CTV Advertising Introduction
For decades, Indian television advertising ran on one currency: reach. Buy the highest-rated show, maximize Gross Rating Points (GRP), and hope the spend translates into sales. That equation is breaking down.
Connected TV (CTV), the internet-enabled viewing of streaming content on television screens, has moved from an experimental line item to a core part of India’s media plans within a single year. Wimbledon 2026 drew 25 advertisers and 21 categories to CTV, more than double the count on linear television for the same tournament.
The FIFA World Cup 2026 pulled in categories that historically avoided premium sports broadcasting altogether. At the same time, agency executives are openly rejecting completion rates and GRPs as sufficient measures of success, arguing that attention, audience quality, and business outcomes now matter more than raw scale.
Media companies are restructuring too. Zee Entertainment recently unified its broadcast and digital advertising revenue functions under one leader, a signal that advertisers increasingly buy audiences across platforms rather than individual channels.
For students of media economics and advertising, this moment offers a live case study in how a distribution technology reshapes pricing, measurement, and organisational design all at once.
The following sections trace three connected developments: the data showing CTV’s expanding advertiser base, the shift in how sponsorships get priced, and the structural changes inside media companies responding to a converged video market.
The Data: CTV Pulls In a Wider Advertiser Base
TAM Sports Adex data from Wimbledon 2026 shows the clearest evidence yet of CTV’s expanding reach. Star Sports carried the tournament on linear television in India, while JioHotstar streamed it as CTV. CTV featured 21 advertising categories and 25 advertisers, versus 9 categories and 10 advertisers on linear television, even though linear ad volumes themselves rose 30 percent over Wimbledon 2025.
Mutual funds led spending on both platforms, but the categories diverged sharply beyond that. On CTV, liquor, cars, tyres, and watches followed mutual funds. On linear television, tiles and floorings, watches, lubricants, and smartphones rounded out the top categories.
William Grant & Sons India topped CTV advertiser rankings with a 9.7 percent volume share, while ICICI Prudential Asset Management Company led linear television at 8.7 percent.
Timing matters as much as platform choice. During the FIFA World Cup 2026, television advertising volumes in India fell 14 percent, largely because late-night kick-off times reduced advertiser participation. Premium content alone does not guarantee ad spend. Viewing habits and scheduling still decide outcomes.
Despite that decline, LV Krishnan, CEO of TAM Media Research, pointed to improved audience measurement and cross-screen analytics as the drivers of CTV’s next growth phase.
At the Brand World Summit 2026, marketers went further, agreeing that CTV has crossed from an experimental budget line into a standard, mandatory component of media planning. The debate has shifted from whether to invest in CTV to how much of the video budget belongs there.
The Money: Sponsorships Move From Reach to Results
As CTV scales, the way marketers value premium inventory is changing just as fast. Trishul Bhumkar, managing partner at Zenith India, argues CTV cannot be treated as just another digital channel bought on CPMs. It functions as a premium content environment where programming quality and viewing context matter as much as targeting precision.
Anil Suryavamshi, vice president of digital for South and West India at Carat India, describes the new measurement framework as three layers: delivery, quality, and outcome. Delivery metrics like impressions and completion rates are now table stakes, not differentiators. “Completion validates delivery but decides nothing,” Suryavamshi said, adding that marketers who still lead with completion rates are reporting, not measuring.
Quality metrics such as attention and co-viewing carry more weight, and campaign renewals increasingly depend on measurable business outcomes including brand lift, search behavior, and sales. This has changed how media gets bought. Bhumkar says the industry is moving from buying programs to buying the right audiences within the right content environments.
Suryavamshi sees two parallel strategies emerging: large tentpole sponsorships around premium live events, and always-on programmatic audience buying, both run under a single measurement layer. For challenger brands, this shift opens new doors.
