December 29, 2025
21
minutes read
Programmatic TV advertising takes TV’s reach and layers on data, automation, and real-time control so every impression works harder. This guide shows you how programmatic TV ads across CTV and linear really work—and how to use them to drive measurable business results.
Programmatic TV advertising sits where TV’s reach meets digital’s precision. Instead of buying broad spots against a show or a time slot, brands use automation, data, and real-time optimization to decide which households see which TV ad, at what moment, and at what price. Done well, programmatic TV ads turn a historically blunt channel into something targeted, measurable, and accountable across CTV, OTT, and even linear TV.
⚡Programmatic TV takes TV from ‘we think this reached the right people’ to ‘we know what this impression did for the business.’
In this guide, we’ll break down what programmatic TV advertising is, how programmatic CTV advertising and programmatic linear TV fit together, and—most importantly—how to plan, buy, and measure programmatic television advertising so that every TV impression contributes to real business impact.
TV viewing has changed faster than TV buying.
Viewers now bounce between smart TVs, streaming services, set-top boxes, and mobile apps. In the US, connected TV (CTV) ad spend is forecast to reach around $33.35 billion in 2025, up 15.8% year on year, with eMarketer expecting it to climb toward $47 billion by 2028 as CTV ad sales overtake traditional TV. At the same time, digital video as a whole—including CTV—is projected to hit about $72 billion and capture nearly 60% of all US TV and video ad budgets in 2025, after growing 18% in 2024.
⚡ Streaming has changed where people watch TV; programmatic has changed how you decide which of those moments is worth buying.
Marketers are chasing those viewers, but the old way of TV buying hasn’t kept up. Manual insertion orders, limited targeting, and panel-based ratings do not match modern expectations around audience precision and performance accountability. Buyers want TV to behave more like digital: audience-first, measurable, and optimizable in near real time.
That’s where programmatic TV advertising comes in. By applying automated buying and granular data to CTV, OTT, and addressable linear inventory, brands can:
💡 If you want a broader primer on TV as a channel before diving into the programmatic side, start with AI Digital’s overview of TV advertising, then come back here for the more advanced controls.
At its core, programmatic TV advertising is the automated buying and selling of TV ad inventory using software, data, and algorithms rather than manual negotiations and flat-priced buys.
Instead of phoning a network sales rep to book a 30-second spot in a given show, you:
From a viewer’s perspective, a programmatic TV ad looks just like a regular TV commercial. The difference is how that impression was bought:
Behind the scenes, programmatic television advertising typically involves:
As IAB’s digital video reports show, advertisers are increasingly treating CTV and digital video as performance-capable channels: 54% of CTV buyers now say business outcomes such as sales, store visits, or leads are their primary KPI for success. Programmatic TV is how those business-outcome expectations are operationalized in TV buying.
A typical programmatic TV buy runs like this:
⚡ Programmatic TV makes every impression a decision, not just a placement.
This same pattern applies across CTV and addressable linear; the main difference is where and how the ad is inserted, which we’ll come back to when we explore programmatic CTV versus programmatic linear TV.
Programmatic TV sits inside a larger advanced TV universe that includes several overlapping formats:
💡 For a deeper dive into this environment, see AI Digital’s guide to connected TV advertising .
💡 AI Digital’s article on what is OTT advertising breaks down how OTT fits with CTV and mobile.
💡 AI Digital’s guide to addressable TV advertising goes deeper on how this works.
To simplify, you can think of programmatic TV as the buying method, and CTV, OTT, and addressable linear as the environments where those buys show up.
A helpful way to frame it:
⚡ Think of programmatic TV as a buying style and CTV, OTT, and addressable as the screens where it shows up.
Traditional TV advertising and programmatic TV advertising sometimes show the same 30-second creative, but they are built on very different mechanics.
In the traditional model, you typically:
This approach is powerful for mass reach, but precision and flexibility are limited. If half the audience for a show is outside your target market, you still pay to reach all of them. If a campaign underperforms, there is usually limited scope to adjust mid-flight.
⚡ Traditional TV buys impressions in bulk; programmatic TV decides on each impression one at a time.
Programmatic TV keeps the power of TV’s storytelling but changes how you decide which impression to buy:
Here’s a simple comparison:
Traditional TV:
Programmatic TV advertising:
The shift also shows up in how money moves. The ANA’s Programmatic Benchmark Study found that 59% of programmatic ad spending in 2024 went through private marketplaces (PMPs), up from 41% the previous year, reflecting a broad push for more controlled, transparent programmatic buying across premium inventory. That logic applies directly to TV, where buyers are using programmatic pipes to secure better access to high-quality CTV and addressable TV supply.
