Jon Bond—yes, that Jon Bond—told me this week something that stuck harder than a Super Bowl Doritos ad:
All media innovations go through five stages.

And guess what?

CTV is at the tail-end of that growth phase, barreling toward maturity.

Translation: If you’re not in yet, you’re already late to the party—and the keg is halfway gone.

Meanwhile, Linear TV? It’s not just mature. It’s arthritic.

It’s stuck between decline and denial, stumbling around like the media equivalent of your uncle who still insists Blu-ray is the future.

Let’s not pretend Linear TV is dead. It’s undead.

A groaning, bloated corpse of a media format, gnawing on legacy ad dollars and hoping no one notices the smell.

It should’ve been buried next to Blockbuster.
But live sports—the last bastion of "appointment TV"—has been keeping the respirator plugged in.

The NFL, NBA, NHL… pick your acronym. These leagues are the only thing standing between cable and the cultural abyss.

But that’s changing. Fast.

While linear was patting itself on the back for rerunning NCIS for the 400th time, CTV was evolving like it just binged all of Silicon Valley on 2x speed.

And now, it's pouncing.

Amazon Prime, YouTube TV, Peacock, ESPN+—they’ve all started snapping up live sports rights faster than Meta copies a startup.

Your boomer uncle who clutched his remote like a sacred relic now watches Thursday Night Football on Prime and thinks it’s magic.

📊 Let’s throw some cold, hard numbers at your eyeballs:

And now we’re in what Jon Bond would call Phase 3: Maturity. CPMs are up, ROAS is down, and everyone’s fighting over the same audience scraps like it’s Black Friday at Best Buy.

This is the inflection point—the “Near Future” sweet spot where a medium has scale, but hasn’t yet been strip-mined by commoditization. And CTV is right there, dangling its shiny data-driven, programmatic, hyper-targeted keys in front of marketers who still think GRPs are a personality trait.

CTV is:

You want to serve sneaker ads to Knicks fans in Phoenix who Googled “flat feet”?
CTV has a button for that.

This isn’t just about better tech.
It’s about control—of the screen, the spend, and the audience journey.

Linear once controlled the living room.
Now, CTV owns it, decorates it, and sends you personalized ads based on your couch posture.

So where does this go?

And here's the kicker—again, credit to Bond—TV is in its Rebirth phase.

CTV is TV now. Just smarter, faster, and actually interested in what you're watching.

It’s Phase 5, which weirdly looks a lot like Phase 2—but with attribution and oat milk.

Will CTV finally put linear out of its misery—or just demote it to background noise during dental visits?

Either way, someone’s getting written out of the will.

And spoiler alert: it’s not the one holding the Roku remote.

🧠 Stay bold, stay curious, and know more than you did yesterday.

Andrew Casale, CEO of Index Exchange, isn't just diagnosing the industry's woes—he’s actively putting out fires. Here's what we learned from the guy tackling the hardest problems in Connected TV:

Casale's bottom line: The industry's rapid expansion created huge technical debts, but the good news? AdTech’s firefighters are finally arriving to clean up the mess.

Real-Time Bidding Enters the Arena—and It's Not Just for Banners Anymore

For years, programmatic advertising sat in the bleachers while live sports remained the crown jewel of direct buys and handshake deals. But in 2025, it’s no longer sidelined. Programmatic has not only joined the league—it’s taking snaps during prime time, calling audibles, and yes, outperforming some of the old guard.

The evidence? It’s not vague anymore. NBCUniversal, Samsung, Index Exchange, and a growing ecosystem of players have proven that real-time bidding (RTB) is not just viable in live sports—it’s essential.

John Alleva, EVP of Platform Monetization at NBCUniversal, summed up the shift plainly: the network doubled the number of advertisers participating in major live events like the Paris Olympics and NFL coverage thanks to programmatic channels. This isn’t about replacing traditional media sales; it’s about opening the floodgates to a new class of advertisers who once couldn’t afford a seat at the table.

NBCU worked hand-in-hand with FreeWheel to optimize their real-time infrastructure. Alleva explained that this model not only delivered performance, but it diversified the client base dramatically—bringing in performance marketers, challenger brands, and digitally native players. For a network long built around marquee sponsors and upfront deals, this was a fundamental rebalancing of the ad portfolio.

Samsung’s Head of Digital Marketing, Jacs Wyatt, had a straightforward mission: scale performance campaigns without throwing money into the CPM abyss. She leaned into programmatic for live sports—particularly CTV—and saw a 33% boost in audience reach. More impressively, she kept cost per acquisition (CPA) under $4. That’s not incremental improvement. That’s turning a branding opportunity into a performance engine.

