Evaluation Guide for Performance TV Advertising Platforms

1.0
The Rise of Performance TV

It’s performance or bust. Every campaign needs a result, and every result needs a receipt. Welcome to modern marketing.

So how do you stand out from your competition? How do you decide which channels to double down on, and which to cut loose? How do you drive real outcomes with an unpredictable budget?

For years, digital channels like search and social were the default answer. They promised performance and measurability — and they delivered. But new channels are proving they can deliver too, often with less competition and more upside.

Take television, for example. TV has historically been labeled a “brand channel,” mostly because it’s hard to measure, and thus, show results. But that’s all changing.

Performance TV graph image

The rise of Performance TV, combined with endless streaming apps, has led to 100 million households cutting the cord. And with streaming now accounting for over 40% of TV viewing in 2025, audiences are consuming content anytime, anywhere, and on any connected device.

TV is now a fully digital, data-rich performance channel, and AI is the key to unlocking its full potential. Today’s top Performance TV platforms make it easy to target high-value audiences, optimize in real time, and tie every campaign to real business outcomes like customer acquisition and ROAS.

But not all Performance TV platforms are built the same. Some are limited to media buying. Others offer full-funnel control, from planning and creative testing to measurement and optimization.

This guide will walk you through how to evaluate Performance TV advertising platforms, what to look for, and how to make sure your investment drives the outcomes that matter most.

1.1

Who Should Evaluate Performance TV Advertising Platforms?

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You might work at a small startup as the sole marketer, or you might work at a large enterprise where dozens of performance marketers will touch your TV ads. Because each organization is unique, use this guide in a way that fits your business, starting with this section.

Below is a short list of people who are often involved in choosing a Performance TV advertising platform. But at the end of the day, anyone responsible for managing your technology stack and marketing goals should be directly involved in the evaluation (and those titles may differ from one company to another).

The Bottom Line:

The most important thing to remember when evaluating Performance TV advertising platforms is to ensure whatever platform you choose meets your organization’s needs.

Marketing Executives

Should assess platforms from a holistic view, putting high focus on how a platform can show advertising program outcomes and their connection to bigger marketing goals and strategic priorities.

Marketing Operations Managers

Should assess how different Performance TV advertising platforms integrate with the team’s existing tech stack.

Performance Marketers

Should assess how easily TV campaigns can be built, managed, and optimized within a platform. They should also validate what performance KPIs — like conversions and ROAS — can be measured, and how accessible and transparent those reports are.

Brand Marketers

Should assess how easily TV campaigns can be built, managed, and optimized. They should also look for differentiators that indicate a platform can maximize KPIs like reach, awareness, and engagement.

Creative Directors

Should assess how easily a Performance TV advertising platform lets marketing teams create, upload, and use creative assets, as well as whether or not a platform provides creative services.

1.2

How to Evaluate Performance TV Advertising Platforms

As you evaluate Performance TV advertising platforms, think about the stages you go through currently to build and launch a TV campaign. If you’re spending time in a platform that doesn’t meet all of your needs, you’re not just wasting time, but you’re probably wasting your advertising budget as well.

If you don’t already invest in Performance TV, don’t sweat. Let’s talk through the TV advertising lifecycle so you can envision how your campaigns might run and what platform features you would need to get the most out of them.

Pro Tip

Look for platforms that integrate AI at each stage to reduce manual effort, accelerate time-to-insight, and boost performance through real-time automation.

The TV Advertising Lifecycle

There are nine stages of a successfully executed campaign: AI-first strategy, goal-setting, budgeting, targeting, media buying, creative, campaign launch, reporting and analytics, and optimization. The right solution will address how it supports activities in each stage.

