Marketing is about performance. Full stop. Where can you deploy dollars to get a return? It's such a simple question yet it's extremely difficult to answer, because it’s different for every brand.

It depends on what you're selling, who you're selling it to, which channels you're already using, what's working vs not and what bets you should be making to get underpriced attention and ultimately more sales.

And in 2026, it’s hard for me to sit here and tell a brand that only using Meta, Google, TikTok, email, and SMS is the way to grow. Don't get me wrong, these channels are great and they are proven but they're also completely saturated. Every brand you know is running ads on the top 3 platforms fighting for lower CPMs, CPCs, and CPAs as they push for tiny performance improvements week over week. Obviously, these platforms are still worth using but they're just not where the truly underpriced attention is anymore especially for paid. 

When I audit a brand and look at what they're actually doing, there are almost always several big levers they haven't tested yet to drive new customer growth. I want to tell you about one of those levers today. It’s called Convergent TV. Not Connected TV, but Convergent TV. Let me explain. 

You've probably seen me write about Connected TV before. CTV is basically streaming TV. There’s 2 flavors which are programmatic CTV: mostly long-tail and free ad-supported apps, plus some allocated inventory from bigger platforms. And direct-sold CTV: something a buyer would negotiate for you to access premium inventory on platforms, with better placement and ad formats. But for the sake of today’s newsletter, anything delivered over the internet to a TV is what almost anyone you know saying "CTV," is describing.

But CTV is really just a delivery method. It's only one slice of how people watch TV. Convergent TV isn't just a slice of TV, it's all of TV. Convergent TV means both linear and streaming together. Linear is the traditional side of TV i.e cable and broadcast, including live sports, the news, the Oscars, and the network shows your customers are still very much watching. Convergent TV is what brings both sides together and allows you to buy ads across linear + streaming to access the full spectrum of what TV can deliver. 

And why is it such a big deal to include streaming and linear together? Because the moment you add linear back into the mix, the audience you can now reach literally doubles. Streaming alone represents roughly half of TV viewership. And programmatic CTV is a smaller slice of that half. The other half is still linear. Cable, broadcast, live events. The stuff marketers forget is even there until they realize they've been ignoring 50% of the available inventory the entire time. You can’t buy linear through a DSP that only offers CTV. You can't get it through a self-serve streaming platform either. Which means if you're CTV-only, you might be missing out on 50% of viewers that want to buy from your brand! 

When you are looking for a partner to buy your TV media on, it’s important that you find one who can buy and measure Convergent TV (i.e both linear and streaming). You’ll get access to more inventory, more viewers, and more options which will help you make the most of what TV truly has to offer.  

What the right TV strategy actually looks like, depending on your stage: 

When I'm advising brands on how to get started with Convergent TV, it really depends on their stage. If you've never run TV before, the barrier to entry is way lower than what you might think. You do not need a Super Bowl budget and a six-month production timeline. Platforms like Tatari have a self-serve entry point where you can run prospecting or retargeting campaigns and repurpose the video creative you're already running on other channels. If you’re already running video ads on other channels, you probably don’t need new creative. You probably already have the right assets sitting in a folder somewhere and you can get it live in under an hour. But I'm going to be straight with you… $50 a day is not a test for TV. It's not going to tell you anything meaningful that you can actually make a decision with. In my experience you need a real budget to get conclusive data and that means somewhere around $20K a month to start. I know that number sounds big but it’s the reality. Here’s why that matters. 

TV doesn't work like a $500 Meta experiment where you read the pixel the next morning and know what happened. It needs enough spend, across enough impressions, over enough time, before the signal is even legible to you. And what you want to be doing is measuring lift across your whole business, not just clicks on a single ad. So when a platform tells you any budget works and you can start at basically nothing, what they're really telling you is that they're selling you the entry point, not the outcome. You want the outcome so I’m giving you the reality of how to achieve it.  

Gabb is a great example of a brand who used TV the right way. They used a simple test-and-learn approach with a realistic budget in the low 10s of thousands per month to actually prove out the channel before they scaled it and watched their cross-channel performance improve. After scaling convergent TV, they saw a 70% decrease in CPA across channels. It was a massive success. 

