Where Savvy Brands Are Moving Budget in 2026 with Matt Giannetti, Senior Director, Head of Platform at Tatari (CTV Mini-Series Episode #4)

0:00TV is back and I don't mean the TV you grew up watching. I'm talking about TV as a performance channel. Measurable, scalable, and finally accessible to brands of all sizes. I'm partnering with Tatari to pull back the curtain on what it actually looks like to run TV like a modern marketer. We're talking linear, streaming, CTV, all of it in one place. Here's how we're structuring this. We're going from zero to hero. Growth brands testing TV for the first time, mid-market brands scaling what's working, enterprise brands building full brand strategies, and yes, Super Bowl campaigns. And then we're getting tactical on how you can plan and budget for TV in 2026.

0:44TV has always been a performance channel. Markers are just catching up to what's possible, and Tatari is the platform making it happen. They give growth teams access to all of TV and let them evaluate it the same way they evaluate paid search or paid social. No black boxes, no guessing, just results you can tie back to your business. This is the TV series for marketers who are done leaving this channel on the table. Excited to dive in. Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies.

1:27The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. We are back with another episode of the Marketing Millennials. And this episode is our fourth episode, and we're focusing on how modern TV really works. Debunking common advertising myths and revealing winning strategies brands use to overcome today's biggest TV challenges. And I'm here with Matt from Tatari. We're going to talk everything TV. Welcome, Matt, to the podcast. Hey. I want to get kicked off. Just give a little background who you are so people have context of where the conversation is coming from.

2:13Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Matt Gianetti. I'm the senior director of our platform services team at Tatari. So my team and I work with our self-service brands. We help them to onboard and train. We help them with building strategy and then ultimately just helping them to use TV as a measurable performance channel. Amazing. So Matt, one thing I've noticed talking to marketers is that a TV platform that they're using can mean very different things depending who you ask. Some solutions are very programmatic CTV focused, others are linear first, and some like Tatari are trying to bring everything together.

2:56From your perspective, what are modern TV platforms actually enabling brands to do today they couldn't do, let's say, a few years ago? Yeah, yeah, no, that's a great question. So I would say simply put, modern TV platforms are making TV behave much more like digital today. So if you think historically, TV required big budgets. There was manual workflows, slow feedback loops. and at the end of the day, your measurement was probably around impressions and reach and frequency. It didn't tell you a lot about conversions or site traffic. So yeah, today, the modern TV platform allows marketers to plan and optimize around performance targets like CPA.

3:44You can use AI to build TV media plans probably in a matter of minutes, right? And then maybe most importantly, the platform provides access to the full spectrum of TV, which we would say includes both streaming and linear all in one place. In this series, I've been talking to a lot of different brands from different TV maturity levels, from like gross stage brands coming from their first test budgets to mid-market to end-price advertisers spending$10 million and above. From what you're seeing, how should the playbook evolve as brands move up the curve from growth stage to enterprise? Yeah, yeah.

4:26So I would say the playbook, it really evolves depending on where you're at in terms of the brand's TV maturity. So for newer brands, like, for example, Gab, who you had on earlier in this series, it's really about testing smart. You want to bias toward quick learnings and just start to optimize quickly around what's driving the results for you. And then you start to build up a little bit more spend and you get in the mid-market stage, probably somewhere around$200K per month. That's when you really want to hone in on fine-tuning your optimizations, I would say. So at that stage, it's about creative iteration.

5:05What's the balance between linear and streaming? and maybe you're even adding new tactics such as retargeting. And then you're jumping up to the big leagues, right? And you're somewhere around the enterprise spend level, which is probably around a million dollars a month. That's when you need to really start focusing on brand-centric metrics alongside your performance metrics. So this is when you start looking at things like incremental reach and aided awareness. And then you can also start leaning into bigger opportunities like tentpole events in live sports. That becomes critical for your TV campaign.

5:44An extreme example of this is the Super Bowl. And I have to take a second just to plug to Tari. We had five clients in the Super Bowl this year. So I think it really goes to show you that a modern TV platform should be there for brands across every stage of the journey and help them really evolve in that single platform. So if I'm summing all this up, the TV playbook is early on, you're proving that TV works. In the middle, you're optimizing how it works. And then once you're at scale, you're maximizing TV's broader impact on your business. Which is, I think, it's funny because when people think about TV, they only think about the big brands and they only doing brand awareness campaigns but tv is actually a very performance driven channel at first in the first two stages you're caring less about they are top of funnel things you could do but even the top of funnel need to drive some sort of results and these big brands now when you get to 10 million above or 5 million above you then you start thinking, okay, how can I invest in some brand awareness campaigns?