AI-First Strategy:
Before setting goals or budgets, ground your campaign in an AI-first strategy. Consider how AI can inform audience targeting, inventory choices, bidding, creative testing, and optimization, so every decision is made smarter from the start.
Goal-Setting:
Choose your outcome – like sales, app installs, website visits, impressions – and ensure your platform is set up to track and measure progress toward these goals.
Budgeting:
Set your cost per outcome and set your platform up to maximize that spend.
Targeting:
Choose who sees your ad (no matter how broad or how granular) and ensure you have access to a wide range of audience segments.
Inventory Selection:
Identify the channels and streaming services you want to advertise on and make sure your platform has access to premium networks.
Creative:
Design your creative assets and upload them, or outsource creative development through your Performance TV advertising platform.
Campaign Launch:
Hit the “go” button and get your campaign out the door – fast.
Measurement and Attribution:
Access robust reports and attribute actions to outcomes usable dashboards.
Optimization:
Adjust your campaigns toward the audiences and networks that are driving the best outcomes (better yet, let AI do it).

In this guide, we’ll walk through each stage and provide a checklist of the features and functionality a Performance TV advertising platform should offer. Once you find a platform that addresses all of these stages, make sure it can scale with your team and offers the level of service and support you need. (There are sections in this guide for those, too.)

2.0
An Evaluation Checklist

An Evaluation Checklist graph image

As you evaluate your Performance TV advertising platform options, there are some key things to consider. That said, you know your organization best and this is your evaluation. If there are parts of this checklist you’d rather skip, go for it.

AI-First Strategy

Before you set goals or budgets, ground your campaign in an AI-first strategy. This means considering how AI can inform audience targeting, inventory choices, bidding, and creative testing, so every decision is made smarter from the start. The right Performance TV platform should make AI the foundation of your campaign, not an afterthought, helping you launch with confidence.

Roles that should evaluate:

Marketing Executives
Performance Marketer
Brand Marketer
Marketing Operations
Creative Director

Checklist:

Predict the highest return on outcomes, impressions, and ROAS before spend is committed
Analyze the most performant inventory across devices, households, and audiences, so you're always reaching your target customer
Learn and adapt at the household level to serve ads where and when your customer is watching
Optimize audience targeting, measurement, reporting, and creative to align with your goals

Goal Setting

Like any other marketing program, TV advertising campaigns should always begin with defining what you want to achieve, so look for a Performance TV advertising platform that offers the necessary tracking mechanisms to help you hit and report on those KPIs.

Roles that should evaluate:

Marketing Executives
Marketing Operations
Performance Marketer
Brand Marketer
Creative Director

Checklist:

Choose your own attribution windows (1-30 days)
Track and optimize toward your most meaningful outcomes (site visits, sign-ups, purchases, installs, or whatever else that matters to you)
Self-manage campaign planning (or provide you the option for full coverage support)
Quick access to real support

Budgeting

Budgeting for your TV advertising campaigns can be an intimidating task. You want to spend enough to make an impact, but you don’t want to waste any money on non-performant ads. Your Performance TV advertising platform or account manager should help you determine how much to spend each month, set your cost per outcome, and set your platform up to maximize that spend.

Roles that should evaluate:

Marketing Executives
Performance Marketer
Brand Marketer
Marketing Operations
Creative Director

Checklist:

Start running campaigns that meet your budget and outcome requirements
Automatically adjust campaign spend based on performance
Transparently understand how pricing works and what you get
Set flexible budget caps and pacing to control how spend is distributed
Model budgets across different scenarios with support from your account team or planning tools

Targeting

Once you know how much you want to spend on your campaigns each month, you need to make sure that spend is going toward the right audiences. Your Performance TV advertising platform should be able to help you choose who sees your ad and ensure you have access to all the audience segments you need.

Roles that should evaluate:

Marketing Executives
Performance Marketer
Brand Marketer
Marketing Operations
Creative Director

Checklist:

Segment audiences by traditional parameters, like location and demographics
Segment audiences by online behavior
Segment audiences by interests
Choose from tens of thousands of custom segments
Launch web-to-retargeting and first-party audience activation
Segment audiences by offline behavior

Inventory Selection

Peacock, Paramount+, Hulu … the list of streaming services available today goes on and on. Identifying where you want to advertise can be challenging. Your Performance TV advertising platform should be able to help you choose the right streaming services based on your target audience — and the right platform will have access to those services.