If you've already tried TV and know it works and now you're trying to scale

This is the next stage of brands I consult with. They’ve done the test and saw the lift. Now they really want to scale. I think this is where things get interesting and where your platform choice starts to really matter because here's something that no one tells you about standard connected TV. Roughly 90% of CTV impressions come from just 10 publishers. Yes, you read that right, just 10! So if your platform doesn't have direct deals with those publishers, you might be missing out on some of the best impressions TV has to offer. 

And I still think most brands don’t realize that there's a whole tier of inventory that DSPs can’t get you. Sunday Night Football. The Oscars. A direct deal with NBCU or Disney. Even though you could watch some of these on CTV (ie. Super Bowl, World Series) the media still has to be bought through the linear network. That access is gated, and it's reserved for platforms that have built publisher relationships over the years. Tatari has those relationships and can get your brand onto that inventory.

There is so much proof from brands that have already executed here and done this well. For example, Manscaped blended linear and streaming together on Tatari and tripled conversions. Wild Earth ran linear and CTV retargeting side by side and decreased their CPA by 60%. Tecovas is another great example. At one point they turned TV off. Not because it was failing but specifically because they wanted to know what the lift really was. And the second they cut it, performance dropped across every single channel at the same time. Online sales dipped. Retail dipped. Branded search dipped. All of it moved together. That is called the halo effect you’ve seen me talk about before. When Tecovas showed this data to their finance team, that ended the conversation on why they needed to be running on Tatari. It was clear that Convergent TV was driving real results. 

And the measurement gets really concrete at this stage too. If you sell on Amazon or in physical retail, Tatari can actually measure TV's impact on your Amazon sales using a baseline lift methodology built on timestamped purchase data. For brick-and-mortar, they run geo-based incrementality tests, which is the gold standard where you split your markets into test and control regions, measure the difference in sales at the DMA level with no personally identifiable data involved. Just think about how powerful that is. Most attribution systems just give up at the edge of your DTC site. Tatari follows the customer all the way to the shelf. And because you're running linear and streaming together in one platform, you get a single view of what's actually working and can shift budget toward what's driving results.

Privacy and data management practices are increasingly important. If you're in a sensitive category like healthcare, fintech, or financial services, Tatari is SOC2 certified which means your compliance team can rest easy knowing you are fully compliant. It’s also built on Vault privacy infrastructure to ensure that no sensitive data is exposed, and even supports pixel-free measurement.

Here’s a few more examples to get your mind running about the potential of Convergent TV. Fiverr ran a post-Super Bowl retargeting campaign and cut their CAC by 75%. Calm built a full-funnel linear and streaming strategy that scaled all the way up to a LeBron James campaign resulting in a 60% increase in subscriptions. Chime basically rewrote what performance storytelling on TV is supposed to look like. These are not little DTC experiments that small brands are running on the side. These are some of the most sophisticated companies in commerce treating TV as a core growth channel with the receipts to back it up.

Why measurement is the thing almost nobody's actually getting right

Every TV platform claims they've got measurement figured out now. It's table stakes in their pitch but Tatari’s attribution engine truly is different. Their incrementality attribution is independent, and they’ll tell you what results your TV ads actually drive. Their baseline lift methodology compares what actually happened against a predictive baseline, inside narrow attribution windows, and the math is transparent. They're pulling from a data set of more than 21 million households, so it's not a small subset. And they measure the entire picture, including web conversions, app installs, Amazon sales, retail lift, plus the halo effect on Meta, Google, and branded search that good TV creates, but that most TV partners can’t tell you about. That halo is usually where a ton of the real value is hiding, and it's exactly the part that many reports leave out. I really like that the company who owns the inventory is not the same one measuring my results. Tatari is an independent platform, so it makes it so I can fully trust the data and know it’s real. 

What to do next

There are two simple options. If you're already running TV and you've got even a sliver of a feeling that you might be leaving reach and measurement on the table, Tatari will audit your current plan for free. No commitment, just a transparent read on what you're actually getting and how you can improve. You can get that here. 

And if you're earlier than that and you just want to see what a convergent TV strategy could actually look like for your brand, or for the clients you're running this for, go talk to the team here. 

Either way, the thing I'd leave you with is this: CTV-only means you’re only accessing 50% of the audience and potential of TV. The brands that combine both linear and streaming into what they call Convergent TV are doubling their reach and getting way better results. I hope this helped and you learned something new. 

Thanks for reading. 

-Nik