This World Cup, CTV Becomes the New Stadium
Major sporting events once revolved around a single screen, with broadcast schedules dictating when audiences tuned in and how campaigns were planned. The coming World Cup will deliver this same audience scale and campaign buzz, but viewing now unfolds across multiple screens and multiple connected devices within the same household, often at the same time.
A match might be playing in the background on the television, while someone checks line-ups on their phone, another follows commentary, and messages come through from friends The audience hasn’t disappeared, but its fluidity makes it harder to define, measure, and reach with confidence.
In this new reality, CTV becomes the anchor, bringing scale, attention, and shared moments back into focus. But to perform at its best, CTV must be underpinned by high-quality household level data, consistent, connected identities and trackable, real-world outcomes. Only then can audiences be identified, understood and measured within the entire household context, rather than fragmented pockets of behaviour within the home.
Household context brings clarity to modern viewing
As signals continue to fragment, traditional planning models need to adapt. For years, planning has been built around channels and inventory, but audiences no longer neatly fit along these lines. For CTV there is an added complication - viewing is rarely individual, often taking place within the home as a shared collective moment. This is the reason CTV trades at a household level. Yet, planning is not always designed to match.
Planning campaigns through a household lens introduces a more accurate, complete view of who is behind the screens. It reflects the entire household composition: their collective lifestyle, buying power, and priorities. It accounts for household composition, shared lifestyles, combined buying power and common priorities. This matters because decisions - from financial choices to brand consideration - are rarely made in isolation. They’re shaped by the needs, habits and constraints of the whole home.
When planning is reworked to this model, the impact is immediate. Targeting becomes more refined, recognising the shared circumstances across the home rather than individual, isolated behaviour. Investment decisions are based on a stable view of the audience, rather than fragmented data points. Instead of trying to adapt to the way CTV operates, planning can start to work with it.
Connecting signals across a fluid, multi-device audience
Every interaction around a live event now generates huge volumes of data. But those signals are often captured in isolation, across platforms, devices, and environments that rarely connect cleanly. In this kind of environment, more data doesn’t necessarily create more clarity. Instead, in can introduce noise and inconsistency.
Without a way to connect those interactions back to real households, planning, activation and measurement quickly become distorted. Targeting becomes distorted, reach is overstated, and measurement can be harder to trust.
This is where accurate, interoperable identity resolution becomes essential. It provides a joined-up view of the audience - allowing signals to be identified, connected and tracked as viewers move fluidly across screens. The result is continuity instead of fragmentation, and a true understanding of how audiences engage across the live event experience, across all devices and all screens within the home.
From attention to real outcomes
An event as large as the World Cup will undoubtedly deliver scale - but scale on its own doesn’t mean much if you can’t understand it. What matters is whether attention can be translated into something measurable: who was reached, how often, and whether that exposure drove real impact.
To achieve this, signals must be connected, consistent and – critically - mapped to real-world outcomes. Market-wide, annonymised transactional insight makes this possible, offering a clear view of impact without requiring brands to rely on or share personally identifiable information.
When those pieces are in place, CTV becomes something you can measure, manage and improve. In the world of advertising, that is the ultimate goal. As viewing continues to fragment, the brands that succeed will be those that can turn complexity into clarity - connecting attention back to a trusted understanding of the audience, and the real-world actions and outcomes that follow.
AI can accelerate outcomes, but only when grounded in accurate data
The growth of CTV has enabled advertisers to reach audiences with a level of precision that traditional broadcast TV could never deliver. The introduction of AI now adds another dimension - enabling campaigns to launch faster, with even greater precision, constantly optimising and adjusting in real-time. Whilst this creates opportunity, it can also introduce challenges.
When AI is trained on deterministic, real-world data, patterns become more reliable and decisions more stable. Optimisation reflects observed behaviour rather than modelled assumptions. Yet as signal volumes explode, not all data carries equal value. Some signals are synthetic, some lack context, and others introduce noise into systems that are already highly complex.
For AI to deliver meaningful impact - in CTV and beyond - the foundations around it must be strong enough to separate noise from value. Real-world behaviour must be prioritised over volume. This becomes especially critical during moments of mass viewership, such as the World Cup, where the scale is immense and the margin for error is small. Anchoring AI in trusted data and persistent identity ensures campaigns to reach the right households, at the right time, with the right message – reliably, consistently and at scale.
This World Cup, the brands that win won’t just capture attention - they’ll understand it, connect it and convert it into meaningful impact at scale. CTV is the new stadium that makes this possible, but only when it’s grounded in accurate household-level data, consistent identity resolution and clear links to real-world outcomes.
[Editor's note: This is a contributed article from Experian. Streaming Media accepts vendor bylines based solely on their value to our readers.]