Advertising on Streaming Services: What the Budget Debate Gets Wrong

Advertising on streaming services gives brands access to a lean-back, high-attention environment that traditional digital channels rarely replicate. Done well, it builds brand presence at scale while offering targeting precision that broadcast TV never could. Done poorly, it becomes an expensive line item that looks impressive in a media plan but moves nothing in the market.

The question most marketers are asking, whether streaming is worth the investment, is the wrong question. The better question is whether your current channel mix is actually reaching people who have never heard of you, or whether it is just recycling spend across audiences already in your funnel.

Why Streaming Advertising Deserves a Serious Strategic Look

For most of the last decade, the media planning conversation in agency boardrooms was dominated by performance channels. Search, social, programmatic display. The logic was seductive: measurable, accountable, optimisable. I spent years inside that world, managing large paid media budgets across dozens of categories, and I understand the appeal. When a CFO asks you what marketing is doing, it is much easier to point to a cost-per-acquisition figure than to explain how a brand impression on a streaming platform contributed to a sale three months later.

But I have come to believe that much of what performance marketing gets credited for was going to happen anyway. Someone searching for your brand already knows you exist. Someone clicking a retargeting ad was already considering you. The conversion looks clean in a dashboard, but the upstream work that created the intent is invisible in the data. Streaming advertising, when used correctly, does the upstream work.

Think of it like a clothes shop. Someone who walks in and tries something on is far more likely to buy than someone who just walks past the window. Streaming ads are the window display. They create the moment of recognition, the first impression, the initial pull. Performance channels are the changing room. Both matter, but brands that only invest in the changing room are entirely dependent on foot traffic they did not generate themselves.

This is a broader challenge in go-to-market thinking. If you are working through how your channel strategy connects to growth objectives, the articles in the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub cover the commercial architecture behind these decisions in more depth.

The Streaming Landscape in 2025: What Advertisers Are Actually Working With

The ad-supported streaming market has matured considerably. Netflix launched its ad-supported tier in late 2022 and has since grown it into a meaningful advertising product. Disney+ followed. Amazon Prime Video moved to ads-by-default for its entire subscriber base in early 2024. Peacock, Paramount+, and Max all operate ad-supported tiers with varying levels of targeting sophistication.

What this means practically is that the inventory available to advertisers has expanded dramatically, and the CPMs have become more competitive as supply has grown. The premium video environment that was once the exclusive territory of broadcast TV budgets is now accessible to mid-market brands with sensible planning behind them.

The targeting capabilities vary significantly by platform. Amazon’s first-party purchase data makes it particularly powerful for consumer goods and retail categories. Netflix’s targeting is still maturing but its audience scale and engagement quality are hard to argue with. Disney+ skews toward families and franchise audiences, which is either very relevant or entirely irrelevant depending on what you sell.

Programmatic access to connected TV inventory has also expanded through platforms like The Trade Desk and Amazon DSP, which means you do not always need to go direct to a platform to buy streaming-adjacent inventory. This matters for planning, because it changes how you think about reach, frequency management, and measurement.

Where Streaming Fits in a Media Strategy

Streaming advertising is not a replacement for search or social. It sits in a different part of the funnel and serves a different function. The mistake I see most often is brands treating it as a performance channel and then being disappointed when it does not behave like one.

The right frame is brand-building with targeting precision. You are using video in a high-attention environment to reach specific audience segments who may not know you exist, or who know you exist but have not yet formed a strong impression of you. The goal is not immediate conversion. The goal is creating the mental availability that makes conversion more likely when the moment arrives.

This connects directly to how you think about channel architecture. If your current media mix is heavily weighted toward lower-funnel channels, you are probably capturing existing demand reasonably well but not creating new demand. Streaming can address that gap, but only if you are honest about what it is for. If you are running pay-per-appointment lead generation as your primary acquisition model, streaming is unlikely to show up in your attribution reports as a direct contributor. That does not mean it is not working. It means your measurement model is not built to see it.

The brands that use streaming most effectively tend to have a clear view of their full funnel, a willingness to invest in brand metrics alongside commercial metrics, and creative that is actually built for the environment rather than repurposed from other formats.

Creative for Streaming: The Brief Most Brands Get Wrong

Early in my agency career, I was in a brainstorm for a major drinks brand. The brief was essentially: make something that feels like us. There was no clarity on what the ad needed to do, who it needed to reach, or what someone should think or feel differently after seeing it. The output was predictably vague. Good-looking, well-crafted, and commercially inert.

That experience shaped how I think about creative briefing for video. The environment does not save you. Streaming may deliver higher completion rates and better attention than pre-roll, but a weak creative brief produces weak work regardless of where it runs. The question you need to answer before you brief a single frame is: what do we want someone to think, feel, or believe about us that they do not think, feel, or believe right now?

Streaming viewers are in a lean-back state. They are not in task mode. They are not actively looking for a solution to a problem. That is a gift if your creative is designed to meet them there, and a liability if your ad is essentially a product demo that assumes the viewer already cares about your category.

The best streaming ads do one of three things well. They tell a story that earns attention in the first five seconds. They create an emotional association that makes the brand feel relevant to the viewer’s life. Or they are so distinctively branded that even a partial view builds memory structure. Most streaming ads do none of these things. They are broadcast TV ads with a slightly shorter runtime, running in an environment that demands more.

If you are thinking about how creative connects to broader commercial strategy, it is worth running a proper analysis of your website and sales touchpoints before committing to streaming production budgets. What happens after someone sees your ad matters as much as the ad itself. A compelling streaming campaign that drives traffic to a confusing or unconvincing website is a waste of everyone’s time.

