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What Brand Marketers Need to Know About TV Advertising in 2026
Next year is shaping up to be an inflection point for both traditional and streaming ads
The TV advertising landscape is getting more complex, as audiences splinter across screens, platforms, and apps. Brands are increasingly being challenged to determine the most effective ways to reach their audiences in a holistic manner and capture attention. At the same time, marketers need to be able to determine how different media channels drive full-funnel performance against insufficient and inconsistent traditional measurement capabilities.
Indeed, amid the acceleration of artificial intelligence (AI) and a full lineup of major TV events on the horizon, 2026 is expected to be a defining moment for TV advertising — both traditional and streaming.
Against that backdrop, here are three predictions for how TV advertising will change in 2026 and what brand marketers need to know:
1. AI Will Turbocharge Innovation
Everywhere marketers turn, they are having yet another conversation about AI – and understandably so. The technology will not only transform how advertising is created, but transacted, optimized, and measured. While it's too early to confidently predict AI's full effect, there is little doubt that, for TV advertising, the transformation will be profound.
What was once a complex and time-consuming exercise — not to mention out of reach for many brands who built their business using social media, video, and search engine marketing — is becoming more streamlined. AI continues to enable media companies to close the gap on big tech companies in two fundamental ways: simplifying the purchasing process and demonstrating how TV can drive results throughout the entire marketing funnel. The changes will also expand opportunities for marketers to bridge the engagement and brand safety of TV with some of the capabilities that have made advertising on big-tech channels so attractive to marketers.
AI will fuel more intuitive self-serve capabilities supporting campaign set-up, in-flight optimization, and reporting, enabling TV to better reflect how advertising on social platforms is purchased. AI-powered tools, meanwhile, will foster commerce-based executions, such as the ability to automatically generate personalized, shoppable ads for streaming, directly from online catalogs.
While these examples are live and in market today, marketers are only at the nascent stage of what's expected to be a fundamental transformation.
2. Opportunities Will Grow for Live TV
As brand marketers look ahead to 2026, they find themselves at the intersection of cultural relevance and technological innovation. With a calendar packed with marquee events — from the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics to Super Bowl LX to the FIFA World Cup — live TV will dominate audience attention, as programmatic tools become available on traditional TV and streaming. But it's not just about the event itself; TV coverage of these events, both traditional and streaming, provides advertisers with even more opportunities to insert themselves into the conversation.
Programmatic solutions are making live event advertising inventory more accessible to a growing number of brands, thanks to its automated, biddable approach, and social-style buying tools.
Live advertising inherently presents challenges, including unplanned ad breaks, spikes in viewership, and ensuring an ad is ready to be served the moment a bid is requested. But overcoming these challenges will be critical as some of the biggest TV events in 2026 unfold. Companies that adopt the most effective tools and adhere to industry standards can ensure their brand is not only adjacent to — but part of — the moments and cultural conversations that only live events provide.
3. TV Will Get Credit for Being a Performance-Based Channel
Driving awareness has long been the centerpiece of TV ad campaign planning, of course, but brand marketers now want more tangible returns. In fact, 76 percent of advertisers say driving consumer action resulting in sales is just as important as building awareness, according to a 2025 survey of 200 industry executives conducted by Comcast Advertising.
The shift is fueling demand for more actionable insights, with 63 percent of the survey respondents saying they want to see attribution linking TV ad exposure to specific consumer actions and/or purchases. TV advertising can do both. It can feed the top of the funnel by acquiring new eyeballs — what it does best — and prove its impact on middle and lower-funnel outcomes, such as sales and website visits.
The days of separating brand and performance marketing are fading. Instead, the conversation will move to integrated full-funnel performance and, most important, how to gauge the true incrementality of different media channels and how each contributes to an outcome. Marketers now have better data and smarter integrations to deliver insights into how TV generates better outcomes, such as the ability to connect ad exposure data to spending via a credit card company or other consumer insights.
However, companies that are part of the TV ecosystem have their work cut out for them in two critical areas: Demonstrating the effect of TV on outcomes for middle- and lower-funnel ad campaigns on an always-on basis and working with agencies and client-side marketers to move past an outdated currency model. Next year is expected to show meaningful progress on both fronts: First, frustration about an outdated Gross Rating Point currency model will reach a tipping point, as marketers push for a modernized approach that enables them to compare media channels on an apples-to-apples basis. Meanwhile, the use of third-party incrementality measurement will go mainstream, as savvy marketers take action to counter the self-reported credit that each media channel claims for driving results, and ensures that every channel — whether it's part of a walled garden or not — is measured on an equivalent basis and getting the credit it deserves.
Redefining Multiscreen TV Advertising
Considering the trendlines, 2026 is shaping up to be a pivotal year for TV advertising, defined by smarter tools, full-funnel measurement, and a calendar chock full of marquee events. For brand marketers, the changes should lead to a simpler purchasing process, boost engagement with multiple audiences, and sharpen accountability — which the C-suite now demands more than ever from marketing. Hold on tight. The next 12 months will be another year of exciting change for TV advertising.
Comcast Advertising is a partner in the ANA Thought Leadership Program.
