Advertisers have been urged  to focus on TV outcomes as Linear spend climbs amid S streaming surge. Despite a dip in impressions, national linear TV ad spend climbed 4% to \$12.34 billion in Q1 2025, indicating a strategic shift by advertisers toward quality placements and measurable results, according to iSpot’s “Q1 2025 TV Ad Transparency Report”

Marketing Dive report indicated that linear ad impressions dropped 4.25% year-on-year, but marketers appear to be leaning into more targeted campaigns, particularly around sports and news.

Meanwhile, streaming continued to capture a greater share of attention, growing its slice of total TV ad impressions to nearly 14%, up from 6% to 8% in early 2023.

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Linear’s share slid to 86%, compared to 92% in the same period last year.

As the 2025-26 upfront season gets underway, brands are increasingly directing budgets toward streaming, with a third of advertisers allocating close to half (48%) of their upfront deals to the digital platforms.

Yet data gaps persist. Only 44% of marketers receive programmatic insights, and just 48% get attribution data from their streaming partners, creating challenges in spend optimization.

While 80% have access to reach and frequency metrics and 61% to demographic data, many still lack deeper contextual performance insights.

Still, traditional TV remains resilient, bolstered by live sports.

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The ongoing rise of ad-supported streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, alongside a 14% projected increase in digital video ad spend to \$72.4 billion this year, signals a deeper pivot to multi-platform media strategies. Digital video is expected to represent 58% of total video ad spending in 2025, up from 51% last year.

According to the report, 53% of marketers ranked campaign outcomes as their top priority when making media investments, followed by value at 27%. The findings are based on the analysis of 224 billion linear and connected TV ad impressions across 87 brands and survey input from over 260 marketers representing 208 brands and agencies

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