Connected TV is channeling the early days of paid search as a top performance marketing channel.
tvScientific CEO Jason Fairchild says the current gap between CTV consumption and ad spend presents an untapped opportunity for smart advertisers.
Connected TV is where paid search was two decades ago—on the edge of a massive shift. TV advertising isn’t dying; it’s being rebuilt as a scalable, measurable, performance channel with room for millions of marketers, not just a few hundred. The disruption is overdue, and the parallels to early search are hard to ignore.
Jason Fairchild is building the infrastructure for connected TV performance advertising as the CEO and Co-Founder of tvScientific. With a background in paid search, he sees CTV as the next great performance channel—one with enormous untapped potential.
Paid search playbook: “The thesis was really, what if we do for TV what we did for paid search back in the day?“. Fairchild isn’t reinventing the wheel; he’s applying a proven strategy to a new format.
Just like early search, CTV’s power lies in scale, automation, and measurability. “It allows any marketer of any size to buy TV, and more importantly, to measure the impact of TV in terms of driving outcomes,” says Fairchild.Â
Industry in flux: Legacy TV advertising is dominated by just a few hundred buyers. “There’s basically 500 advertisers that generate 85% of the linear TV spend,” Fairchild explains. “Meanwhile, there are 9 million search and social advertisers that fuel a massive advertising economy.”
This gap presents an opportunity. “We’re at a temporary moment where the supply outpaces the demand,” says Fairchild. Connected TV is already surpassing linear in consumption, and it’s only a matter of time before ad dollars follow.Â
“The dirty secret is that search steals a lot of credit from TV, and we see that in the data,” Fairchild says. “Once people understand the analytics around that, they’ll heavy-up on TV as the most performant medium.”
White box approach: There’s no click on a TV ad—which means there’s no last-click attribution. “Instead, you have to build analytics that help people understand ad exposure at a household level,” says Fairchild.
CTV advertising won’t scale without trust. “The only way to build trust with advertisers is through transparency and control,” Fairchild explains. “Implementing our optimization algorithms in a white box manner, so marketers can see exactly what happened, is vitally important.”
Format innovation: “Today the TV ad experience is what we grew up with, 15-30 second long-form content,” Fairchild says. “That said, there’s room for a lot of innovation on what that form factor can look like.”
QR codes, for instance, could allow consumers to engage directly with ads. Pause ads offer a low-interruption way to capture attention, with early signs of strong engagement.
Demand creation: Fairchild views CTV as a full-funnel engine that outperforms search in both brand lift and conversion. “TV can create demand for a product or service which can then be connected to bottom-of-the-funnel KPIs.”
“TV is a more powerful medium than paid search in terms of direct response and performance,” Fairchild explains. “It’s a massive opportunity and very worthwhile.”
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