7:03But you hear when you hear TV, you think, oh, it's only a brand awareness channel. We're not going to see results. I can't test it. I mean, that's what you've been hearing for the last five years or 10 years when people think TV is a channel. Yeah. Yeah. You don't need large budgets and you should really hold your TV platform accountable for performance metrics, just like you are for any of your other performance bottom funnel marketing channels like search and social. I want to rapid fire some things we hear from brands and marketers all the time. Tell me whether they're true or false or what the reality actually is.

7:45So I can reach my audience by running only streaming. Yeah, this one's mostly false. At least it's incomplete. So streaming is obviously a super critical part of the TV ecosystem. We all talk about it today. But don't forget, traditional linear still represents about half of where viewers watch TV and half of the TV inventory. So if you're only focusing on streaming, you're literally missing out on potentially half of your customers you could be reaching on TV. And it's also really important to understand that linear is where a lot of the big cultural moments still live on TV. Again, things like live sports, tentpole events, major broadcasts, all of those have to be bought through a linear TV network in large part.

8:38And a good example of this, there's a common misconception here, and I think this is a good example to kind of dispel. it is let's say you're watching the NBA playoffs on Hulu Live or YouTube TV. You're a cord cutter, right? You might think that those ads that you're seeing are streaming inventory, right? But actually, in large part, that would be wrong. In reality, the majority of those ads are probably sold through linear TV networks and through a linear TV rep. And then that gets distributed over these streaming platforms. So for you as a marketer, from your perspective, if you want to tap into that inventory, you have to speak to a linear network.

9:21You have to negotiate with a linear rep. And so if you're not partnering with a platform that allows you that direct access to both blend linear and streaming, then you could very much be missing out on a large part of TV and a premium part of TV. And I bet if you're mostly probably paying a little more than you should be paying if you don't have someone negotiating on your behalf on some of these moments. Exactly. That's a great point. Yeah. I mean, Tatari, we've been negotiating with these networks for over 10 years, right? We have great inroads, great relationships. So I would recommend not trying to do that on your own and relying on a platform or a partner like that.

10:04The next thing I want to say that I hear a lot of people say is TV can't be measured like marketing or performance media. Yeah, yeah. No, this one's false as well. And I hope we're able to dispel this myth during this podcast. TV is absolutely measurable like a performance media today. You can plan, measure, optimize all based on CPA and ROAS. You can make near real-time optimizations on that. So I would say it's really just a matter of partnering with the right platform that gives you the necessary tools to execute on this. Next, we're going down this as we're rapid firing. We're trying at least.

10:46If I'm buying through a DSP, then I don't need a TV platform like Tartari. Yeah, this one's false as well. This is one I'm pretty passionate about as well. I think, again, it is a pretty common misconception. for performance marketers who are stepping into TV for the first time. DSPs, they are definitely useful tools to buy programmatic CTV, but they were never actually designed to operate the entire TV ecosystem. So just for context, I'll start off. DSP stands for Demand Side Platform. It's a digital buying tool. It was originally created for automating the purchase of display inventory. And today in the CTV world, it does work very well for targeted streaming campaigns.

11:37But there's inherently challenges with that. The fact that it's only buying programmatic CTV means again, you're limiting the amount of TV inventory that you're accessing. I would say programmatic CTV probably represents around 20 % of the available TV inventory. So you're literally unable to tap into 80 % of the TV inventory if you're only running on a DSP. And again, DSPs do not buy into linear TV. And we talked about how linear is super critical for a TV campaign, especially in terms of the premium opportunities and live sports. And then there's another side of sort of concerns with DSPs that's surrounded around fees and supply transparency or the lack thereof, and occasional fraud that you have to deal with.

12:29And that's very difficult to avoid, actually, when you're buying through a DSP. So if I'm wrapping this up, I think it just goes to show that brands and marketers should really be trying to partner with a TV-first platform. So again, I'll give a plug. At Tatari, we have a product called Upstream that is all direct server-to-server integrations with publishers. So you have that direct relationship. There's no intermediaries. And as a TV first platform, again, we're buying across both linear and streaming of access to the full spectrum of TV. Yeah. And I think, I mean, we said this at the beginning, this is also like a misconception of what TV actually is.

13:15When you think DSP is the only thing you could do a TV or street like linear is the only thing I could do for TV, there's actually solutions to do. all these in one place where I think that's like, I have to get a DSP to do these buys, or I have to talk to a special rep to do linear. And this is all, that's why people I think are confused and don't jump into TV because there's so many misconceptions in the industry of what TV actually is and how do I buy a TV and how does it actually work? Yeah. Yeah. It feels fragmented. It feels kind of foreign to performance advertisers. I get that. But yeah, there's platforms out there that can really simplify it for you.

