As traditional TV networks shift their focus from linear broadcasting to streaming platforms such as Paramount+, Peacock and Disney+, much of the effort has centered on attracting big-budget advertisers. The next phase of streaming’s growth lies in bringing in small and mid-sized brands—businesses that have traditionally stayed away from TV advertising due to limited budgets, expertise or creative resources.

Brands such as Backbone, which created a gaming controller that attaches to smartphones, and Kencko, a maker of instant smoothie powders, have been entering TV for the first time via buying platforms meant to mirror those used by small and mid-sized brands to advertise on Meta and Google.

Despite platforms’ efforts to simplify the complexities of TV advertising, getting started still requires “a big leap of faith” to prime a brand’s marketing for a new medium, said Maneet Khaira, CEO of Backbone. 

“There’s always the inherent risk that you’re just lighting money on fire,” said Khaira. But, given the growth in tools for performance marketers to enter streaming advertising, “this is the first time in years where there have been new channels that [advertisers] can really rely on, besides Meta and Google and others that are bought on a performance basis.”

The goal for TV media companies is that as TV goes digital, it should be able to bring in the advertiser load of digital platforms such as Meta and Google, which service millions of advertisers of all sizes, and in this year’s third quarter alone, pulled in $39.89 billion and $65.85 billion in ad revenue, respectively. This compares to $3.35 billion and $2.17 billion reported over the same quarter for NBCUniversal and Paramount, respectively (Disney does not break out ad revenue in its quarterly reports).

More from Ad Age Datacenter: Walt Disney Co.’s ad spending

As such, these media companies, as well as others in the connected TV space, have rolled out self-serve buying platforms for their streaming ad inventory meant to mirror the ease of purchasing inventory on Instagram. Paramount Ads Manager launched this summer, Peacock Ad Manager debuted in 2022 and Hulu Ad Manager (now named Disney Campaign Manager) hit the market in 2020.

Ella Leung, director of automated sales at Disney, said a shift occurred during the pandemic, when small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMB) experienced immense growth as e-commerce capabilities quickly expandsed while consumers were in lockdown.

“Businesses that were only spending on social channels like Instagram and TikTok during that time were increasing their budgets and were ready to grow their brand and, when growing their brand, were expanding to CTV,” said Leung.

The utility for media companies doesn’t end with SMB marketers. In Disney’s quest to automate 75% of its ad business by 2027, the company also intends to migrate its largest advertisers and agencies to buying through Disney Campaign Manager. 

As such, Disney, Roku and other self-serve platforms offer both buying by credit card and traditional invoicing. Disney Campaign Manager requires as little as $500 to get started, and Roku’s platform has no minimum cost. Disney Campaign Manager has also launched capabilities to support managing multiple campaigns across multiple brands at once for large advertisers running marketing for multiple businesses, and can incorporate self-serve buying into upfront deals.

One holding company media buyer, who spoke with Ad Age on condition of anonymity, said that their agency has not utilized media companies’ owned buying platforms in dealmaking, but that they have utility, in theory. For example, the buyer said in the shift to buying and measuring streaming and linear TV inventory together rather than as part of siloed budgets, self-serve platforms can offer clients better visibility into cross-platform buys with a media company.

Another example, according to Leung, is a major coffee brand that wanted to buy Disney inventory at a national level while tailoring campaigns to various markets. To do that, the brand can use Disney Campaign Manager to target specific geographies and easily iterate its ads for each one.

Last year, 4,200 unique advertisers bought Disney inventory via its self-serve platform. This year, Disney has begun rolling out the capability globally and it launched access to Disney+ inventory this month. To prioritize capturing business in the self-serve market, Disney combined its programmatic and self-serve teams to create a broader automation team, which it has grown 50% this year.

And more action continues in the space—Roku launched its ads manager in September after a year in beta, and Netflix has announced plans to roll out an in-house buying platform next year. With the launch of ads on Prime Video this year, Amazon has also updated its DSP with more options for SMB marketers looking to enter streaming that will continue to roll out into 2025.

Roku declined to share information on the early growth of its self-serve platform but Peter Hamilton, senior director of ad innovation at Roku, said that the CTV company has seen unexpectedly high repeat business through Roku Ads Manager since its recent launch.

Additional platforms come in the form of third-party aggregators such as Mntn and Vibe, which mediate buying for performance marketers across multiple channels.

‘Renaissance moment’

In the first half of 2024, 169 advertisers bought national TV inventory for the first time, according to a new survey from the VAB. This represents over $380 million in spend, with the majority (67%) spending less than $500,000.

Both Disney’s Leung and Roku’s Hamilton said advertisers using their companies’ platforms run the gamut of local to national buying, as well as level of spend.

The opportunity for new-to-TV marketers is immense, said Backbone’s Khaira, calling this holiday season a “renaissance moment” for brands to be able to meaningfully access streaming inventory efficiently. Backbone was an early user for Roku Ads Manager, which took about two days to onboard in-house and get ads running, said Khaira, adding that the brand had done about eight test campaigns on Roku before beginning to run larger buys.

Read more: Holiday marketing trends—watch brands’ TV ads

Before getting into TV, Backbone primarily advertised in digital media such as Meta, TikTok, Google and Amazon’s retail channels. As the brand has recently been expanding its sales with more retailers, it wanted to advertise on TV to reach larger swaths of shoppers.

Late last year, the brand bought its first ad on linear TV, which ran during “Good Morning America.” Backbone used a small performance-oriented media agency to get started in TV, but Khaira said the effort didn’t justify the results—linear TV proved too difficult to measure the impact on sales, and the added fees associated with outsourcing the buying to an agency would limit the brand’s ability to invest further.

