforms, minimizing audience duplication. With expertise in both areas, it’s possible to achieve truly unified cross-platform media buying. This approach ensures that media runs as efficiently as possible, with minimal audience duplication across linear and CTV. For instance, while 55% of households watch both linear and ad-supported CTV, well-executed cross-channel campaigns can deliver less than 10% duplication.

Having a comprehensive backend media buying platform for TV is crucial for facilitating the planning, purchasing, and reporting of non-preemptible spot purchases on linear and impressions on CTV. By sourcing CTV inventory directly from premium and trusted publishers and optimizing the supply path, marketers avoid CTV fraud. Moreover, walled gardens are a reality we have to accept in CTV, so integrating a unified dashboard across multiple DSPs with access to unique CTV inventory sources ensures a robust and comprehensive execution strategy.

Measure in a unified way and optimize without siloes

Many TV buyers still allocate their budgets in silos, dividing resources between separate teams for linear TV and digital (CTV) buys. This division persists because professionals in linear TV often lack familiarity with digital processes and vice versa.

Consequently, reallocating budgets during a campaign becomes challenging when one channel outperforms the other. However, by utilizing a unified team responsible for both linear and CTV activations, advertisers can more nimbly adjust their budgets to optimize performance across TV platforms.

For example, when running a cross-channel linear and CTV campaign, budget reallocation requires unified view of TV and CTV measurement. If you don't use a platform like Simulmedia's, you typically receive disparate, non-standardized reports from each publisher. The problem is that each publisher's Excel report is structured differently, making it very hard to combine and reconcile. Equally bad, they don’t give enough info to de-duplicate viewers across different publishers and platforms. With the TV+ platform, publishers can view real-time media and performance metrics for every campaign, and measure metrics across both linear and connected TV..

Future Trends in Converged TV

The future of converged television is promising, with several trends indicating its growing importance.

According to Dave Morgan, Simulmedia’s Executive Chairman, the television industry is undergoing significant changes, with streaming, linear, and other video formats coming together. This convergence is creating new possibilities for advertisers to reach target audiences using innovative ways. More you can find in his interview Convergence Is Key Theme at Cannes: Simulmedia’s Dave Morgan .