Want to know what Convergent TV advertising will look like in 2026? Then follow the “easy” money.
In digital, Google and Meta built billion-dollar businesses by simplifying the advertising process for brands. Select your audience, target outcomes, and budget, and let the platforms and their AI do the rest. It’s “The Easy Button” — but for advertising instead of office supplies.
For years, TV advertising has been inching closer to this model by becoming increasingly “convergent” — more streaming, more automated, more optimized, and ultimately, more outcomes. As we race towards 2026, the acceleration of this trend will be the defining feature of TV advertising in the new year.
Amazon has rapidly gained share with its own Easy Button for programmatic TV. The Trade Desk won’t be sitting this one out either. The next few quarters will be marked by mass adoption from brands — and the transformation of our industry as we know it.
So how do you get ready? Keep your eye on these five related trends, and be ready to adapt in the new year.
1. The Easy Button creates a stronger, more democratized ad ecosystem
The growth of automated, outcomes-optimized programmatic TV will open TV advertising to thousands of new brands that couldn’t previously get past the complexity and cost. Where TV was once restricted to the biggest brands and their agencies, the Easy Button opens the door to anyone who has an outcome or audience they’d like to hit.
Expect programmatic TV to follow programmatic digital in opening the floodgates for mid- and long-tail advertisers looking to make their mark. After all, it’s never been easier. While “more” doesn’t always mean better, it does mean a more competitive, more dynamic auction, which leads to better revenue for content and creators. And easier, more efficient performance for all those brands means more jobs for our economy.
2. AI interfaces and zero-click searches will be the death of traditional attribution
If you’re still relying on traditional last-click or pixel-to-pixel attribution in 2026, you’ll feel like that pilot who’s lost instruments as they fly into a dark, stormy night.
Across the board, every marketing leader I’ve spoken with tells the same story: website traffic and search clicks are falling as consumers re-route their customer journey through AI search summaries and GenAI interfaces. These lower-funnel signals — clicks to websites — used to be the bedrock of how marketers measured and optimized campaign effectiveness. Already, some studies report that zero-click searches account for nearly 60% of all Google activity. In 2026, conventional web traffic signals will continue evaporating to the point that there’s no water left in the classic attribution pond.
Marketers will need to adapt by overhauling their measurement frameworks, shifting to behavioral metrics higher up the funnel and AI-driven attribution models. Consumers are still flocking to Google in droves, which means their search queries remain plentiful and reliable signals of intent — even when searches and the customer journey are disrupted at the AI summary. Marketers can further future-proof themselves by investing heavily in brand-building, ensuring they’ll be top-of-mind with the consumer before an LLM makes its recommendation.
3. A reckoning is coming for audience targeting data
Audience data products will face significant pricing pressure — if not outright commoditization — in 2026. On top of the well-founded concerns about audience data accuracy, The Easy Button is making AI outcome-optimized campaigns more effective than the audience-reach-at-the-lowest-price status quo.
To make The Easy Button a viable business model, marketers will increasingly pay a flat fee for a bundle of audience data provided by their buying platforms, rather than a la carte pricing for specific data. And as Convergent TV campaigns are increasingly measured by the outcomes they drive, we’re going to see which audience data sets are actually accurate and impactful.
4. Live sports advertising gets dynamic
While the prestige and reach of live sports have made this inventory slow to hit the programmatic market, we’ve already seen a notable shift in 2025. As Easy Button-buying proliferates, we expect to see even more programmatic in live sports, punctuated by two inventory-rich quadrennial events – the Winter Olympics and the World Cup.
One big prediction for 2026: dynamic ad insertion is coming to your favorite sporting events, enabling media companies to serve different creatives to different consumer audiences. Viewers are already seeing different creatives from the same brand in streaming NFL and NBA games, and we expect to see fully dynamic ad targeting during major streamed sporting events next year.
5. Mid-funnel measurement bridges what’s left of the gap between social, retail, and TV media
Last year, we predicted that 2025 would bring The Convergent TV Singularity, the point at which there was no longer a meaningful difference between “linear” and “streaming” TV for media buyers or sellers. This came true, and then some.
As more advertisers adopt the Easy Button, they’ll find that they can buy TV in a fashion similar to how they purchase the fast-growing categories of social video retail media, and games. But how do you compare and optimize performance across these three channels?
The answer lies where these three mediums converge: the middle of the funnel. Mid-funnel outcomes measurement creates a common framework for assessing success — the consumer engagement actions that signal consideration and reliably predict future sales. Ultimately, that enables the Easy Button to optimize for performance and results across the majority of marketers’ spend.
What do you see coming down the pike in 2026?
As the Easy Button changes TV advertising in the new year, we’re looking forward to helping our partners optimize buying and yield management with our Vertical AI-powered TV outcomes data.
Have your own thoughts on 2026 in Convergent TV advertising? Leave us a note in the comments.