While media giants like Comcast and Warner Bros. Discovery gear up to spin off their cable businesses, ad-tech platform Tatari is emphasizing that there is still power in running linear TV ads.
At Tatari’s Forward 2025 event in New York on Thursday, marketers assembled to discuss the evolving TV advertising space. Execs from Reddit, mental health app Calm, and more got on stage to discuss how ad spend on TV can complement marketing efforts on other platforms.
Perfect pair? Reddit may be an online platform, but it has a “symbiotic” relationship with TV, company CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman said onstage. For one, 94% of Reddit users are TV service subscribers, he noted, and the platform has 50,000 communities dedicated to topics like TV and streaming, demonstrating that there is an appetite among users to discuss that type of content in online spaces.
“Entertainment is our No. 1 largest category on Reddit. It’s absolutely massive,” he said.
Huffman said he disagreed with the idea that mobile phone screens are the “second screen” to TV viewership, noting that they serve different purposes for TV viewers at different times.
“I think that’s nonsense,” he said. “I think what’s really important is not what’s the second screen, it’s the idea that there are two first screens. First you enjoy the product, the show, the movie, the game, and then you go to your other screen to talk about the thing. In this regard, the two screens complement each other in a very powerful way.”
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Big impact: Reddit’s not the only brand recognizing the ongoing power of TV. Calm initiated a longer-term media buy on TV in the run-up to the the 2024 presidential election that culminated with a 30-second silent spot that aired during election night news coverage that aimed to “give folks a little bit of calm in the midst of all the chaos,” Mavis Brefo, Calm’s growth director, said onstage. The stunt seemed to work: organic social mentions of the brand increased 600% compared to other days in 2024, Brefo said, and the Calm app also jumped about 100 spots on the App Store at the time.
Calm is balancing linear TV buys, where it has identified opportunities to build frequency, with streaming buys, where it can be more difficult to build frequency, Brefo said onstage. To do that, the brand monitors audience overlap and relative frequency across both channels.
“It’s our North Star,” she said.
Constant iteration: As some brands seek a more integrated cross-platform advertising approach, Tatari debuted several new platform features, including more buying tools for publishers and more advanced measurement options.
“We’re focused on…areas where we can illuminate a blind spot you may currently have,” Benjamin Heaton, senior director of product management at Tatari, said onstage.