TV’s Coming Political Ad Hangover, The Growing Value Of The TV OS
1. TV’s Coming Political Ad Hangover
As much as $16 billion was spent on political advertising this last campaign cycle. While actual numbers are hard to come by because (surprise!) some companies count streaming as part of “digital” ad spend and others count it as part of “TV” ad spend, it seems that around $2 billion went to CTV and around $11.5 billion to local broadcast and cable.
And even if those numbers are off by 10 or 20 percent, it’s still a huge amount of money.
Money which is not going to be there in 2025.
And that’s a problem.
Because the industry is going to have to try and find a way to make up for it, and that will not be easy.
Wall Street is not going to like seeing all those lower revenue numbers either.
Which could turn into an even bigger problem.
Why It Matters
TV, in case you hadn’t noticed, is in a period of real flux, with real concerns about long-term profitability for just about every player in the business.
For streaming services (CTV) it’s about filling all that inventory and fixing the myriad of problems, from lack of any standardization around, well, around anything, but especially around measurement. For broadcasters and cable networks, it’s about the ever-shrinking and aging audience and how long can they hold on without making any sort of change.
Both sides are going to be challenged by Amazon next year, as the reality that Amazon has launched somewhere between 50 to 80 million ad-supported subscribers sinks in, a number that may be even bigger due to their NFL and NBA games, which are all ad-supported.
Plus unlike everyone else in the business, Amazon makes it easy—they’re a walled garden with an e-commerce platform, which is music to the ears of most brand managers.
The rub for 2025 is that the situation is not a surprise for anyone—it’s not as if there is some magical election cycle for 2025 the industry could activate.
Still, when you get used to the amount of money that was flowing in—as much as 1 billion in the last week alone—it’s hard to go back to an austerity plan.
Harder still is contemplating a longer term plan for the future, one that isn’t hooked on a biannual boom and bust cycle.
There are some obvious effects we’ll see next year: CPMs will go way down as a glut of available inventory enters the market.
Fill rates will go down too.
Contextual targeting, the subject of an upcoming TVREV report, will assume an even bigger role and will help with those fill rates and with the perception that it’s tough to make CTV a scale play.
Belts will be tightened.
Consolidation will continue to happen—there are just too many options on both streaming and on cable, and if we’re in a world where ads are only served when someone is watching, you can’t have a whole bunch of linear channels where literally no one is watching.
What You Need To Do About It
If you are an advertiser, carpe diem! CPMs will be way down and so this is your chance to flood the market without significantly increasing your total TV ad spend. This is true for advertisers and for programmers —make use of all those house ads to drive tune-in and build your brand. You can’t rely on recommendation engines and word-of-mouth in a market this tight. Sometimes old school methods work best.
If you are a FAST service or ad-supported subscription service, lean into contextual and self-serve SMB ads too. They’re both up-and-coming ways for you to up your ad game and bring new customers into the fold. Customers that won’t disappear in early November.
If you’re a local broadcaster, cable network or MVPD, that self-serve SMB play works for you too. Use it to help expand your customer base beyond the usual suspects and maybe pull a little money away from digital, Facebook in particular. The people who own these companies know Facebook usage is way down, it’s not going to be that hard to bring them over to the dark side.
If you are located in a swing state, know that this is going to be a particular letdown. Because for the past six months, maybe more, all you’ve had to do is wake up every morning and collect the insertion orders, maybe worry that you were going to run out of inventory and how would viewers react if you just ran a half hour of political ads?
So our advice is to take a short vacation, clear out your head, and return to a more normal way of being. After this last election cycle, you’ve certainly earned it.
If you’re Wall Street, remember that this is all cyclical, that a company like Tubi which is on track to break the billion-dollar mark this year, is not doing worse because it’s not an election year. They’re just riding the wave and getting their ducks in order for 2026.
2. The Growing Value Of The TV OS.
Two interesting pieces of news today about the TV OS. One from VIZIO about how their ad business is booming—their Q3 results for Platform+, their ad and sponsorship unit, showed a whopping 26 percent YOY increase from 2023, with total net revenue accounting for $197 million of the company’s $445 million total revenue, or 44.2 percent.
