Every marketer I talk to is facing the same pressure: prove your media investment is driving real impact — or risk losing it. Many advertising budgets are already tightening in today’s uncertain market due to rising costs, added tariffs, and shaky supply chains. Nowhere is this scrutiny higher than your brand or agency’s biggest line item: convergent TV.
In a highly fragmented Upfront market, impressions alone can no longer be your guide. If you're only planning your convergent TV buy solely on cost or scale, you're leaving performance on the table – a luxury no one can afford.
Instead, you’ll need an approach that marries cost and scale with the predicted outcomes you can expect to drive from your media plan. By weighting your plans toward the inventory that is most likely to generate consumer engagement behaviors that predict future sales, such as brand searches and website visits, you can maximize your efficiency at any budget.
The key is to carry this outcomes-oriented approach across every aspect of your Upfront decision-making, from how much you invest in each publisher to the geographic areas you prioritize. By examining the right data, investment leaders can defend their budgets and find pockets of exceptional performance.
Here are a couple examples that show how integrating engagement data into your planning can help you make smarter Upfront decisions.
A big mistake I frequently see media buyers make is chasing scale at the lowest possible cost — regardless of how effectively different media achieves its primary goal of moving consumers closer to purchase. One way to avoid this pitfall is to marry consumer engagement data with publisher pricing to understand which media offers the biggest bang for your buck.
We recently worked with a leading advertiser to conduct this very exercise. First, we indexed five publishers’ cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM), enabling our client to understand how expensive each individual publisher was compared to the average network they do business with. In this table, Publisher A gives the advertiser the best deal with the lowest cost-per-thousand impressions.
Next, we integrated our predictive outcomes data to create an effective cost-per-thousand-impressions (eCPM), which measures how much consumer engagement the advertiser receives for every dollar it spends with each publisher, compared to the average network the advertiser works with.
Suddenly, things changed. Publisher A, once the most efficient place for the advertiser to spend money, was outranked by Publisher B, which offered a lower effective CPM. Meanwhile, Publisher E looked like a far better deal when we included its strong ad effectiveness in the mix.
With this data in hand, our client was able to make smarter decisions about how it allocates spend between these publishers, based on the actual efficiency each delivers.
One of streaming's most underutilized advantages is its ability to function as hyper-targeted local TV. With engagement data, you can optimize buys across specific markets and identify cities with disproportionately high returns.
For example, when we mapped engagement against baseline propensity scores (the likelihood of viewers to engage regardless of ad exposure) for a client, we discovered valuable targeting insights:
These geographic insights don't just inform your Upfront strategy — they become valuable currency in negotiations with publishers. If you know exactly which markets drive outsized returns for your brand, you can structure packages that activate media weight where these impressions will work hardest.
Whether it’s the Upfront or other TV negotiations throughout the year, economic uncertainty has a way of separating outcomes-driven marketers from those still coasting on legacy approaches. Every buy is an opportunity to reshape how you think about media investment.
Your competitive edge isn't how much you spend, but how intelligently you deploy your budget. By grounding your TV negotiations in engagement data, you'll not only weather the current economic climate but also emerge with a more resilient, performance-driven approach to TV.