Nikhil Doda, co-founder and COO of Lahori Zeera, says brands now ask which audience they want to influence rather than which show has the highest ratings. His company’s “Sip Kar, Pitch Kar” integration during Shark Tank India Season 5 (Sony LIV / Sony Entertainment Television) shows the trend toward native storytelling over simple logo placement. “Brands today want to be part of the story, not just sponsor it,” Doda said.
The Structural Shift: Media Companies Reorganize for Converged Video
The clearest signal of CTV’s maturity may not be a data point at all. It is an organizational chart. Zee Entertainment appointed Prashant Shetty to lead both broadcast and digital advertising revenue under one unified role, ending the traditional split between linear TV sales teams and digital sales teams.
This restructuring reflects how advertisers now think about buying. They increasingly purchase audiences that move across screens, not fixed inventory tied to a single channel. Industry commentary around the move frames it directly.
The future sales conversation is no longer broadcast versus digital. It is unified video. This mirrors what agencies describe on the buying side. India’s fragmented identity ecosystem remains a challenge for audience-based buying.
Even so, the direction is set. As FIFA World Cup 2026 CTV data shows, categories that historically avoided premium sports broadcasting are now participating, and streaming is expanding the total advertising pie rather than simply moving television rupees online.
For India’s ₹40,000 crore television ad market, already under pressure from a weekly ratings suspension disrupting measurement, CTV’s growth offers both a new revenue stream and a new set of planning problems that linear-only teams were never built to solve.
Why This Matters for Media Planning in India
Three insights follow for students and working professionals tracking India’s media economy. First, CTV is not cannibalizing linear television budgets. Wimbledon 2026 saw linear volumes rise 30 percent even as CTV attracted a wider advertiser base, and FIFA World Cup CTV data shows new categories entering premium sports advertising altogether.
Second, measurement is now a competitive differentiator, not a back-office function. Agencies that still report completion rates as their headline metric are, in Suryavamshi’s words, reporting rather than measuring, while brand lift and business outcomes increasingly decide contract renewals.
Third, organizational structure follows strategy. Zee’s decision to merge broadcast and digital revenue leadership under Prashant Shetty shows that unified video planning requires unified sales teams, not parallel departments negotiating separately for the same advertiser budget.
For a country with fragmented audience identity systems and a television market still recovering from a ratings-measurement disruption, these shifts will define which media companies and agencies capture the next wave of advertising growth.
Conclusion
Connected TV’s rise in India is not a single story about streaming stealing television’s audience. It is three stories happening at once: an advertiser base that is genuinely expanding, a measurement framework that is being rebuilt from the ground up, and media organisations restructuring their sales teams to match.
Wimbledon 2026 and the FIFA World Cup 2026 both demonstrate that timing, platform, and content quality now interact in ways linear-only planning never had to account for.
Agencies like Zenith India and Carat India are pushing clients toward outcome-based evaluation, while advertisers like Lahori Zeera are choosing native integration over traditional sponsorship logos.
Meanwhile, Zee’s unified revenue leadership under Prashant Shetty suggests the industry’s next competitive battles will be fought not just over content, but over who can measure and sell audiences across every screen at once.
For India’s ₹40,000 crore television advertising market, still absorbing a ratings-measurement disruption, CTV represents both an opportunity and a test of whether legacy sales structures can adapt fast enough.
References
CTV attracts wider advertiser mix during Wimbledon 2026
CTV Moves to the Centre of the Media Plan
How streaming is repricing the value of sponsorships
Streaming isn’t just changing where people watch. It’s changing what brands pay for.
Key Highlights
- CTV hosted 25 advertisers and 21 categories during Wimbledon 2026, more than double linear television’s 10 advertisers and 9 categories, even as linear ad volumes rose 30 percent over the previous edition.
- Agency executives including Anil Suryavamshi of Carat India and Trishul Bhumkar of Zenith India say sponsorship value now rests on attention, audience quality and business outcomes, not GRPs or completion rates alone.
- Zee Entertainment unified broadcast and digital advertising revenue under Prashant Shetty, signaling that Indian media companies are restructuring sales teams around converged, cross-platform audience buying.