13:59Question. Some ad tech platforms are throwing out crazy free media credit offers right now. From a brand's perspective, what should marketers watch out for from those offers? And why might they end up costing more in the long term? Yeah, no, another great question. We're starting to hear this more and more. And, you know, what's the saying? Nothing in life is free, right? These free TV credits, they sound great. But in reality, these partners are probably not going to lose money on this deal, right? So it's important as a marketer, as a brand, to pay attention to what's actually being offered here.

14:40So I would say look out for things like hidden fees, lower quality placements of inventory, and even sometimes commitments that could extend beyond the promo period that just might not fit into your long-term strategy. And so our advice at Tartari would be to ask simple questions around these things. What's the CPM? Where are my ads going to run? How are you making money off of this? And if these platforms, they can't give you straightforward answers on this, then I think you have to really consider that even with these ad credits, it's very possible you're not going to generate the results you want or get the learnings that you want to really help kickstart a long-term sustainable TV campaign.

15:27Yeah, I think that's also a good point of what questions to ask when something is free. Like, is it free because I'm getting lower quality placements? Is there like a hidden tax that is a part of this or fee? Like you said, it's never really free anything when a brand gives you something. It's a marketing tactic at the end of the day. Yeah, exactly. I mean, everyone listening to this is probably a marketer. They know that a buy one, get one promotion does not necessarily mean that they're losing money on that. Right. So it's the same here, I would say. and also it's funny because you say that like when you go to a store and you get buy one get one most of the times you only need to buy one of the products and you don't need to like or like it says like the next one they buy three and get but you really could just they buy one and it forces you to buy more uh so it's sneaky these tactics exactly um i also talked to a lot of marketers and brands that specifically live in search or paid social.

16:46And a lot of their pain points I see is like rising costs, algorithm volatility, creative fatigue. There's a lot of attribution problems. When you sit down with these type of marketers, how do you reposition TV from, let's say, a nice-to-have awareness channel to an actual performance lever that can help fix some of their problems? Yeah. Yeah. No, those are the common problems that we talk about. And I think when we sit down, we like to frame TV as it can literally be a pressure release valve for all of those problems. If you think about it, marketers run into issues where CACs are rising on meta and Google and platforms like that.

17:36When that happens, you have two options. You could keep bidding on that platform for those same people, or you can generate new demand. That's where I really think TV shines and comes in. It can be this entirely new pool of potential audience or customers for you. So, you know, TV really helps expand your top of funnel, your awareness consideration, and that can actually really improve the efficiency of your lower funnel channels. So we oftentimes see that TV drives measurable lifts in things like branded search, direct traffic, and actually the conversion rates of your platform's campaigns in Meta and Google, as an example, those can increase as well, given the awareness and consideration increase that TV has provided.

18:24So yeah, I would say instead of fighting in that same auction inventory in this platform, expand that pool, right? Expand who you're putting your brand in front of and who's actively looking for your brand. And I'll give you an example. One of our clients is Rocket Money. You may have seen their ads. They definitely are very pervasive. They started testing TV with us a few years ago because they were hitting a point of saturation in their social. And they're very interested and focused on their measurements. So once they were able to hone in measurement of TV and get comfortable with that, they were able to really scale.

19:06So we saw them like 5X their budget in a relatively short period of time. And they liked it so much that they actually brought that media in-house. So now they're one of our sort of longest standing self-service customers as well. yeah i definitely see rockin money everywhere um and they have a good budgeting app and i think i saw the budgeting app from tv and you always see the the mortgage stuff too all over the place so um they definitely do a good job because i know like they have good brand awareness and i know what it is and i've i've looked at it a couple times to um do things so i yeah that's that's super cool i also want to talk about i mean talking going on the subject of how like Rocket Money is very big on measuring things.

19:53And I know this is a big problem when people go to TV, they think they can't measure TV. So what are the hardest things brands struggle with when trying to prove TV's impact internally? And how does a platform like Tatari solve that? You know, I think this could be one of the largest challenges. It's not the largest challenge to sort of a brand solidifying a long-term TV campaign. So I would love it if every time a new brand launched with us, their sales spiked immediately and it was a one-to-one correlation and everybody was happy and the impact of TV was obvious. But the reality is that that can't always happen.

20:36It might happen here and there, but it doesn't always happen that way. And actually, TV is more nuanced and can be actually challenging a bit to measure. You know, obviously, new performance marketers coming to TV are probably used to a last-click attribution model, as that's, you know, pretty common in search and social. And TV doesn't really have a click-through, right? So, if you try to utilize that methodology, you're really going to highly undervalue the impact of TV. And so what I would say at Tattari, what we do, and I think what's most important for brands to really think about it is partnering with a company that provides a more holistic measurement approach and a dashboard that's more holistic.

