A Guide to Evaluating a Linear TV and CTV Advertising Partner

1. Three partner types exist: omnichannel agencies, self-serve platforms, and TV specialists.
   
   
2. Ask five questions: how they buy inventory, manage cross-channel frequency, approach TV creative, handle attribution, and prove incrementality.
   
   
3. Watch for red flags like single-model attribution, vague inventory sourcing, no creative strategy, and inability to shift budget mid-campaign.
   
   
4. The right fit depends on your budget, team, and goals and often changes as your TV spend scales.
   

More brands are exploring TV than ever, and more agencies and platforms are chasing your attention because of it.  

Connected TV ad spend is on track to hit $37 billion in 2026, up almost 18% from last year, and self-serve platforms have popped up seemingly everywhere to capitalize on the opportunity. Even linear TV has been surprisingly resilient, with $48 billion in ad spend this year plus attention around the enduring impact of live sports. 

But as a marketer evaluating potential TV solutions, vendors can start to blend together after the third or fourth pitch. You just want a way to know what’s right for your brand. 

This guide makes that easier. It breaks the TV advertising space into three types of partners, the specific questions worth asking each, and red flags to avoid.  

3 Types of Linear TV and CTV Partners 

TV partners typically fall into one of three operating models. They all come with trade-offs. The right fit depends on budget, your team's bandwidth, how quickly you need to be in-market, and what you’re trying to achieve on TV.

1. The omnichannel media agency. This agency can run TV campaigns alongside your paid social, search, and display. One relationship for coverage across your whole marketing mix.

• Pros: You're not adding a new vendor just for TV. The same partner who handles your digital can fold TV into the mix, which is appealing if your team lacks resources to manage multiple relationships.

• Cons: TV isn't the specialty. Odds are they're white labeling someone else's DSP rather than using technology purpose-built for TV. Creative strategy may be designed for digital, not screen-on-wall TV.

2. The self-serve platform. DSPs and self-serve CTV platforms give you access to programmatic CTV inventory. Your team owns strategy, measurement, and optimization. The platform provides access and a reporting dashboard.

• Pros: Small budget minimums mean this is a low-risk way to test CTV. A good fit if you have a team with TV experience who can manage the platform while filling in expertise gaps.

• Cons: This is usually a starting point, not a full TV strategy. Brands often test here, then move to an agency once they're ready for a bigger, linear-inclusive buy, or keep the platform around for a specific job like retargeting. You will likely need separate creative and measurement partners.

3. The TV specialist. An agency that only does TV and CTV, full stop, combining both forms of TV under one strategy. Strategy, creative, and measurement are all built around TV specifically.

• Pros: Everything is built for TV from the ground up. Nothing gets stitched together after the fact or pulled from a digital playbook.

• Cons: TV-only means you’ll need in-house support or a separate partner to manage your other marketing channels.

5 Questions to Ask a TV Agency

These are the questions worth asking in any TV partner conversation.

1. How do you buy media inventory: programmatic or direct? A partner buying TV through a programmatic supply path has access to a fraction of total linear inventory. Ideally, you want a partner with both programmatic capabilities and direct network and publisher relationships, giving them access to premium programming at the best possible rates.
   
   
2. How do you control frequency across linear and CTV households? Controlling frequency means knowing which households saw your ad on linear vs. CTV, then making buying decisions in real time. This clarity should extend to measurement. TV partners should provide deduplicated reach that avoids double-counting households engaged through both linear and Connected TV.
   
   
3. How do you approach TV creative? TV creative isn't the same as digital video. Look for a partner with creatives dedicated to TV rather than a general “video” team applying digital instincts to a 30-second spot. They should be able to explain how they approach message structure, pacing, and calls to action, and pretest creative before it airs. Creative quality has the single largest impact on ad effectiveness, so it's worth understanding their process.
   
   
4. How do you handle TV attribution? Ask what measurement models the partner uses, and how they handle the differences between linear TV's individual-level impression counting and CTV's household-level counting. Any partner relying solely on last-touch attribution for a TV campaign is systematically undervaluing linear and overvaluing CTV's direct response contribution.
   
   
5. How do you isolate TV's incremental impact? A last-touch dashboard can tell you what happened during a campaign, but not what wouldn't have happened without it. Watch for overly long attribution windows since they'll take credit for purchases that would’ve happened regardless. Ask the TV partner if they run matched market or holdout tests to prove incrementality, and whether they can show TV's halo effect on other channels like search and direct traffic.
   
   

Red Flags in the TV Partner Evaluation Process 

The following are warning signs in the partner review process.

1. Single-model attribution. If a partner grades its own work with one attribution model, every campaign will look like it worked. The standard is multiple measurement models. Even better if you can bring in a third-party measurement solution to audit performance.
   
   
2. Vague answers about where CTV inventory comes from. Low-quality inventory, like long-tail apps, made-for-advertising sites with a video player, or non-premium placements labeled as CTV, can hide behind a cheap CPM. Efficient pricing isn’t a red flag on its own. What matters is whether a partner can tell you exactly which publishers and apps are in the buy, and whether they have ad fraud and brand safety guardrails in place.
   
   
3. No conversations about creative. Partners who lead with media placements and treat creative as an afterthought are missing a key part of the formula for success on TV.
   
   
4. No response to the frequency question. Managing frequency across linear and CTV is hard. No clear plan usually means it isn't being done.
   
   
5. Treating linear or CTV as the whole plan. A partner who talks about CTV like it replaced linear is missing half the opportunity. Linear still delivers reach CTV can't match on its own, especially with older, affluent audiences, and CTV fills in where linear alone falls short. If a partner leads with one channel and treats the other as an afterthought, their strategy was probably built around what they sell, not what your audience actually watches.
   
   
6. No ability to shift budget once a campaign is live. Some TV agencies still lock in inventory months in advance and can't move budget once performance data comes in. Ask how often they reallocate spend and what could trigger a shift mid-flight.
   
   

What TV or CTV agency is right for me? 

Your TV partner should grow with you. 

The right partner for your first TV campaign may not be the right partner for your fifth. Brands that start on a self-serve platform to prove CTV works often graduate to a TV specialist or omnichannel agency once they're ready to scale. Brands that start with an omnichannel agency for convenience may eventually split TV out once it's important enough to warrant dedicated focus.

Treat this less as a permanent decision and more as a fit for where your business and marketing goals stand today.

Where does Marketing Architects fit in?

Marketing Architects is a TV specialist that treats linear and Connected TV as two forms of the same channel. Backed by our media-buying AI, Annika, and a unique agency model where clients only pay for media, we’ve been helping brands grow for nearly 30 years.

If you're evaluating partners with the questions in this guide, ask us the same ones. We'd rather earn the fit than assume it. Connect with our team to get started.