By Joe Hall, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Spaceback
I was recently watching Survivor with friends. The commercials came on and every head dropped to their phone. A top show on the big screen and the commercials might as well not have been shown at all. Not only that, I bet those TV advertisers paid a premium over the TikTok ad we were all seeing on our feed.
It’s well documented that people have short attention spans, expect on-demand everything and are happy to multitask while watching TV, but something else hit me at that moment. The real problem with TV commercials is the process itself. Traditional TV ads are designed for a world that no longer exists. They are simply arriving too late and are too broad to be part of the conversation.
An Exponential Shift in Media
Gordon Moore predicted in 1965 that the number of transistors on microchips would double every two years, and for decades, that prediction came true – to the point that 1,000 transistors on a single chip in 1965 turned into about 50 billion in 2025.
“Moore’s Law” is often applied to the explosive growth and change that’s happened across technology and media, not just in microchips. Consider TV advertising in 1965. There were three major TV networks and a few local channels. Each hour contained about eight minutes of ads, or about 16 commercials. Add in some radio ads, newspaper ads and billboard signs, and the average American in 1965 might actually remember most of the ads they saw in a day. Today, sixty years later, the number of ads has exploded.
So has the amount and kind of content people are exposed to. Instead of a few articles and a couple of shows, people now scroll through thousands of individual bits of content in mere minutes. Today, a teenager is on media for seven hours every day including TikTok, Snap and YouTube as well as gaming and on-demand CTV. Social media is updated in real time. Every second someone scrolls, they see fresh content. They’re connected to their friends. They can buy whatever they see with one click. It’s relevant, targeted, interactive.
TV is not this world, but CTV can be. Just because CTV is on the same screen as traditional TV doesn’t mean we need to be stuck in 1965. CTV must be the 2025 version of multichannel media that’s 50 billion times faster, more engaging, more targeted and more interactive than anything that worked sixty years ago.
Embracing a New Process
The way advertising catches up is when advertisers change their process.
There are a number of factors advertisers can change, and they all add up to a dramatic improvement in CTV ad relevance:
- Speed to market: Advertisers have plenty of tools they can test to increase the speed of production, from AI generated content to technology that pulls in and alters existing content. Advertisers can reduce production time by shooting local, using smaller setups and simply taking less time overthinking the end result.
- Timely content: An ad message that was developed two months ago is old news. People want fresh and relevant content like what they see on social media. That’s one reason why brands from Unilever to Coke are leaning into influencer marketing, which is proving to be one of the most resilient channels in an uncertain market.
- Personalization: Advertisers like American Eagle Outfitters are starting to incorporate audience data and even product data to deliver personalized ads that are more relevant, pulling in one of the defining features of digital to the living room screen. Dynamic creative optimization is a space to watch, as the concept of one TV commercial fractures into hundreds or thousands of personalized versions.
- Interactivity: CTV is an addressable medium, which means people can engage directly with the content. Walmart and Roku work together to deliver shoppable ads to the screen, and many other brands are tapping RMN partnerships to do something similar.
The US is actually starting to lag in this area. Consider CTV in India, which The Current called “the market to watch” in 2025. India is shifting quickly to a market of premium, personalized CTV advertising that’s produced quickly and cheaply to appeal to the social-first nature of audiences. It doesn’t mean creative is “worse quality” than before. It means it’s tuned to the audience of today.
I love to cite Nielsen’s finding that 65% of campaign success is driven by creative. For CTV, there are actually two different sides to that coin. On one hand is the typical digital process, where advertisers are notoriously focused on everything but creative – finely tuning audience targets, CPMs and site lists to deliver a set of drab banner ads. On the other hand is traditional TV, where creative is everything, but is hampered by an outdated approach.
Both of these sides – digital and TV – live within CTV, but CTV demands a hybrid strategy that blends the craft and care of TV creative with the fast pace, relevance and personalization of digital. With a never-ending stream of content at the audience’s fingertips, it’s no longer enough to make one perfect TV spot and hope it lands. To keep pace with a world overflowing with content, CTV advertisers must rethink not just what they create, but how they create it. TV ads aren’t just competing with the show anymore and if Survivor taught us anything, it’s that the game has changed and we need to adapt to win.
