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Hot Takes is back!
This time, we asked our TVREV Thought Leaders Circle members “How are you dealing with fragmentation?”
It’s an important issue as media fragmentation and its fallout have been top of mind at every industry trade show this year. And it will be the subject of my new book, due out next month, The Collapse of the Monoculture and the Rise of Feudal Media. (And what’s a little bit of self-interest amongst friends…)
First up was the Map Man himself, Evan Shapiro, CEO of ESHAP, who declared (because Evan always declares rather than suggests) that the cure for what he calls Infinite Fragmentation Syndrome is affinity: it’s not how many people you reach but how much they love you.
If the three most important words in real estate are "Location, Location, Location," the only three words that matter in modern media are "Fragmentation, Fragmentation, Fragmentation."
When Boomers and GenXers were coming up in the media business, we had just a handful of competitors and an ever-expanding audience on our own enormously profitable, close-circuit platforms. We pushed out stuff. People consumed it. And they paid us for the privilege.
We all need to admit how easy that gig was — it was nearly impossible to fail.
Today, our competition is every human with a phone - 8 billion of them - and audiences now decide for themselves what, where, and how they consume, as well as what they will or won't pay. Which, increasingly, is nothing.
However, I have discovered the cure for Infinite Fragmentation Syndrome: Affinity.
In The Affinity Economy, it does NOT matter how many you reach, it only matters how much the people you reach LOVE you. Scale is dead. Fandom is now the official currency of media success.
If you wanna know WTF that means, you can watch my recent presentation on precisely that.
WARNING: The video at the link contains actual case studies of doing things differently. It may cause dizziness in those with a Fear Of Finding Out.
Next up was Tony Marlow, CMO of Genius Sports, the goal isn't eliminating fragmentation but connecting fans' many screens so the massive attention around live sports becomes addressable.
Sport is arguably the last bastion of live, aggregated audiences at scale. As the broader media landscape fragments across platforms and formats, major sporting events remain among the few moments capable of bringing tens of millions, and sometimes hundreds of millions, of people together at the same time with exceptionally high levels of engagement. That makes sport incredibly valuable to brands seeking meaningful connections with audiences in an increasingly fragmented media environment.
Yet the modern sports experience is itself fragmented across screens. Fans often have a device in hand while watching the game, shopping, playing fantasy sports, betting, engaging on social media and communicating directly with friends throughout the action. The challenge is therefore not to eliminate fragmentation, but to connect these environments in a more personalized and compelling way.
At Genius Sports, we combine our unrivaled fan graph with our Moment Engine to understand both the individual fan and what is happening in the game, enabling creative to be customized for the right fan, on the right screen, at precisely the right moment. The winners will be those that make the unmatched attention generated by live sport addressable, measurable and valuable wherever fans choose to engage.
Mike Fogarty, Head of Client Development at Tatari, believes fragmentation stops being a problem once advertisers treat all of TV as a single channel with one measurement layer.
We treat TV as a single channel. A viewer doesn't think about whether they're watching linear, CTV, or a free ad-supported app. They're just watching TV. So we don't split them into silos either. The person who saw your ad on cable last night and on a streaming app this morning is a unique household, and we plan, buy, and measure against them accordingly. That means buying across linear and streaming together, deduping reach so you're not paying twice to hit the same household, and tying every impression back to a real outcome, whether that's a sale, a signup, or an install, no matter which platform it ran on. Fragmentation only hurts you when you treat each platform like its own channel. Collapse it into one funnel with one measurement layer, and fragmentation stops being a problem to manage and just becomes more signal to optimize against.
Smarter supply path decisions are the answer for Blake Hebert, Senior Director of Publisher Operations at Premion, who argues the real problem is unmanaged fragmentation.
Fragmentation isn't the problem—unmanaged fragmentation is. Streaming has never offered more opportunity—or more complexity. Advertisers need greater transparency and control over where their campaigns run. That means prioritizing direct relationships with publishers and their owned-and-operated inventory, using SSP-sourced inventory strategically to minimize duplication, and avoiding 'audience extension' offerings from partners that don't control the underlying supply. Beyond supply selection, advertisers should use the signals available in the bid stream to segment inventory more intelligently and align media quality with campaign objectives. Smarter supply path decisions ultimately drive greater efficiency, stronger performance, and more value from every streaming investment.
Mark Bonham, Chief Growth Officer of CCR Media, argued that the companies that win won't be the ones chasing every platform, but the ones that know where to focus.
Fragmentation isn't the challenge; we all know it exists. The real challenge is scale. Consumers move across streaming, FAST, live sports, social, creator content, podcasts, gaming, and linear, and there are hundreds of thousands of hours of content to choose from, with more added every day. Sports rights keep shifting. Creator content keeps exploding. Linear still holds real attention.
