Streaming audiences face more choices than ever, giving the TV home screen greater influence over what they watch next. At Advertising Week New York, leaders from TiVo Ads, Nexxen, Underdog and OBI Creative explored what that moment means for advertisers and what must change to make the opportunity easier to buy and measure.
Discovery is becoming part of the media opportunity
Streaming has given viewers more choices than ever. It has also made deciding what to watch more complicated. That puts the TV interface in an increasingly important position. The home screen isn’t simply a navigation layer between apps. It sits at the point where viewers are deciding what to watch, which service to open and where to spend their time.
As Matt Milne, president of TiVo Ads, put it during the discussion, “Content is the reason, but the path has got to be an easy way to find it.”
Once viewers enter an app or begin watching a program, they are already committed to a destination. The home screen reaches them earlier, while they are still deciding what happens next. And unlike many digital environments, that decision is taking place on the biggest screen in the home.
Context may be as valuable as content
Audience and viewing signals make that moment more valuable.
TiVo Ads, for example, brings together audience intelligence across smart TV and pay TV environments, helping advertisers better understand viewing behaviour and reach relevant audiences. That means brands don’t necessarily have to buy directly against a piece of content to benefit from the intent surrounding it.
Live sports offer a compelling example. Brands can use home screen placements to reach fans as they turn on their televisions and navigate toward a major match, without relying exclusively on advertising within the broadcast.
The opportunity extends beyond sports. Entertainment launches, seasonal moments and major cultural events all create occasions when audience attention and context can be particularly valuable.
This points to a more nuanced form of CTV planning: one built not only around audiences and programmes, but around moments of intent.
Not every valuable impression needs to convert
As home-screen advertising expands beyond entertainment marketers, measurement must move beyond a last-click mentality.
A viewer seeing an ad on the home screen may not immediately pick up a phone, download an app or make a purchase. In many cases, the role of that exposure is to build awareness, extend reach or reinforce a message that will appear elsewhere in the customer journey.
That means evaluating its impact through a combination of metrics, including brand lift, aided awareness, incremental reach and frequency, alongside more direct performance indicators where appropriate.
But that doesn’t mean performance is absent.
For entertainment advertisers, the connection between exposure and action can be particularly direct: an ad can lead viewers straight into promoted content.
Milne shared that TiVo Ads has recently seen a 10x lift in viewership for entertainment content promoted on the home screen compared with the same content without that exposure.
For other advertisers, video, QR codes and additional calls to action can introduce a performance layer.
The next challenge is making it easier to buy
There is still a practical reason home-screen advertising isn’t yet a standard part of every CTV plan: friction. Historically, buyers have faced different creative specifications, direct relationships with individual platforms and TV manufactures, unfamiliar metrics and custom buying processes, making another specialist channel difficult to justify. That is beginning to change.
Partnerships such as TiVo Ads and Nexxen are helping bring home-screen inventory into the programmatic environments buyers already know, supporting more streamlined audience targeting, activation and measurement.
Creative barriers are also coming down. Advertisers don’t necessarily need to begin with an elaborate bespoke home-screen takeover. Existing CTV video assets can provide a starting point, allowing brands to test the environment before investing in more customised executions. That transition matters.
To become mainstream, the home screen must fit more naturally into the way advertisers already plan and buy television.
From channel planning to moment planning
Perhaps the bigger shift isn’t about creating another advertising channel at all. The home screen sits across several established categories. It can drive discovery for entertainment, build awareness for brands, extend reach around live sports and create direct paths into content. Its value comes from the moment it occupies.
For years, advertisers have paid premiums for the first position in an ad pod or for placement alongside the most valuable content. The home screen moves that competition one step earlier.
As programmatic access expands, targeting improves and measurement becomes more sophisticated, the question may no longer be whether the home screen belongs on the CTV plan. It may be how much value advertisers place on reaching the viewer before they’ve decided what to watch. Because increasingly, the battle for attention doesn’t start when the content begins. It starts when the screen turns on.
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