The pandemic led to lower TV ad spend and increased connected TV viewing this year. The shift in TV viewing means TV audience measurement gaps must be addressed to keep pace with how, what, and where consumers are watching TV.

TV ad spending takes a hit as marketers adjust their budgets amid a recession.

US TV ad spending is now expected to decline by 15.0% this year to reach $60 billion, down from $70.59 billion in 2019.

eMarketer vice president of content studio at Insider Intelligence Paul Verna steps in once again in as host of this week's "The Weekly Listen," where he and eMarketer principal analyst Mark Dolliver and junior analyst at Insider Intelligence Blake Droesch discuss TV ad spending and subscription video-on-demand services during the pandemic, deepfake video technology, the new app tax from Apple, streaming services and the "positive" addition to a lot of their names, and foul-mouthed fowl.

US upfront TV ad spending will decline 1.4% in the 2019-2020 season to $20.28 billion, and drop a substantial 27.1% in the 2020-2021 season to $14.78 billion, a $5.5 billion difference year-on-year.

With the coronavirus pandemic leading to a significant economic slowdown, we’re providing updated guidance to our clients about what we expect for ad spending during H1 2020. We finalized our most recent complete forecast on March 6, 2020, before the cascade of drastic social distancing and market declines began in the US. Since then, we have provided guidance through a series of "Analyst Take" notes on US ad spending. Guidance for US search, out-of-home, display, digital video and TV are now available. We also issued ad spending guidance in Canada, China, France, Germany and the UK. We will update our full-year forecast for ad spending again in June.

Where it makes sense to do so, we also cover traditional nondigital metrics in these buckets, such as TV ad spending and usage and spending on traditional non-ecommerce retail. Under these umbrellas, we assess and project more than a thousand industry-level, product-level, and consumer-behavior-oriented metrics.

Between January and August 2020, video streaming services increased their TV ad spending more than any other category that iSpot.tv tracked. Amazon was the largest ad spender, investing $169.8 million on TV ads for Amazon Prime Video during H1 2020. Several other streaming services relied on TV house ads to promote themselves.

This is partly why TV ad spending is holding relatively steady, despite recent pandemic conditions, and is by far the largest traditional spending category. Pandemic Accelerates Print’s Descent. Print advertising, including newspapers and magazines, will amount to CA$1.34 billion ($1.01 billion), 23.8% less than our pre-pandemic estimates.

Hundreds of millions of euros will gradually reenter the market, though it will take time for TV ad spending to reach the level anticipated in our pre-pandemic forecasts. OOH ad spending will be hardest hit.

A major challenge in measuring connected TV (CTV) audiences is that most of the time people spend streaming happens devoid of advertising.