The news: Connected TV (CTV) household reach was low in 2024, with the average ad campaign reaching only 19.64% out of the 95 million US households in Innovid’s ad tech platform, per a new Innovid study.

• The number of times the average household saw any given CTV ad was lower YoY, decreasing slightly from 7.42 times in 2023 to 7.09 times in 2024. However, high-investment campaigns (receiving 200M+ impressions) received 10+ average impressions per household.
• Still, CTV ad impressions rose 18% YoY in 2024—but a gap remains between ad investment and viewership, the study noted.
• Interactive ads drove engagement. CTV ads with elements like QR codes and overlays received an average of 71 seconds of additional viewer time compared with standard pre-roll ads, with QR code usage alone more than tripling YoY.

Zooming out: Investment in CTV ads is growing steadily, increasing by 16.8% this year as time spent with CTV grows 6.9%, per our forecast—though there is risk that the CTV market will become stagnant as a result of heavy tariffs.

However, advertisers have concerns with the CTV format that Innovid’s report echoes.

• 37% find difficulty managing ad frequency across platforms, while 29% are concerned over multiple ad buys to attain reach and frequency—two sides of the core fragmentation issue that’s limiting household reach.
• When advertisers struggle with frequency management, they may end up over-delivering to the same viewers on individual platforms and under-delivering to a broader potential audience, contributing to ads reaching less than 20% of households despite growing CTV usage.
• The need for multiple ad buys is also an issue. When managing various ad buys becomes too complicated, advertisers may default to fewer platforms and concentrate media dollars on familiar environments, limiting potential reach across the full CTV ecosystem.

Our take: CTV represents a massive opportunity for brands to reach key audiences, necessitating that advertisers remain strategic about how they approach the fragmented landscape to boost current reach limitations and achieve substantial scale.

• Advertisers can consider hyper-targeting strategies after using broader targeting parameters to establish a baseline reach, gradually refining targeting for subsequent exposures based on engagement. Different targeting approaches—such as broader demographic targeting on high-reach platforms and behavior-based targeting on niche platforms—could prove successful.
• Brands must build a presence across multiple CTV platforms in favor of concentrating ad budgets on just one or two services. Diversifying current platform strategies based on platform-specific behaviors and patterns could promote broader household coverage.