CTV advertisers often concentrate spend in premium streaming platforms, but over-targeting can limit reach and reduce a campaign's overall efficiency.
Bryce Vredevoogd, Advertising Director at The E.W. Scripps Company, explains how layering multiple publishers, channels, and owned inventory expands reach while preserving audience targeting.
Audience-first planning that balances distribution across platforms improves performance and lowers cost by reducing wasted impressions and improving measurement across the full funnel.
For CTV advertisers, picking where to increase their spending often falls to a simplified logic: trust that prestige streaming platforms will lead to results. But with 70% of CTV advertisers preparing to increase their spending and move money across the connected television ecosystem, some experts are arguing better performance requires a more nuanced strategy.
It's an issue that's top of mind for Bryce Vredevoogd, Advertising Director at The E.W. Scripps Company, one of the largest local TV and CTV media companies in the U.S. He used to sell that same prestige inventory at Condé Nast and Hearst Magazines, where he managed major automotive relationships with Ford, General Motors, and Fiat Chrysler. Now, he helps clients build broader, audience-focused plans that deliver better results.
"It’s not about doing one massive partnership. Success comes from building multiple, properly funded touchpoints that actually move the needle," Vredevoogd says. A central piece of his approach involves 'publisher stacking,' so instead of blowing a budget on one partnership, the strategy builds a funnel across different screens and environments. But the premium publisher fallacy still holds, which means executing new strategies requires navigating some friction in the room. Many CMOs and agency leaders understandably like to see familiar, legacy logos on their media plans. Vredevoogd handles those conversations through consultative problem-solving, pushing clients to look beyond initial brand affinities.
Stacking the deck: By spreading investment across multiple environments, Vredevoogd's strategy is designed to control frequency, expand reach, and improve cost efficiency all at once. That means combining premium publishers with lower-CPM, high-scale inventory into a single, coordinated plan. "We created a very layered media campaign: local broadcast TV and multiple touchpoints across different line items in the CTV space. We did have those Hulus, HBOs, and broader reach from publishers like CNN and MLB.TV, and then we layered in Scripps' own properties as well," he says.
An over-reliance on premium logos can create a practical problem of over-targeting. When campaigns are confined to highly specific IP-based parameters or a single publisher, they often hit the same small pool of users repeatedly instead of expanding to new ones. That imbalance drives up frequency without growing meaningful reach, ultimately limiting efficiency and inflating costs. Vredevoogd points to a recent client that was heavily dependent on Meta. To test whether a multi-channel mix could improve performance, the advertiser agreed to allocate half of its budget to a CTV campaign with Scripps.
Too close for comfort: Vredevoogd's team initially mirrored the client’s tight geographic targeting. But as frequency quickly spiked within that limited audience, they expanded to the full market, unlocking more reach without sacrificing targeting. "In the first forty-five days, that led to more reach throughout the market to their specific audience. We're not losing the audience targeting, as that is the whole purpose of CTV, but we're reaching more people," Vredevoogd says. "Because we're reaching more people, their cost per quality lead went dramatically down. Remember, they're spending the exact same amount of money, and their return on ad spend almost tripled in a forty-five-day period."
Holding the budget flat: Their nuanced approach is leading to measurably better results. "Fast forward six months, their cost per quality lead is now down 88% at the exact same investment level since they started," he says. "A little strategic thinking goes a long way. A lot of that is truly getting into the weeds, setting the stage before you ever start a campaign and working in true partnership with the client."
The multi-screen swing: The takeaway is that campaigns assuming where an audience "should" be often miss how people actually behave, and end up over-serving a narrow slice instead of expanding reach. "You would hazard a guess that someone who's interested in new golf clubs or new irons is probably watching the Masters this week, or watching the Golf Channel," Vredevoogd says. "But that person doesn't always 100% watch the Golf Channel. If we are audience-focused, it doesn't matter where we are finding them, as long as we are finding that audience. That's how advertisers should search for their desired consumer."
Planners are increasingly focused on reach and efficiency across fragmented digital audiences, but there are still moments where concentration is highly valuable. Live sports, for example, represent one of the strongest engagement drivers in the industry. Advertisers can't always just buy their way into the biggest leagues when incumbent brands have already locked down much of the inventory. So local media companies are leveraging broad sports distribution to open up that market, giving local and regional advertisers more accessible options through properties like the Scripps Sports Network. That access allows brands to execute a new playbook in emerging leagues.
Bypassing the beer blockers: "You can't go partner with the NFL because Miller Lite, Bud Light, or whoever their current partner is, is already paying a pretty penny for that partnership," Vredevoogd says. "With a lot of these emerging sports leagues, those partnerships do not exist, which gives advertisers the opportunity to plant their flag in a very important piece of content and the future of sports."
For some media companies, owning and controlling distribution will play a growing role in the next iteration of streaming video. As CTV becomes more measurable and with more AI innovation, publishers that can build richer experiences inside their own environments are better positioned to test new formats and connect content more directly to commerce. "AI helps you focus on outcomes instead of audiences, which will lead to more efficiency and larger return on ad spend," he says.
Vredevoogd notes that long-term success of these campaigns depends on a disciplined approach, where distribution, creative, and measurement are unified and performance is evaluated against real outcomes rather than assumptions. "High-impact ads are here, but they will continue to evolve. Integrating more into content, bringing that content to commerce, is definitely the way forward," he says.
