Originally posted on The Drum.
What comes next for CTV now its scale problem has largely been solved? Elizabeth Neubauer-Donovan, EVP, head of retail & commerce networks & growth monetization at Acxiom, and Nicolas Carpino, director, business development at Acxiom, explore how identity and commerce intelligence turn CTV from a channel built primarily for reach into one capable of smarter decisioning, activation and measurement.
In the worlds of adtech and martech, it feels like inflection points are practically a weekly event. But there’s no denying that connected TV (CTV) has now reached one.
A huge 83% of US adults use streaming services, and the explosion of advertising-based video on demand means advertisers can now reach households at an unprecedented scale. CTV upfront commitments overtook primetime linear TV for the first time in 2026, with US CTV ad spend approaching $38bn. Meanwhile, 75% of CTV inventory is now transacted programmatically, and self-serve tools have lifted the share of small spenders investing in CTV from 60% in 2024 to 85% in 2026. CTV is no longer the preserve of large corporations.
With CTV’s early reach problem solved, the next challenge is making that reach intelligent – that is, understanding the audience’s journey before, during and after impressions. Now advertisers need a reliable way to recognize people or households across channels, combined with behavioral signals rich enough to act on.
Identity as the connective tissue
Today, CTV largely relies on IP addresses or a loose household match that ultimately isn’t targeting anyone. But improvements in identity infrastructure are beginning to change that.
Privacy regulations make building an identity infrastructure quite complex, with more than 20 US states now enforcing or introducing comprehensive privacy laws. While Google stepped back from deprecating third-party cookies, the problem of fragmentation remains. Display still leans on unstable cookie infrastructure, for example, and retail media runs largely on first-party data that isn’t standardized across networks. DOOH and podcasts struggle to verify exposure at all. CTV sits in the middle of this, connected to other channels but reliant on its own patchwork of identifiers.
The industry response has been a wave of investment in privacy-conscious identity infrastructure, from universal IDs to data clean rooms. Done well, this infrastructure means a household or individual can be recognized responsibly wherever they show up.
Although identity reduces dependence on IP addresses, it’s only really valuable if used to connect signals that historically existed in isolation. Connecting media exposure with first-party, behavioral and commerce signals gives marketers a more complete view of the consumer journey and creates a stronger foundation for activation and measurement.
Acxiom’s identity and data are coming together with ReachTV’s media network, in an omnichannel retail media network reaching more than 50 million travelers monthly across 90 US airports. The network links mobile, location, behavioral and media signals to help advertisers reach relevant audiences and measure performance.
Commerce intelligence changes the decision process
Commerce intelligence enables marketers to build audiences based on category affinity, shopping intent and purchase recency. Combined with identity frameworks to carry that context across channels, these signals increase message relevance and enable measurement that reflects business outcomes.
Commerce media is well beyond the experimental phase, with investment in the US to reach $142bn by 2030, close to a quarter of all digital ad spend. Retail media is forecast to account for around $73bn of that, increasingly driven by sectors outside traditional retail, including finance and healthcare. For CTV buyers, these commerce signals help value inventory by what happens after the ad runs, not just how often.
Frequency management is indicative of commerce intelligence in action. A viewer with strong existing category affinity or recent purchase intent doesn’t need the same repetition as a cold prospect, turning frequency into a function of what’s known about the viewer. Campaigns informed by behavioral and commerce data tend to convert better, while those without frequency discipline waste CTV budget on over-exposure.
Retargeting is another practical use case. When a household member browses a product category or abandons a cart on a brand’s website, they can be added to a high-intent audience and see that brand’s ads while streaming CTV, nudging them along the purchase path.
Overall, knowing more about a viewer changes where, how and how often a brand should show up.
Measuring what matters
None of this counts for much if measurement stays anchored to reach and completion rates, which say little about whether a campaign moved the business forward.
Here, the industry still has ground to make up. The IAB’s State of Data 2026 report cites privacy regulation, signal loss, platform-embedded optimization and fragmented data as reasons marketers struggle to connect exposure to outcomes. Its fix is integration: marketing mix modeling (MMM), attribution, incrementality testing and finance data working together to produce auditable, decision-ready recommendations tied to business outcomes. Identity and commerce intelligence are built to close that gap, giving marketers a consistent thread from exposure to purchase.
Beyond CTV
This intelligence layer’s value doesn’t stop at the TV screen. The same identity and commerce signals that sharpen CTV decisioning can inform retail media, digital and search, so every channel joins one coordinated journey.
That coordination matters more as commerce media diversifies beyond the retail giants into new industries, multiplying the signals available and making them more portable. But portability only helps if signals survive a fragmented landscape, where performance data sits in different formats across platforms. A shared identity and commerce layer carries them across that divide.
As media fragments, the marketers who pull ahead won’t necessarily have the biggest budgets or widest reach. They’ll treat identity and commerce signals as the connective layer running from planning and activation through measurement and monetization. CTV proved that scale was solvable. The next phase of streaming will be won by whoever makes that scale count.