⚡ With programmatic TV, you’re no longer buying a show and hoping your audience shows up. You’re buying your audience and letting the tech find where they actually watch.
Programmatic TV advertising isn’t just a different way to place TV ads. It materially improves how precisely those ads reach the right viewers, how much premium inventory you can access, and how effectively you can measure and optimize your spend.
The most immediate advantage of programmatic TV ads is audience precision.
In CTV, streaming environments are inherently logged-in, IP-addressable, and device-identified. Identity graphs can link those devices to households and, in many cases, to deterministic identifiers like hashed emails or subscriber IDs. That lets you:
Recent data from StackAdapt, drawing on eMarketer, shows the US had 233.9 million CTV viewers across about 115 million CTV households in 2024, with CTV usage expected to reach nearly 70% of the population in 2025. In other words, audience-based targeting on TV is no longer a niche add-on; it covers the majority of US households.
On the linear side, addressable TV has moved firmly into the core plan. In 2025, Go Addressable and Advertiser Perceptions report that 43% of advertisers expect to spend more on addressable TV in 2026 than in 2025, while 67% say addressable will feature in their 2025–2026 upfront negotiations and 80% are using or planning to use it this year.
💡 AI-led targeting amplifies this further. If you want to go deeper on how AI modeling, lookalikes, and predictive scoring enhance audience building, AI Digital’s piece on AI targeted advertising: how smart targeting is redefining ROI and personalization is a useful complement to this section.
Programmatic TV often gets confused with “remnant” or low-quality inventory. In reality, the programmatic pipes are how many brands now access the best TV supply.
Several trends are important here:
For buyers, the key advantage is that programmatic pipes can aggregate premium supply across many publishers. Instead of negotiating with each network separately, you can secure access to:
Programmatic also opens up premium linear inventory. A recent Dish Media study with Janus Strategy & Insights found that 94% of US adults can be reached via TV targeting, but 13%—about 31.6 million people—are only reachable through addressable TV, and that reallocating just 10% of a campaign budget to addressable TV can increase light-TV viewer reach by 38% and deliver double-digit revenue gains. That kind of incremental reach is only feasible when you can tap into addressable pools across multiple distributors, which is where programmatic comes in.
In short, programmatic TV is how many brands unlock both breadth and quality of TV supply without losing control over where and how their ads run.
⚡ If you want premium TV at scale, you go where the pipes are—and those pipes are programmatic.
Programmatic TV doesn’t always mean open auctions, but real-time decisioning is a core part of the value.
In many CTV and OTT environments, impressions are sold via:
Real-time bidding (RTB) is the mechanism that decides, in a fraction of a second, which ad gets served. Your DSP evaluates:
It then bids accordingly. That decisioning is informed by ongoing performance data and can be tuned toward different outcomes—reach, completion rate, incremental conversions, or a blend.
💡 If you want a dedicated deep dive on RTB mechanics, see AI Digital’s article “What is real-time bidding (RTB): Definition, benefits, and how it works in 2026” and, in the meantime, the explainer on programmatic vs RTB is a helpful bridge.
On the supply side, the shift from open auctions to more controlled deals is notable. As mentioned previously, the ANA’s 2024 Programmatic Benchmark shows a flip from 59% open / 41% private marketplace in 2023 to 41% open / 59% private marketplace in 2024, as advertisers chase better control and performance across channels. TV buyers are applying that same approach in CTV: lean on PMPs and programmatic direct for quality, while still using RTB to optimize within those pools.
⚡ The net effect: every TV impression becomes a dynamic decision, not a static booking. That’s where much of the efficiency gain comes from.
Programmatic TV comes with digital-grade reporting, which is the foundation for continuous optimization.
Instead of waiting for post-campaign summaries, you get:
IAB’s 2025 Digital Video Ad Spend & Strategy report goes even further, stating that store visits and sales are now the most important KPI for video buyers, with IAB’s Chris Bruderle noting that “driving bottom-funnel business outcomes is now far and away the most important KPI for video buyers—deliver, or you’ll get cut.” The same study finds that failure to deliver business outcomes is the number one reason buyers reduce or remove spend with streaming partners, which only reinforces how critical it is to instrument programmatic TV campaigns with robust tracking and measurement partners.
