Welcome to The tvRoom. Your weekly digest of television, streaming, and digital media insights.
This week we're covering:
- 📺 Now Playing: Linear TV, But Make It Programmatic
- ☎️ The Old Max Can’t Come to the Phone Right Now - She’s HBO Again
- 🎬 Creative Spotlight: Hatch: “Goodnight, Phone”
- 💋 Plus, Sabrina Carpenter Invites You For a Day of Glam
Linear TV Enters the Programmatic Era
After years of false starts, programmatic buying has finally come to linear TV. The shift signals that television’s last major walled garden is opening to the precision and accountability that define digital advertising.
Comcast kicked off the moment last week when it made its entire linear inventory available through FreeWheel for real‑time, targetable bidding, a first at national scale. Dentsu was among the first buyers to test the new workflow, running ads for the animated film Stitch Head across both linear and streaming through a single interface.
Linear meets digital
Until now, “programmatic linear” mostly meant partial automation for limited ad slots. Full biddable inventory turns decades of scheduled buying into a data‑driven marketplace, aligning the mechanics of linear and connected TV for the first time.
That means advertisers who used to optimize across CTV and mobile can finally apply unified measurement and audience segmentation to traditional broadcast. Platforms like tvScientific extend that precision further, bringing performance marketing principles, attribution, and outcome-based optimization into the newly programmatic TV landscape.
The bigger picture
The race is now on to standardize the workflows that join linear, streaming, and digital video into one ecosystem. For performance‑minded marketers, the implications are huge: television is becoming another channel in the same programmatic supply chain that already powers most of digital media.
What this means for advertisers
Linear’s move to real‑time bidding won’t replace private marketplace and guaranteed deals overnight, but it marks a new phase in TV’s digital evolution. Campaign planning can now flex across every screen, with audience precision where “TV reach” once stood alone.
It’s the clearest signal yet that the line between old and new television has dissolved, replaced by one connected, data‑driven marketplace.
Read More:
TV Industry Updates
- Brand backtrack: Warner Bros. Discovery restored the HBO Max name, admitting the brand’s premium equity was too valuable to drop.
- Grid goes programmatic: Comcast opened its linear TV inventory to real‑time bidding, bringing programmatic buying to cable for the first time.
- Stream on, Netflix: The streamer posted record ad‑sales in Q3, doubling upfront deals as programmatic demand surged.
- Shorts cash out: YouTube CEO Neal Mohan confirmed that Shorts now matches core YouTube’s revenue per watch‑hour in several major markets.
- Live kickoff: YouTube secured exclusive rights to stream an NFL game for free worldwide, underscoring sports’ growing role in digital video deals.
- Studio playbook: Under Armour launched Lab96 Studios to produce athlete‑led films and long‑form storytelling beyond standard ads.
Creative Spotlight: Hatch: “Goodnight, Phone”
Hatch turned bedtime doomscrolling into a horror story with its faux movie trailer “Goodnight, Phone.”
The details:
- The spot starred Kiernan Shipka as Ava, a woman haunted by her smartphone after moving into a new home.
- The campaign premiered in AMC and Cinemark theaters during the Halloween season, then expanded to YouTube and social media.
- The project blurred the line between entertainment and advertising while reinforcing Hatch’s message about healthier phone‑free nights.
What We Loved: Hatch used the language of horror cinema to deliver a wellness message that felt fresh, funny, and genuinely unsettling; proof that a good scare can sell better sleep.
Marketing Mix
- Celeb stays: Airbnb unveiled “Airbnb Originals,” letting users book one‑off experiences with stars like Sabrina Carpenter and Patrick Mahomes.
- Shop by chat: PayPal teamed with OpenAI to let users complete purchases inside ChatGPT using their PayPal wallets.
- Smiles all around: PepsiCo unveiled its first corporate rebrand in nearly 25 years, shifting focus to its full portfolio with a new “Food. Drinks. Smiles.” tagline
- Primed to buy: WPP Media found that 84% of purchases come from shoppers already biased toward a brand.
- Trick or treat takeover: Mars rolled out Halloween campaigns, hitting CTV and even a Brooklyn “Hallowmas” pop‑up blending Christmas and Halloween.
- Color by chat: Behr Paint introduced ChatHUE, an AI assistant that helps users pick colors through conversational search.
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