Backbone chose to try again, this time going at it in-house with Roku’s self-serve platform, which Khaira said it picked as a top choice given the CTV operator’s access to both owned and third-party inventory as well as its broad reach (47% of U.S. streaming happens on a Roku device, per Comscore).

Roku Ads Manager was also built with first-time TV advertisers in mind, said Hamilton. The platform was developed to prioritize reporting on performance metrics such as conversions, and is unique in offering tools such as the integration of Shopify Checkout to enable performance marketers to launch shoppable ads. Its automated audience optimization was developed for ease of use as new marketers run campaigns, similar to Meta’s tools.

Khaira said that Backbone had also tested self-serve platforms from other media companies, such as Disney and NBCU, and found that Roku’s was the easiest to transition to from buying on Meta and Google’s services. Additionally, Khaira views Roku’s inventory as similar to a third-party service that would aggregate CTV inventory for SMBs but without third-party fees, given the inventory is owned by Roku and with direct data from the platform.

Roku’s self-serve platform integrates Shopify Checkout to enable performance marketers to launch shoppable ads. For Backbone, “we can see cleanly that this ad resulted in this purchase in a way that we couldn’t with similar linear TV buys,” said Khaira.

Since the brand launched in 2021, “this is the first time that we’re actually, in a meaningful way, altering our media mix and seeing good results,” said Khaira.

Similarly, Kencko’s marketing has historically relied on Instagram as well as emails, said Pedro Conceição, director of growth, Kencko. Rather than going through a media company’s buying platform, the smoothie powder brand used Mntn, a self-serve platform that aggregates CTV inventory with performance advertisers in mind. 

The Portugal-based health brand ran a U.S. campaign from September to October tied to its expansion into Walmart, looking to raise brand awareness alongside the increased retail availability and drive sales. The campaign ran across channels including NBC, Max, CNN, AMC, Discovery Channel, Food Network and “a bunch of Paramount inventory,” said Conceição.

Mntn was the preferred buying platform for Kencko, according to Conceição, because it allowed the brand to match first-party data with Mntn’s own audience segments for extremely precise targeting. The campaign was heavily targeted toward markets surrounding the 3,000 Walmart locations that would carry Kencko’s products.

Conceição said Kencko has not tested additional self-serve platforms, but could see a future in which the brand would take learnings from buys via an aggregator platform to select which media-owned platforms to buy with, such as pivoting to Peacock Ad Manager if Mntn found marketing on that platform had performed best.

However, “if you go from having Mntn, which allows you to access dozens of networks, to now you need to manage a bunch of different networks, then it’s putting the need for resource and being able to manage all of that on the advertiser,” said Conceição. “It becomes an equation of whether it’s just simpler to go with an aggregator like Mntn, or to go directly to the networks, because that could be cheaper, but more time-consuming.”

Conceição said Kencko will continue to advertise on TV, but will select key moments to do so.

Advertisers aren’t alone in shifting to self-serve—agencies contributed to nearly 50% of Disney Campaign Manager’s revenue in 2023, according to the company. Over 1,000 agencies transacted on Disney’s platform, with 85% being new to the company.

Brkthru is a media buying partner for mid-market ad agencies without media offerings, although the company also works with some advertisers directly. Brkthru manages media through several self-serve platforms such as Disney Campaign Manager on behalf of agencies or advertisers to manage buys with multiple media companies at lower prices, said Jonathan Mellinger, president, Brkthru. 

“What’s been most attractive about the content providers building self-service platforms is it allows us to do the curation of the programming and audience development, and match that with our smaller regional subset of clients who wouldn’t necessarily have access to that type of inventory, and we don’t necessarily have access to that inventory all the time through a traditional DSP,” said Mellinger.

Self-serve platforms offer advertisers far greater visibility into available inventory than traditional programmatic platforms and ensure programming doesn’t end up on unvetted channels that can slip through the cracks of mass automation, he said.

The creative conundrum

One major factor in brands’ readiness for TV is developing creative assets ready for TV, or risk flooding viewers’ screens with low-quality advertising. Both Backbone and Kencko created ad spots specifically for TV. Some platforms, such as Amazon’s DSP and Paramount’s ad manager, are incorporating AI tools to convert social assets to match TV formats or generate something new altogether. 

“It’s important for performance marketers to understand that not everything is about optimizing for the short-run, and that to create a solid brand experience and to improve brand perception, we need to invest in higher quality content,” said Conceição.

Rather, brands should consider the context in which they’re running, said Conceição, and how running low-quality ads next to a polished streaming show may have a negative impact on consumer perception, even if it such as did catch viewers’ attention.

Similarly, Backbone’s Khaira said investment in high-quality assets may ultimately even out with search and social assets, which may need to be refreshed numerous times per week. And, as AI tools become more sophisticated, overhead costs for starting in TV marketing will continue to decline.

Recent news: Reactions to Coca-Cola’s new AI holiday TV ads

For media companies, the creative question is also tricky, as consumers are already skeptical of the shift back to ad-supported TV after most streamers launched ad-free for much lower monthly prices than they currently charge for the same experience. Roku’s Hamilton said that making TV advertising more accessible inherently runs that risk, and that viewers may need to become accustomed to seeing new styles of TV ads, whether that’s an increase in social influencer talent or AI-generated animation.

However, Hamilton added that it’s also a process of natural selection, because new-to-TV marketers will learn quickly whether their ads are finding success with viewers, and those that don’t won’t continue to run.