The appetite for better measurement is strong. Comcast Advertising’s 2024 report found:
Programmatic TV buyers are responding by:
In practical terms, this makes optimization a continuous loop:
That is the key difference from traditional TV. You’re not just “setting and forgetting” a schedule; you are running TV as a living, optimizable channel.
From a planning perspective, it helps to split programmatic TV into two main models:
Both matter, and each adds something different to your plan.
Programmatic CTV is the workhorse of most modern TV strategies.
How it works:
Because CTV is digital at its core, it supports:
💡 For numbers to anchor your CTV planning, AI Digital’s connected TV stats collection is a solid reference.
What CTV is best at:
⚡ If you’re not planning CTV as a core video channel, you’re planning around where a huge chunk of your audience actually watches.
Programmatic linear TV brings data-driven buying to traditional broadcast and cable.
How it works:
Several trends are worth noting:
Programmatic linear TV is particularly useful when you want to:
💡 AI Digital’s article on CTV vs linear TV is a helpful companion if you want a side-by-side view of how these two environments behave and how to balance them in your plan.
Measurement and attribution are where programmatic TV breaks away from traditional models the most. TV will never look exactly like click-based channels, but we are much closer to closed-loop TV measurement than even a few years ago.
With programmatic TV, especially on CTV, you can typically track:
Industry research confirms that advertisers are using these capabilities to evolve TV from pure awareness to outcome-driven planning.
To make measurement work, brands typically combine:
Comcast Advertising’s 2025 research with AdExchanger reports that 63% of advertisers would increase TV spending if better attribution could prove uplift in consumer spending, even though they are currently 30% more likely to use TV for awareness than direct response. In parallel, new attribution work with Mastercard shows 3× incremental ROAS and measurable uplifts in transactions and sales for home furnishing brands, reinforcing that the real constraint on TV investment is measurement, not demand.
Despite the progress, there are still some friction points:
The practical takeaway: build a measurement framework up front. Decide which KPIs you care about (reach, incremental conversions, revenue), ensure the right tracking and partners are in place, and budget for testing. Programmatic TV gives you the data; you still need a clear plan for how to use it.
💡 For more on how AI-based optimization and supply-side intelligence contribute to better measurement and efficiency, see AI Digital’s articles on how AI Digital embraces AI technologies to change the programmatic game and supply-side optimization with AI.
Once the strategy is clear, the question becomes: how do you actually buy programmatic TV effectively? These five areas are where most of the leverage sits.
A DSP is the central control panel for your programmatic TV buying. It lets you:
Some teams work directly in one or more DSPs; others use a partner like AI Digital that is DSP-agnostic and can orchestrate across multiple platforms, selecting the best path to inventory on a case-by-case basis.
When evaluating DSPs for programmatic TV:
💡 For a detailed breakdown of DSP capabilities and how they fit into a broader programmatic strategy, AI Digital’s guide to the demand-side platform is a good reference.
Open auctions still have a role, especially for scaling reach and testing, but premium TV supply is increasingly transacted via PMPs and programmatic direct deals.
The ANA benchmark noted earlier showed the programmatic mix shifting toward private marketplaces. That shift is directly relevant to CTV and programmatic TV:
You should:
The combination of PMPs for premium and open exchange for incremental reach gives you the best mix of control and flexibility in programmatic TV buying.
CTV shouldn’t be an afterthought or just a bucket in the “digital” column. It deserves its own planning line. That doesn’t mean linear is “dead.” It does mean:
In practice:
One of the easiest ways to waste money in TV today is to overexpose the same households across multiple platforms. Without careful frequency management, a viewer might:
Some repetition is good; too much drives annoyance and diminishing returns.
To manage this:
Finally, treat measurement and attribution as a buying criterion, not a nice-to-have.
When assessing partners (DSPs, SSPs, networks, measurement vendors), ask:
The more you can prove TV works, the more budget it earns.
Programmatic TV is powerful, but also complex. Fragmented supply, evolving identity, and multiple DSPs and measurement tools can easily overwhelm internal teams.
AI Digital exists to help brands run programmatic TV and digital media as a disciplined, outcome-driven channel, not just another budget line. We do that through our Open Garden framework, Smart Supply, and Elevate.
