Marketers still chase the same outcome they did 75 years ago: reach the right audience with a message that lands. The channels, though, have multiplied beyond simple planning. In a Digiday partner piece, Viamedia president and chief strategy officer Evan Rutchik argues the real bottleneck is not advertiser demand—it is the missing layer that connects inventory, demand and campaign intelligence.
The fragmentation problem
Streaming has overtaken linear in share of total TV viewing time. But linear has not gone away. More than a third of time spent viewing is still with cable and broadcast, and a meaningful share of homes have no streaming at all. A media plan that over-rotates to CTV leaves those households untouched.
Rutchik points out that audiences do not migrate cleanly from one channel to another. Even as major media companies emphasize streaming at upfronts, linear viewing remains large enough to matter. The advertising system therefore has to support both, not treat linear as legacy.
Where the incentive gap sits
Some high-performing channels carry higher operational cost for agencies and platforms. When a channel takes more work to find, negotiate and execute, it tends to get deprioritized even if audiences are there. That is part of why Rutchik frames the problem as supply-demand economics, not just media mix.
What a unified layer should do
The piece calls for an operating system, not another dashboard, built around three jobs:
- Supply: Give advertisers efficient access to premium TV, CTV and digital inventory.
- Demand: Connect brands and agencies to a path that executes across channels.
- Intelligence: Layer audience signals and performance data so campaigns can optimize as identifiers decline.
Marketecture Media CEO Ari Paparo makes the point bluntly: “it’s the data, stupid.” Connecting pipes helps, but the durable advantage is the intelligence that tells planners where reach actually exists and how creative is performing.
Why this matters for marketing teams
Marketing professionals should treat this as a vendor-audit prompt. If your media partners cannot show linear and streaming reach in one place, you are likely paying for overlap or leaving cable-only homes out. A unified supply path also matters for publishers: broadcasters and MVPDs can monetize high-performing inventory instead of watching demand move around them.
The argument is not that linear must win; it is that fragmented execution makes every channel less efficient. For brands, the practical shift is to ask for one cross-channel workflow before adding more inventory or platforms.
Source: Digiday
