How advertisers think about connected TV in 2026

The conversation about connected television usually starts with viewers. The conversation about why connected television matters as a business starts with the people paying to reach those viewers. In 2026, US advertisers are projected to spend approximately $38 billion on connected-TV inventory, a 14% increase over 2025 and the continuation of a multi-year period of double-digit growth in the channel.^[1] The buyer side of this market is where the strategic implications live. This article looks at what advertisers are doing with that spend, what they say they want, what is still broken, and what it implies for any brand whose product or audience lives in connected television.

The framing here is descriptive, not promotional. The numbers below come from industry-research firms whose business is selling advertiser-perception studies and market forecasts. Readers building products or brands in this space are encouraged to consult the cited sources for methodology and sample composition.

The headline numbers

Three figures define the 2026 CTV advertising market. First, US CTV ad spend is projected to reach approximately $38 billion in 2026, up roughly 14% from $33.35 billion in 2025, according to eMarketer's latest forecast.^[1] Second, the same forecast expects double-digit annual growth to continue through 2029, when the US market is projected to reach approximately $51 billion. Third, the IAB's 2026 outlook report projects social media and CTV as the two channels leading US digital ad growth this year, while traditional linear TV ad spend is expected to decline only 1.7% in 2026, a notable improvement from the 14.4% contraction the channel experienced in 2025.^[2]

The advertiser-intent numbers are equally consistent. The 2026 CTV/OTT Advertiser Survey from Advertiser Perceptions and Premion, polling 151 decision-makers, found that 70% of CTV advertisers plan to increase their CTV budgets this year by an average of 17%, that half of all CTV ad buying is expected to move through programmatic channels in 2026, and that nearly nine in ten advertisers agree CTV increases brand favorability.^[3]

What advertisers say they are buying CTV for

The IAB's 2026 outlook also surfaced the underlying objectives behind that spend growth. New customer acquisition remains the top objective for ad buyers in 2026, cited by 54%, though notably this is down 10 percentage points from 2025. The decline in customer-acquisition as the dominant objective reflects a maturation of the channel, with brand-building and full-funnel measurement growing as secondary objectives.^[2]

CTV-specific buyer goals layer onto this picture. Connected television is consistently rated by advertisers as a strong brand-favorability channel, with the Advertiser Perceptions/Premion survey finding that approximately 88% of CTV advertisers agree the medium increases brand favorability. Performance-driven measurement is becoming feasible alongside the brand-building case, particularly as retail-media integrations bring closed-loop attribution into the CTV environment.^[4]

What is still broken

The growth picture for CTV advertising obscures three persistent buyer-side problems that the channel has not yet solved.

Fragmentation. Advertisers report that the largest operational challenge in CTV is the proliferation of platforms, publishers, and inventory pools that need to be unified into a single media plan. Cross-device attribution and cross-publisher measurement are repeatedly cited by industry researchers as the top challenges for CTV marketers, with no single solution yet emerging as a category standard.^[5]

Measurement. Survey data through 2025 and 2026 consistently shows advertisers reporting that CTV measurement is one of their primary concerns. About 44% of respondents in a 2026 industry survey said they want better measurement and data insights, ahead of any other improvement category.^[6] The promise of closed-loop attribution exists; the implementation is still uneven across publishers and platforms.

Programmatic tax. Programmatic buying is now expected to account for approximately half of all CTV ad spend in 2026, but the share of every advertiser dollar that reaches the publisher rather than the ad-tech intermediation layer remains lower than buyers would prefer. Programmatic fees claim 41.6% of 2026 gross real-time-bidding digital display ad spending in the US, according to eMarketer.^[7] The trend toward agent-to-agent and direct buying represents a partial response to this friction.

The smaller-buyer story

A meaningful shift in 2026 is the gradual opening of CTV advertising to smaller advertisers. Programmatic self-serve platforms and AI-assisted creative tools are bringing the entry cost of a CTV campaign down to a level that, according to IAB analyses, makes CTV "as easy to launch as a social ad set" for many small and mid-market businesses.^[8] Entry-level CTV platforms are now offering campaign starts at budgets well below $1,000, compared with the tens-of-thousands minimums that characterized the channel three years ago.^[9]

The story of CTV in 2026 is not just that big advertisers are spending more. It is that small advertisers can finally spend at all.

This matters because the share of the CTV market that comes from local, regional, and small-business advertising has been the largest unrealized growth pool in the channel for several years. The 17% planned increase in CTV budgets across the existing buyer base, combined with the new wave of entrants made possible by self-serve tools, is what underwrites the 14% headline forecast growth in the channel for 2026.

Retail media as a growth layer

One additional structural shift worth noting: retail media is becoming a meaningful component of CTV ad spending. Retail-media CTV spending grew 45.5% in 2025, and according to eMarketer projections, approximately one in five CTV ad dollars in the United States will flow to retail-media networks by 2027.^[10] The implication is that the CTV ad market is no longer purely a media-buying market; it is becoming a commerce-integrated channel where the line between advertising and sales attribution is blurring. For advertisers, this opens new performance frameworks. For publishers, it adds a class of buyer that did not exist at scale three years ago.

What this means for brands built in this category

For any company whose product or audience lives in connected television, the buyer-side picture in 2026 supports three operational conclusions.

First, the addressable advertising opportunity around the medium is at multi-year highs and continues to grow. A brand that captures audience attention in the CTV environment now has access to a more liquid, better-measured advertising market than the same brand would have had even two years ago. Monetization potential through advertising is no longer a forward-looking promise; it is a current reality.

Second, the buyer side is asking for help with measurement, fragmentation, and discovery. Companies that solve those problems for advertisers, either as standalone products or as features of broader CTV platforms, are building into the strongest demand signals in the category.

Third, the smaller-advertiser layer is the largest unrealized growth pool in connected television. Brands that can serve as a destination, a measurement layer, or an aggregation point for the long tail of CTV advertisers are positioned for outsized share of the growth.

For the consumer-side counterpart to this analysis, see our companion piece on what viewers actually want from connected TV in 2026. For the broader market context, see our note on ad-supported streaming and the new free TV economy.

What this is not

This article is not investment advice, a forecast of which advertising platforms or measurement vendors will win the next round of competition, or a recommendation of any specific CTV product, publisher, or media plan. It is a description of buyer-side market conditions in 2026 based on publicly available industry research. Brands and advertisers building plans in this space are encouraged to consult their own counsel and the cited sources for the methodology behind each figure.