Roles that should evaluate:

Marketing Executives
Performance Marketer
Brand Marketer
Marketing Operations
Creative Director

Checklist:

Buy media directly in the platform
Automatically optimize your budget based on ad performance
Select from a variety of ad formats based on what you need for a specific campaign
Optimize for actual results, like purchases and installs — not just views
Connect any existing TV inventory directly to your platform

Creative

We consistently hear that not having creative assets is one of the top reasons why marketers don’t do TV advertising. Your Performance TV advertising platform should offer solutions to make this easier and scalable.

Roles that should evaluate:

Performance Marketer
Brand Marketer
Creative Director
Marketing Executives
Marketing Operations

Checklist:

Identify best-performing creative assets and offer best practices of high-performing videos
A/B test creative assets against live TV
Use their network of creative partners to produce assets, if needed
Repurpose your creative assets from social media
Automatically adjust creative assets if they’re uploaded with quality issues, improving your speed to launch

Campaign Launch

Get your campaigns out the door — fast. The right platform should make launch logistics smooth, with the tools, automation, and support you need to move from planning to live with confidence.

Roles that should evaluate:

Performance Marketer
Marketing Operations
Brand Marketer
Creative Director
Marketing Executives

Checklist:

Simplify launch with intuitive workflows and minimal manual configuration
Implement your tracking tags so you can show lift in website traffic and attribute outcomes accurately
Use automated bidding to optimize ads toward your desired outcomes
Speed up QA and approval with automated creative checks and dynamic asset handling
Access real human support for last-minute launch assistance

Measurement and Attribution

It’s totally normal to impatiently press “refresh” on that performance dashboard. Your Performance TV advertising platform should make it easy to prove impact, offering intuitive dashboards, transparent attribution, and real-time insights that help you confidently connect the dots between ad exposure and business outcomes.

Roles that should evaluate:

Performance Marketer
Marketing Operations
Brand Marketer
Creative Director
Marketing Executives

Checklist:

Match TV ad exposure to site visits and outcomes through deterministic and probabilistic attribution
Follow the viewer journey from impression to website visit to purchase
Get real-time updates on data tied to your campaign metrics
Pull reports with clear, traceable data points customized to keep your campaign goals on track
Gather real-time data analyses that automatically optimize your ads
Perform incrementality tests so you can report on the true value of your campaigns
Attribute results across channels to understand how Performance TV contributes within your broader media mix

Optimization

What good is an advertising campaign if you can’t make adjustments based on what’s working or what’s not? You might be surprised to know that when it comes to optimizing your Performance TV campaigns, not all platforms are created equal. The right Performance TV platform should not only surface insights through reporting, but should also offer services to help you act on them to improve your campaigns.

Roles that should evaluate:

Marketing Executives
Performance Marketer
Brand Marketer
Marketing Operations
Creative Director

Checklist:

Optimize your ads based on performance goals
Retarget people who visit your website with Performance TV campaigns
Adjust where you’re advertising based on how ads are performing on certain platforms
Leverage AI to ensure your ads reach the right audience at the right time

3.0
The User Experience

Whether you’re looking for a steady flow of conversions or a boost during the holiday season, you need a Performance TV advertising platform that can help you get started immediately. While speed, platform features, and capabilities are important, don’t lose sight of the overall experience you’re signing up for.

Scalability

Scaling your Performance TV campaigns isn’t just about spending more, it’s about managing complexity, connecting systems, and ensuring your platform can grow with your business. Scalability requires deep integrations, access to premium inventory, and flexible support models that make expansion sustainable.