So, the question isn't "how do we cover everything." It's "what actually deserves our attention." Most companies try to chase every platform and every dataset. The best ones prioritize, and instead they know what matters, where to focus, and where their limited resources will work hardest.
That's where we come in at CCR Media. We're not pretending this ecosystem is simple. We help clients cut through the noise, consolidate signals across multiple datasets, and make faster, more confident decisions about what content is actually worth watching.
Here's my honest take: we're all stuck in the middle, and that's not changing anytime soon. If anything, the middle is becoming the center of the industry — because the walled gardens aren't going to start playing nice with each other. The key is having the right partner, to help cut through the noise.
For Graham McKenna, CMO of XR (Extreme Reach), fragmentation has become a creative operations problem, with nearly 40% of finished ads never seeing the light of day.
Fragmentation isn't just a media problem anymore. It's a creative operations problem. Advertisers are producing more versions of every ad, in more formats, for more platforms than ever before. The result is growing operational complexity, with nearly 40% of finished ads never being used. AI versioning will only amplify that complexity. For too long, our industry has been obsessed with optimizing the media buy while overlooking where advertising ROI really begins: the moment creative is produced. That's what XR intends to solve.
Adam Gendelman, GM at WunderKIND Ads, is focused on making new formats like pause ads transactable programmatically rather than app by app.
Streaming is transforming the entire TV ad experience, and new formats like Home Screen and Pause Ad inventory are outperforming traditional 30- and 60-second spots. But these new inventory types often live in silos, at least initially, and take time to truly scale across the fragmented CTV environments. We're really focused on enabling the market to transact on inventory like pause ads programmatically, so that programmatic buyers can access the format through one uniform deal ID and one uniform creative across apps and OEMs, rather than having to traffic creative directly to each app or platform one by one.
Fragmentation is an opportunity, not a problem, for Christiana Cacciapuoti, SVP of Growth at Madhive, who sees the U.S. as a mosaic of communities that technology can finally reach at scale.
When people talk about fragmentation, they usually are talking about consumer attention being increasingly split across different channels and devices in a way that it wasn’t before smart phones and streaming TV. That shift has gotten the attention it deserves and we’ve built tools for advertisers to thoughtfully manage it.
The fragmentation no one talks about is geographic. People think of local advertising as mom and pop shops – and it is – but small businesses are not the only ones who need to leverage precision and personalization to drive performance. Even the largest global brands running national campaigns benefit from customizing their message to the community. LA and NYC are both large US cities, but selling a vehicle to an LA commuter whose livelihood depends on a car is wildly different than selling a car to me, a Brooklynite who sees it as a fun luxury for weekend escapes. Local advertising is a technical needle-in-a-haystack game, but if you build technology that can find those audiences at scale, fragmentation becomes a competitive advantage instead of a constraint.
Cathy Rasenberger, President of Rasenberger Media, looked at how the splintering of sports rights has upended viewership among younger fans, and why programmers need radically new content strategies to reach a generation raised on phones, clips and social feeds.
Sports rights fragmentation has led to seismic shifts in viewership, particularly among younger fans who are consuming sports in a radically different way than their parents. To reach and engage with this generation of fans, sports rights holders and programmers must develop radically new content strategies.
Today, the majority of Gen Z fans say their smart phone is the primary device for watching sports. Half get their non-live sports content from social media and prefer Tik Tok and Instagram over TV. 34% prefer highlights and clips, with only one-third watching the full game vs 75% over age 55 (HUB). They use social and phones to complement their live sports viewing, not replace it, and watch FAST and social programming to discover new sports. Younger fans want to interact and chat in real time during live sports events, with 63% more likely to use streaming platforms that include social features, live chat rooms or watch parties.
To reach these younger fans, - the future of sports fandom-, it's no longer enough just to air the live game. Sports programmers must engage with younger fans wherever they consume sports content, across multiple apps and devices, thru short form content on YouTube to promote discovery, clips for sharing on social media, FAST channels to extend reach to new audiences, vertical video on phones; and with content overlays that enable interactive experiences including gaming, rewards, multi-view, and chat.
Kiran Paranjpe, Chief Commercial Officer of Chartbeat, Inc., highlighted the fragmentation nobody talks about: the kind inside media organizations themselves.
The advertising industry frequently discusses three types of fragmentation: audience fragmentation, media fragmentation, and consumer fragmentation. These are important conversations; missing from these conversations, however, is an acknowledgement of the fragmentation inside media organizations themselves.
Internal fragmentation rarely appears on a financial statement, but its effects are visible throughout the commercial organization. Sales teams spend time assembling information that already exists inside of other systems. Operations teams coordinate campaigns across disconnected workflows. Planning becomes more manual as organizations reconcile inventory, pricing, and availability across independent platforms.
