Navigating the Total TV Paradigm: An interview with Moe Chughtai, Executive, Global Vice President @ MiQ

If the primary way you're measuring success is how well a platform reports its own performance, you will have blind spots. - Moe Chughtai

In today's conversation, I sat down with Moe Chughtai, Global Vice President at MiQ. Moe takes us behind the scenes of how advertisers are tackling the unprecedented challenges of fragmented attention across social, streaming, broadcast, and cable. We discuss how elevating data above individual platforms is the key to allocating media spend responsibly. We also discuss how to effectively navigate these different channels and generations, and why a unified data strategy and measurement framework is essential for proving your bottom-line return.

The Total TV World

Tim Rowe: Who is MiQ — what problem do you solve, and who do you solve it for?

Moe Chughtai: MiQ is a tech-enabled programmatic managed services partner. We work with agencies and brands who want to run digital advertising across all ecosystems. We've built an AI technology that sits on top of all of the different buying platforms. Whether that's open web DSPs like The Trade Desk and Amazon or more closed web solutions like Google and Meta, all of that buying technology is integrated into our Sigma platform. We've got a data layer that sits on top of that, enabling smarter AI-driven planning across these different worlds. Our traders on average run about 45 campaigns a month, whereas the median agency trader runs about 5.

Tim Rowe: Could you take us through what this enables the advertiser to do?

Moe Chughtai: Streaming platforms are relatively large companies with a decent amount of market share, and they decide which buying platforms they partner with. Netflix owns about 10% of total video activity on the big screen, and you can buy them through multiple DSPs, like The Trade Desk, but not every DSP. If you want to buy Prime Video, you've got to go through the Amazon DSP. If you want to buy YouTube and YouTube TV, you go through the Google platforms, and social video is a whole other ball game. To get the scale you want in CTV, the minimum number of platforms you've got to run in is at least 3, requiring good technology to play across those worlds.

Tim Rowe: How has streaming evolved for advertisers over the past decade?

Moe Chughtai: The early stage was all about educating advertisers that consumers were heading to CTV and budgets needed to catch up. Around COVID, the conversation shifted to maximizing the opportunity: finding incremental audiences from linear plans and balancing frequency. From 2024 onwards, brands recognize they are in a total TV world. Now it's about how to make the most out of your TV investment, do cross-channel frequency better, and make the open web and walled gardens work well together.

What is TV anyway?

Tim Rowe: Lines are starting to blur between social, traditional television, and podcasting. From the conversations you're having with brands and advertisers — what is TV?

Moe Chughtai: We talk about total TV as a concept that covers all different viewing forms. The definition varies depending on which generation you ask. If you're speaking to a boomer or older Gen X audience, TV is still your cable box or satellite service, though they are adopting streaming more. For millennials, they are streaming first and YouTube first. For Gen Z, it's YouTube first, social video second, and streaming third.

Tim Rowe: Is consumer behavior leading that change?

Moe Chughtai: Advertising is always led by the consumer. Younger audiences are watching things like Shorts and social video in ways defined as entertainment and television. My younger brother, who is on the older end of Gen Z, watched most of The Sopranos on TikTok, 90 seconds at a time, before ever turning on the HBO app.

Measuring Beyond Walled Gardens

Tim Rowe: How do you guide an advertiser through the workflow of wanting to be on Prime Video, YouTube TV, Paramount, NBCU, and social all at once?

Moe Chughtai: It's about how you plan effectively across different ecosystems that provide varying levels of data. It is crucial for advertisers to own data themselves and partner with companies outside of these platforms to aggregate insights. For example, a national QSR marketer was running ads in markets where consumers couldn't even go to their stores. By looking at location data and overlaying her streaming, YouTube, and TikTok investments, we showed her the biggest areas of waste so she could shift spend dynamically.

Tim Rowe: Let's focus on measurement for a second. What is measurement?

Moe Chughtai: I'll tell you what it's not: in a multi-buying platform world, your measurement cannot be platform-measured. If the primary way you're measuring success is how well a platform reports its own performance, you will have blind spots. Brands need to elevate themselves above the platforms, own more of the stack, and use measurement solutions that rapidly return data across channels. We're seeing the walls of these platforms come down as a response to marketer demand, like Google integrating more providers into its clean room and Ads Data Hub, and Meta with its data clean room ecosystem.

The YouTube Behemoth & What's Next

Tim Rowe: We're seeing a maturation of the ads on YouTube. What do the conversations sound like when guiding an advertiser through what YouTube is and isn't?

Moe Chughtai: YouTube is the most dominant and accessible video platform in the world. When we think about YouTube, we look at three behaviors. First is a scrolling behavior via the Shorts feed, which is a rapidly growing quarter of time spent. Second is the big screen: almost 60% of global ads MiQ runs on YouTube are on the TV screen. The third is the traditional legacy view of YouTube as mobile, horizontal video, which is becoming a smaller percentage. Over the next couple of years, YouTube will dominate in the social compete world with Shorts and the big screen world.

Tim Rowe: Looking ahead to 2027, any big predictions for the next year or two?

Moe Chughtai: My macro two-year prediction is we're going to see the walls on these gardens continue to come down. Platforms built walls up around COVID and GDPR in response to privacy and competition. I think they've recognized that the way to succeed is to enable advertisers to accomplish their data-first use cases, which requires bringing data in and operating with desired partners. As platforms allow more data in and share more data out, it means better planning and measurement across the open web and walled gardens.

Want to watch or listen to the entire conversation?

Listen to the full podcast HERE