This Year’s CTV Replay: Programmatic, Measurement And Lots Of M&A

2024 was quite an explosive year in CTV land. Global ad spend on connected TV is expected to surpass $30 billion in 2024, according to eMarketer. That’s a 22.4% increase from $24.6 billion last year. And the quicker CTV advertising grows, the hotter the competition over ad dollars becomes.

Streamers spent 2024 fighting tooth and nail for CTV ad dollars, including by beefing up their programmatic and measurement suites to court as many advertisers as humanly possible.

Meanwhile, programmatic middlemen are consolidating to get a bigger slice of the CTV pie. Many of the major acquisitions that happened this year – and there were a lot – revolved around CTV.

All things considered, it would probably be fair to call 2024 the year that CTV went programmatic and became a digital performance channel.

Mergers and acquisitions galore

With more and more advertisers investing in streaming, it’s no wonder that CTV led a long string of mergers and acquisitions this year.

In April, Cadent acquired performance marketing platform AdTheorent, and in June, contextual ad platform Seedtag bought the SSP Beachfront for closer ties to TV publishers. In August, Outbrain bought Teads for similar reasons.

Ad tech M&A didn’t slow in the fall. In October, Connatix bought JW Player for video monetization, and Samba TV snapped up Semasio, a contextual targeting platform. In November, Mediaocean bought Innovid, a video ad server and measurement platform, and Viant bought IRIS.TV, a CTV data platform. Walmart also finalized its acquisition of Vizio, which it first announced in February.

The common thread in all of these mergers and acquisitions is a desire to appeal to the growing number of performance advertisers interested in streaming. Those advertisers have made it clear they need scale, programmatic access and trustworthy measurement to invest more of their budgets into CTV.

Those buy-side demands also explain what the major streamers have been up to this year.