Checklist:

To help you scale your TV programs, a platform should offer:

Integrations with your existing tech stack

Operational infrastructure that supports scaling media, creative, and targeting without bottlenecks

Access to premium, high-quality inventory across major streaming platforms, networks, and devices

Support for multi-brand, multi-region, or cross-channel campaign structures

Flexible budget controls and workflows to accommodate evolving strategies or organizational models

Optional managed services to help extend your team’s capacity as needs grow

Pricing

Transparency is something you want from any vendor, especially when it comes to pricing. Unfortunately, so many companies are still lacking in this area. Even some of the big-name Performance TV advertising platforms keep their customers in the dark about how fees are calculated, making it nearly impossible to assess the true cost of using their platform.

Pro Tip:

Look for a Performance TV advertising platform that’ll give you a clear breakdown of fees, ensuring you have full visibility into how your budget is allocated. This transparency means you can make more informed spending decisions.

Data Security

With TV advertising rising in popularity, the amount of consumer data stored in Performance TV advertising platforms is also increasing rapidly. And while this means marketers are able to more precisely target their ads, it also means they’re more susceptible to cyber threats and privacy breaches.

Checklist:

To ensure data security is a top priority, a platform should:

Use industry-standard encryption protocols to protect data

Have robust user authentication functionality, like secure passwords, 2FA, or MFA

Use best practices for storing data

Comply with data privacy regulations like GDPR and CPRA, or any regulations specific to your market

Let teams manage and control who can access their instance

Follow security best practices

Conduct regular audits to identify and address potential vulnerabilities

Maintain a robust Privacy Policy and Data Processing Addendum

Let users export data easily and delete it upon request

4.0
Does Your Platform Make The Cut?

Your Performance TV Evaluation Checklist

The world of Performance TV is evolving fast — and not all platforms are created equal. To get the most out of your TV campaigns, you need a platform that supports your full funnel: from goal-setting and targeting to optimization and reporting.

Use this checklist to assess whether a platform gives you the control, flexibility, and results you need at every stage of your campaign journey.

Goal-Setting

To define and track what matters most, your platform should enable you to:

Set custom attribution windows (1–30 days)
Optimize toward real business goals (site visits, sign-ups, purchases, installs, and more)
Quick access to real support

Budgeting

To make the most of your media spend, your platform should allow you to:

Start running campaigns that meet your budget and outcome requirements
Auto-optimize spend based on performance
Set flexible budget caps and pacing

Targeting

To precisely reach your ideal audience, your platform should equip you to:

Target by location, demographics, or behavior
Access thousands of audience segments
Launch web-to-retargeting and first-party audience activation

Inventory selection

To access quality inventory and buy effectively, your platform should make it easy to:

Buy directly in-platform
Optimize for real results (not just views)
Connect any existing TV inventory directly to your platform

Creative

To quickly launch high-performing creative, your platform should support you to:

Identify best-performing creative assets
Use or repurpose existing assets
A/B test video creative

Campaign Launch

To go live with speed and confidence, your platform should let you:

Simplify launch with intuitive workflows
Add tracking to measure lift and conversions
Automate bidding and optimizations

Measurement and Attribution

To prove impact and optimize fast, your platform should empower you to:

Follow the viewer journey from impression to website visit to purchase
Attribute results across channels
Perform incrementality tests

Optimization

To keep improving your results, your platform should give you the flexibility to:

Optimize your ads based on performance goals
Retarget site visitors with TV ads
Shift placements based on real-time results

Don’t just launch campaigns.
Build momentum.

Choosing the right Performance TV platform isn’t just about ticking boxes: it’s about unlocking smarter, faster, more impactful advertising. As you compare your options, prioritize platforms that:

Deliver real, measurable outcomes

Make it easy to scale and optimize

Fit your goals, budget, and workflow

Offer the flexibility and support you actually need

With the right partner, TV has the potential to become your most powerful performance channel.

Evaluation Guide for Performance TV Advertising Platforms

1.0
The Rise of Performance TV