The other came from Samsung, which reported that its Samsung TV Plus service had amassed 88 million monthly average users (MAUs) with a 50 percent increase in viewership worldwide as the company expands their FAST service into new regions such as Singapore, the Philippines and Thailand.
That 88 million stat puts them on par with other major global FAST services like Tubi, Pluto and The Roku Channel, all of which also have (self-reported) MAUs in the 80-100 million range.
Why It Matters
The industry is just beginning to wake up to the power of the TV OS.
Not only does it provide additional revenue for manufacturers, it also puts them in a power position, with control over content, advertising and overall user experience.
Manufacturers like LG, Roku, VIZIO and Samsung who own their own TV OS have been forerunners in recognizing the power of the TV OS, and they’ve been joined by independent white label OS manufacturers like Titan OS, WhaleOS and TiVo.
If only the market stopped there.
Looming on the sidelines are the two tech giants in the space, Amazon and Google.
Google has not yet formally entered the fray, but their Android operating system powers many smart TVs and is considered by many to be the industry standard.
Amazon, meanwhile, has moved from focusing on its Fire TV dongle to rolling out its own branded TVs. And while it has yet to make a major push into the space, most observers, myself included, feel that it’s just a matter of time, and that given its booming ad business and vast reserves of cash, that free TVs or almost-free TVs are most definitely going to be a future offering.
The battle for control of the TV operating system is much more of a thing outside the US, particularly in Europe, where an estimated 40 percent of the market does not have a dedicated operating system.
That’s in large part because Roku, which still controls something like 30 to 40 percent of the US market (depending on whose stats you use) has yet to make much of an impact in Europe. That’s a whole article in and of itself, but suffice to say it’s not for lack of trying.
It does mean the European market is still pretty wide open (along with the rest of the world.) So the question is when, how, where and if Google and Amazon make their move and what the market reaction will be, from consumers, from advertisers and from content owners.
What You Need To Do About It
If you are a content owner—whether that means an entire fully baked media company like WBD or DIsney, or a company that owns a handful of FAST channels, be aware of the power of the TV OS and make sure you are careful in your negotiations with them. Make sure you have control of your data. Make sure you take advantage of all the bells and whistles they can offer you in terms of promotion and advertising. Realize there is a difference.
If you are a TV manufacturer and you don’t have your own OS, you have a number of options—the white label services, the OEM operating systems (you can license them) and the tech company’s OS.
Each has its own pros and cons, depending on your position in the market, but as you make your decision, I’d urge you to keep the old fable of the Scorpion and the Frog in mind.
3. Non-Partisan TV-Centric Political Observation
I’ll just throw this out there: As I am likely to note several times each year, the TV series that receive the most attention in the media are rarely the ones with the highest ratings.
In fact, a series like Mad Men, which to a certain type of viewer seemed like the epicenter of a cultural moment (and inspired its own line of clothing at Banana Republic) often struggled to break one million viewers an episode, a paltry showing back in pre-streaming days.
Even in the streaming era, a show like Succession, whose series finale dominated the New York Times home page, with something like a half dozen unique takes on its significance, never reached more than two or two and a half million viewers an episode, a number dwarfed by Fire Country, a popular CBS series that few Succession viewers had likely ever heard of.
HBO in its heyday never had more than 50 million cable subscribers and one of the reasons WBD named their new streaming service “Max” was because they realized that the HBO name did not have appeal beyond a certain subset of their intended target audience.
And finally, when Netflix did release their per-series results, the two most watched shows, Ginny & Georgia and The Night Agent were not on anyone’s bingo card and all those The Queen’s Gambit and The Crown viewers had to turn to Google to see what they were about.
Something to consider along with those two anonymous quotes I keep throwing at you: Netflix needs to stop making snobby shows no one watches and They all want to write for “Barry.” And you know who watches “Barry”? No one!
Happy Friday!