Measurement: The Honest Conversation Nobody Wants to Have

I have judged effectiveness awards. I have seen the entries that win and the entries that do not. The ones that win are not always the campaigns with the cleanest attribution. They are the ones that make an honest, coherent case for how the marketing activity contributed to a business outcome, even when the causal chain is not perfectly traceable.

Streaming attribution is genuinely difficult. Connected TV devices do not have cookies. Cross-device identity resolution is imperfect. The time lag between exposure and conversion can be weeks or months, which breaks most attribution models. If you are used to measuring digital channels on a last-click or even data-driven basis, streaming will look like it is doing very little in your reports.

The more honest approach is to use a combination of brand lift studies, geo-based incrementality testing, and media mix modelling to understand the contribution of streaming over time. None of these are perfect. All of them are more honest than demanding last-click proof from a channel that was never designed to produce it.

This is part of a broader point about digital marketing due diligence. Before you invest in any new channel, you need a clear view of how you will evaluate it, what success looks like over what time horizon, and what you are willing to accept as evidence. Going into streaming without that framework means you will either overspend without accountability or pull the budget too early because the dashboard does not show what you hoped.

The Forrester intelligent growth model has long argued that sustainable growth requires investment across the full customer lifecycle, not just the bottom of the funnel. Streaming sits firmly in the upper part of that model, and its contribution is real even when it is hard to isolate.

Sector Considerations: Who Should Be Spending on Streaming

Not every category gets the same return from streaming advertising. The channel tends to work best where brand perception matters, where purchase cycles are long enough that upper-funnel investment has time to compound, and where the target audience is actually watching ad-supported content in meaningful numbers.

Consumer goods, automotive, financial services, travel, and entertainment are natural fits. The audience scale is there, the attention quality supports brand messaging, and the category dynamics reward the kind of mental availability that streaming builds over time.

B2B is more nuanced. Streaming is not typically the primary acquisition channel for B2B brands, but that does not mean it has no role. Senior decision-makers watch streaming content. If your targeting is precise enough to reach them in a relevant context, there is a case for streaming as part of a broader account-based or category-building strategy. This is particularly relevant in sectors like financial services, where B2B financial services marketing increasingly requires brand differentiation at scale, not just technical sales collateral.

For niche B2B categories, the economics rarely work unless you have very precise audience targeting and a strong creative case for why streaming is the right environment for your message. The BCG analysis of go-to-market approaches in financial services highlights how audience segmentation quality determines whether broad-reach channels add value or dilute it. The same logic applies to streaming.

There is also a concept worth considering here: endemic advertising, where your ad appears in a context that is directly relevant to your category. Streaming platforms are beginning to develop more sophisticated contextual targeting that moves in this direction, placing ads adjacent to relevant content genres rather than just demographic profiles. For brands where context matters, this is worth watching closely.

Planning Streaming Into a Go-To-Market Strategy

When I was growing an agency from around 20 people to over 100, one of the consistent tensions was between clients who wanted everything to be measurable immediately and the reality that brand investment takes time to compound. Streaming sits squarely in that tension. It is not a quick-win channel. It is a compounding channel, and it needs to be planned as such.

The practical planning questions are: what audience are you trying to reach that you are not currently reaching through other channels, what do you want them to think or feel about your brand, and over what timeframe are you willing to evaluate whether it is working? If you cannot answer those three questions clearly, you are not ready to run streaming ads. You will spend money, see inconclusive results, and conclude that streaming does not work for your category. It may not. But you will not know that from an underfunded, under-briefed test.

For B2B tech companies specifically, the channel strategy question is complicated by the fact that different audiences within the same buying group often need different messages. The corporate and business unit marketing framework for B2B tech companies addresses how to structure that kind of multi-audience approach, which is directly relevant when you are thinking about whether streaming makes sense at the corporate brand level versus the product level.

Budget allocation is the other practical question. There is no universal answer, but the principle is that streaming should be sized relative to the importance of brand-building in your overall growth strategy. If you are in a category where awareness and perception drive purchase decisions, streaming deserves a meaningful share of budget, not a small experimental line item. If you are in a category where the purchase decision is almost entirely driven by immediate intent, streaming is a secondary consideration at best.

Tools that help you understand your current growth levers, like the analytical stack outlined in Semrush’s growth tools overview, can be useful for diagnosing where your acquisition mix is strong and where it has gaps that streaming might address.

The Attention Economy Argument for Streaming

There is a structural argument for streaming that does not get made often enough. The average quality of attention on most digital channels has declined. Social feeds are faster, more fragmented, and more competitive than they were five years ago. Display ads are largely ignored. Even search is becoming more crowded as AI-generated content floods organic results and paid competition increases.

Streaming is one of the few environments where a viewer is genuinely committed to the content they are watching. They chose to sit down and watch something. They are not multitasking in the same way. That committed attention is increasingly rare and increasingly valuable.

This does not mean streaming ads are automatically effective. Attention is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. But it does mean that the floor for ad quality in streaming is higher than in most digital environments, and the ceiling for impact is also higher. A well-crafted streaming ad in front of the right audience at the right moment can do more for brand perception than months of retargeting spend.

The Semrush analysis of growth examples across categories consistently shows that the brands with the strongest long-term growth trajectories invest in brand-building channels alongside performance channels, not instead of them. Streaming is increasingly the brand-building channel that offers the best combination of reach, targeting, and attention quality.

If you are working through the broader architecture of a go-to-market strategy, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers how channel decisions connect to commercial objectives across different business models and growth stages. Streaming does not exist in isolation, and the decisions around it are always more productive when they are made in the context of a coherent overall strategy.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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