AI Digital operates on a DSP-agnostic, Open Garden model, which means we are not locked into a single buying platform or stack. Instead, we:
The Open Garden framework is specifically designed to avoid walled-garden constraints and unify data and buying across platforms so decisions are made on performance, not on the limits of a single ad tech stack.
💡 For more detail, see the DSP-agnostic approach that gives AI Digital an edge in fragmented media buying.
Smart Supply is AI Digital’s premium supply selection layer. Rather than leaving supply decisions entirely to default DSP settings, Smart Supply focuses on:
Behind the scenes, Smart Supply uses direct relationships with top-tier SSPs and proprietary AI filters to deliver predominantly premium inventory, while giving advertisers clear line of sight into every impression.
This sits neatly alongside broader industry moves (from ANA, IAB and others) away from low-quality, opaque supply and toward curated, high-value programmatic inventory.
Elevate is AI Digital’s AI-driven intelligence platform, designed to sit on top of Open Garden buying and Smart Supply. It brings your programmatic CTV and digital strategy together by providing:
Because Elevate is built around custom KPI optimization and business outcomes, it fits neatly with how modern advertisers are evaluating CTV and broader video investment: not just on reach, but on revenue, customer acquisition cost, and lifetime value.
⚡ Programmatic TV only works if the pipes, the data, and the decisions are aligned. That’s the job of your partner.
If you want to show where programmatic TV fits into the wider picture, AI Digital’s what we do page is still the best top-level overview to link to.
TV has always been a powerful medium. Programmatic TV advertising makes it more precise, more flexible, and more measurable.
By using programmatic CTV advertising and programmatic linear TV together, marketers can:
The opportunity now is to treat TV like the rest of your data-driven marketing: set clear objectives, instrument campaigns properly, and optimize continuously.
If you get the fundamentals right—audience strategy, supply quality, frequency control, and measurement—programmatic TV ads stop being a test line and become a core driver of both short-term performance and long-term brand growth.
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Inefficiency
Description
Use case
Description of use case
Examples of companies using AI
Ease of implementation
Impact
Audience segmentation and insights
Identify and categorize audience groups based on behaviors, preferences, and characteristics
Automated ad campaigns
Automate ad creation, placement, and optimization across various platforms
Brand sentiment tracking
Monitor and analyze public opinion about a brand across multiple channels in real time
Campaign strategy optimization
Analyze data to predict optimal campaign approaches, channels, and timing
Content strategy
Generate content ideas, predict performance, and optimize distribution strategies
Personalization strategy development
Create tailored messaging and experiences for consumers at scale
Costs are mainly driven by the quality of inventory you buy (premium CTV apps vs long-tail), how granular your targeting is, the audiences you’re competing for, and the time of year. CPMs rise when you use tight audience segments, high-demand content like live sports, or peak periods such as Q4 and major retail or political windows.
Programmatic TV combines device and household IDs with first-party data, third-party audience segments, and contextual signals like genre and time of day. Instead of buying a show’s entire audience, you buy impressions only when the viewer or household matches your defined profile, so most of your spend goes to people who are actually in-market or otherwise valuable.
Performance is measured through impression and completion data from publishers, plus cross-device attribution that links TV exposures to outcomes like site visits, app activity, leads, or sales. Brands use a mix of platform analytics, ACR or device-graph data, conversion APIs, and lift or incrementality studies to understand what programmatic TV contributed beyond other channels.
CTV programmatic advertising is the automated buying of ads on internet-connected TVs and streaming apps using data, real-time bidding, and audience targeting instead of manual TV buys. In practice, programmatic connected tv lets you reach specific households or viewer segments across smart TVs and devices, then measure how those impressions drive outcomes like site visits, leads, or sales.
Programmatic CTV is growing because it marries big-screen impact with digital-grade targeting and measurement. Viewers are spending more time in streaming environments, and programmatic buying gives marketers precise control over audiences, frequency, and outcomes in those environments, often with more flexibility than traditional linear TV.
Most brands start by defining one or two clear objectives, running a focused test on CTV with a trusted DSP or partner, and instrumenting that test with proper tracking so they can see incremental reach and outcomes. From there, they scale into more audiences, more publishers, and, if relevant, addressable linear once the initial results are proven.
Yes, if it’s approached with focus. Smaller brands can use programmatic CTV with modest budgets, tighter geo targeting, and clear performance goals, often via a managed partner rather than building their own TV ad-ops team. The key is to start with a narrow test, prove impact, then scale gradually rather than trying to match enterprise-level spend from day one.