21:24So at Tattari specifically, we try to triangulate performance across a number of metrics. Things like incremental CPA, view through CPA. We can even show you the attributable Amazon purchases from your TV campaign or the purchase lift in your retail sales. A truly holistic view into TV's impact on your business. And these results can be powerful. I'll give you another example. One of our clients, Calm, they reported that they saw a 27 % lift in incremental installs and a reduced CAC by more than 50 % when they started running their convergent TV strategy across linear and streaming. So it goes to show the impact.

22:11Calm has some of the best dads. They meditate for a little bit in the middle of a stressful game or stuff like that. It's super smart. I also think that we are moving in a society where zero-click marketing is actually becoming more and more prevalent with AI and all this stuff. So like being able to, like you setting up measurement to four zero click channels, not every is the way to go because not everybody's clicking and not everybody's going to go to your site through a click or through a direct click on an advertising. in they're going to see something and then go to it so you really should set up your marketing around like incremental lifts and not only last last click model so i i like that you guys do that for your uh clients um so what are the next steps for brand that wants to get into tv is it timeline or is it creative or what is it?

23:18How do you define what success looks like? Yeah. So when I think about this, I think it's easy to frame it in a three-step plan. So the first is obviously you want to define your test. You should pick a KPI. I think as a rule of thumb, we often say you can use your meta prospecting CPA as your goal for TV. And then you also want to obviously decide on a budget. We would probably say somewhere around 50K over four weeks at minimum is a good level to ensure that you're getting stats, take results and a clean read across a number of testing dimensions. And then from there, the second step is probably to produce a creative, obviously.

24:06And a lot of marketers might get hung up on this. They want to make it perfect out of the gate. They want their Super Bowl spot right away, right? That's maybe a misconception that TV needs that. And that's not the case. We definitely see a lot of brands are able to repurpose video content that they have as low-hanging fruit. There's a lot of AI creative production companies that can help. They're very quick to use. They typically use good rules of thumb and best practices for generating TV creatives that can perform well. So it's not a huge investment, actually, I think, to get your creative produced and ready for TV.

24:44And then finally, from there, obviously, you want to launch and you want to learn. So I would say think about it like any performance channel. Define success for your campaign as easy as just finding what's working, right? Identifying the pockets of inventory that perform the best, lean into that, and kind of test and iterate from there. I think you did make a good point. I think that, and you've debunked it in this right now, but I think what most marketers worry about with TV, not only that it's expensive channel or it's hard to access or I don't know where, but they are saying, like, I'm really only creating creative for Meta and Google and I don't have enough time to do creative for TV and it's going to make me have to go find an influencer or an actor and it's going to be a two to three day shoot and I'm going to spend 100k on it and then it's going to blow through my budget and that's what you hear a lot when it comes to like I want to run TV.

25:55So I'm glad you, but I've also seen like comms ad probably cost near to nothing to run that ad and it's probably performing amazingly. Um, so there are people like calm and brands like that who debunk that all the time by running easy, quick creative that, um, pulls people in. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we, we talked about the three stages of the TV journey and the playbook. I honestly, I think the first two stages you can get away with, you know, pretty quick, relatively price efficient creatives that you generated. Right. And yeah, like you said, Calm is used a really savvy way, a creative way to generate something that was probably super price efficient and went crazy for them, for their brand.

26:45Yeah. I mean, we talked to Manscaped last episode and they were at the level where they are like, okay, now we want to change perception of our product and do a brand play. let's invest in a creative, but they, they were only at that stage, but they have a bunch of DR stuff everywhere. That's not highly produced, highly actor, highly, um, Superbowl level quality, um, creative. Yeah. Yeah. They've done a great job for sure. Um, lastly, where could people like, how does one start the process with TV today, especially with Tatari if they want to, let's say, start their first test or access the channel?

27:31So you can reach out to us in a number of ways. Obviously, LinkedIn is like the professional network is a great way to do that. You can tap me, tap anybody else in your network that works at Tatari. You can go to our website. There's sort of onboarding forms that you can fill out. But yeah, I think it's all about starting a conversation. And, you know, likely you'll chat with someone at Tartari that can give you some consultative advice on the best way to approach TV and make it, you know, sort of relevant for where your brand currently is in your marketing journey. And, you know, kind of start planning and iterating from there.

28:17Well, thank you for coming on and debunking some myths that people have with TV and showing that it actually is a channel that people should test out in 2026 and beyond and that it actually is a performance channel. It's not just a brand channel or a big brand access channel or you need expensive creative or you can access it at every level of your journey from growth to all the way up to enterprise. So thank you so much. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. thanks so much for listening keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world if you haven't ready make sure to subscribe and follow the marketing millennials podcast on apple podcasts spotify youtube or wherever you get your podcasts and if you like what you hear i would greatly appreciate you giving us a five-star rating it helps bring more marketers into our community Thank you.