For Wyatt, the turning point was realizing that live sports viewers weren’t just “tuning in”—they were leaning in. The heightened attention during live moments gave Samsung a unique window to engage, but it required the flexibility of programmatic infrastructure to activate across devices and demographics in real time. As she noted, the ability to “tell the right story to the right audience” at the exact moment they’re engaged was the difference between just being seen and being effective.

At NBCUniversal, Verna De Jesus manages billions of impressions across NFL content alone—and she does it programmatically. That scale used to be the exclusive domain of direct-sold campaigns, stitched together through weeks of IO wrangling. Not anymore.

De Jesus emphasized how automation not only accelerates the pace of business but also democratizes access. Smaller advertisers are now showing up in places that once required Super Bowl-sized budgets. Her team’s work has proven that even the most premium inventory can be transacted in real time without sacrificing quality, creative control, or brand safety.

Cadi Jones, Chief Revenue Officer at Index Exchange, has been vocal about what she calls the “linear-grade” experience of modern programmatic. Her argument isn’t theoretical—it’s architectural. Over the past two years, Index has invested in building the infrastructure to support burst traffic, pod logic, and real-time enablement at scale. And in live sports, those three elements aren’t nice-to-haves—they’re survival requirements.

According to Jones, the goal isn't just to replicate linear TV’s scale; it’s to exceed it by fusing that reach with targeting precision and rapid measurement. She highlighted innovations in bidstream enrichment, including OpenRTB 2.6 and real-time audience APIs, as transformative forces enabling advertisers to treat live sports like they would a dynamic social campaign—adjustable, accountable, and always-on.

Real-time programmatic in live sports isn’t a nice new tool. It’s the new rulebook.

If your media strategy still treats live sports as an upfront-only channel, you’re competing with one hand tied behind your back. Programmatic has moved from novelty to necessity. The biggest players in media—NBCUniversal, Samsung, Index—aren’t just testing the waters. They’re building the next wave.

And here’s the kicker: performance marketers are already in the game. If brand advertisers don’t start moving with the same speed and intelligence, they’ll find themselves priced out of relevance.

This isn’t the future of sports advertising. It’s the now—and it's real-time.

While everyone else is busy counting impressions like it’s still 2012, LG Ad Solutions is quietly turning your TV into the quarterback, the merch table, and the sportsbook—all at once.

Live sports? That’s their battlefield. And according to their Stadium to Screen report, 80% of U.S. CTV viewers are now watching sports on streaming platforms. Translation? Cable’s coughing up blood and LG’s already hosting the afterparty.

Tony Marlow, LG’s CMO and apparently part-time futurist, isn’t mincing words. Viewers want more than just streaming—they want interaction, personalization, and an experience that doesn’t feel like a leftover banner ad in a Super Bowl jersey. And yes, LG’s giving it to them.

They’re dropping webOS Pay, because apparently the future of sports advertising is letting fans buy sneakers mid-free throw with two clicks and zero QR codes. They’ve got 3D home screen takeovers that break out of the frame like a Marvel villain, and pause ads so lush luxury brands are using them like print spreads on steroids.

Oh—and if you thought “emotional targeting” was just a sad media planner crying over a spreadsheet, think again. LG’s using AI and ACR data to target fans based on how they feel during the game. Rage-clicking after a bad call? There’s probably an ad for whiskey with your name on it.

Bottom line: LG isn’t waiting for the ad industry to catch up. They're running the play, calling the shots, and scoring while everyone else is still asking where the remote is.

Let’s get one thing straight:
We’re not here to make anyone feel comfortable.

We don’t slather on the compliments, roll out the red carpet for sponsors, or let execs peddle jargon without pushback. ADOTAT+ isn’t the industry’s hype machine—it’s the watchdog with a magnifying glass and a crowbar.

While everyone else is too busy "celebrating innovation" (read: parroting press releases and clinking glasses at sponsored panels), we’re doing something truly radical:
Asking real questions.
Pulling receipts.
Digging past the PR gloss to find out what actually works—and what’s total B.S.

Let’s be blunt:
There’s nothing wrong with those cheerful podcasts and “fireside chats” that promote, promote, and pimp. But that’s not us. We don’t exist to fluff execs’ egos. We exist to tell you what they’re not saying.

So here’s the pitch:
If you want to know which AI models matter in sports ads, how Samsung and NBCU are secretly building the next layer of CTV infrastructure, or which measurement vendors are bluffing their way to a Series D—you should be subscribed.

If you want fluff?
Go listen to another podcast that calls every keynote "brilliant."
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