None of these activities improve outcomes for advertisers. They consume time and organizational attention that could be directed toward strategy, customer relationships, and innovation. The more sophisticated a media business becomes, the greater the importance of reducing this operational friction.
For Fariba Zamaniyan, Global SVP of Data Monetization at TiVo Ads, the industry's real gap isn't not seeing all the places people are watching, but the lack of a complete picture of viewing behavior across all those places.
Fragmentation isn't something we're trying to eliminate—it's the reality of today's television ecosystem. The challenge isn't just where people are watching—it's how to build a complete and consistent understanding of those viewing behaviors. A stronger, more comprehensive data foundation will help the industry improve audience planning, measurement, attribution, and cross-platform insights while reducing the blind spots that fragmentation creates. As an independent data provider, we're dealing with fragmentation head-on to enable a more interoperable and impactful TV measurement ecosystem.
Geoff Wells, Content Partnerships for Ventura TV OS at The Trade Desk, sees fragmentation as the sign of a healthy market — the real trouble is misaligned incentives that turn potential partners into competitors.
At Ventura TV OS, we think the conversation around fragmentation is important, but it only tells part of the story. More platforms, technologies, and business models are a natural outcome of a healthy, competitive market. The challenge emerges when that growing complexity is paired with incentives that put participants at odds with one another, turning potential partners into competitors. Recognizing that dynamic early became foundational to Ventura TV OS's objectivity. We believe the future of CTV will be shaped by platforms that create growth and enable OEMs, publishers, and advertisers to share in the value being created, not control it. When those incentives are aligned, fragmentation becomes a source of innovation and opportunity.
Chris Signore, SVP of Business Development at Magnite focused on why publishers need a single place where all their demand competes on equal footing, rather than juggling systems that were never designed to work together.
Streaming has given publishers more content to monetize than ever before, but it's also left many managing multiple systems that weren't built to work together. To help publishers navigate this fragmented landscape more efficiently, our focus has been on helping simplify complex workflows by bringing demand together in a more coordinated way. One of the approaches we champion is mediation, a shared decision layer that unifies demand so that every impression can be evaluated on the same playing field. This helps improve efficiency and gives publishers greater control over how they monetize their inventory. When paired with high-quality demand, mediation offers a foundation for the ecosystem that balances revenue goals with user experience and control with scalability.
Dan Callahan, SVP and Chief Revenue Officer of Spectrum Reach, explained how distributors are uniquely positioned to give advertisers a single point of entry to audiences scattered across dozens of apps and platforms.
Fragmentation isn't the problem — it's the reality every advertiser now has to solve for. Years of chasing scale across a growing maze of platforms has left advertisers managing walled gardens, disconnected data, and inconsistent measurement. That's not a viewing problem; it's an aggregation problem.
As a distributor, we offer a solution to that complexity — acting as an integrator of premium content, versus just aggregating impressions. We bring live TV and streaming together through the Spectrum TV App, and now Seamless Entertainment, which makes content discovery effortless for viewers while giving advertisers one unified way to reach audiences across a wide range of apps and programming.
Connecting complexity rather than eliminating it is the way forward for Andrew Longworth, VP of Advanced TV at Innovid, who says marketers want openness and interoperability, not another walled garden.
Fragmentation isn't going away, so our approach to it needs to change. Instead of trying to eliminate complexity, the industry needs to focus on connecting it. Marketers don't want another point solution or walled garden. They want tech built on openness and interoperability that brings together data, creative, media, and measurement across the ecosystem. When those workflows are connected, fragmentation becomes much more manageable, and marketers can spend less time navigating complexity and more time driving outcomes.
Taylor Stewart, VP Growth & Emerging Channels at TripleLift, made the case for planning around people rather than channels, connecting creative, data and measurement so each campaign informs the next.
Fragmentation isn't the problem. Guessing is.
Consumers now move across streaming, social, retail media, and traditional TV, making it difficult for brands to efficiently target and engage the right audience. Channel-first planning can't keep up. Audience-first buying, powered by identity, AI, and cross-channel measurement, can.
CTV buying often exists in a black box, focusing just on the where without understanding who or why. Fragmentation becomes a liability when creative, data, and measurement stay siloed. Connect them in real time, and every campaign teaches the next one something. Audience data sets the context. High-impact formats and sequential creative carry that context across channels, so the story holds together even when the screen changes.
On the supply side, fragmentation looks different: it creates opportunity. CTV supply spans MVPDs, OEMs, FAST, and broadcasters, each holding a piece of true scale that's hard to see in full. Subscriber data and cross-platform addressability are starting to fill those gaps, letting advertisers unlock supply and build customer journeys that are specific to a person, not just a placement.
Fragmentation split the map. Audience-first buying is how we read it again.
Ioanna Protogiannis, Senior Director of Measurement & Reporting Solutions at LG Ad Solutions, argued that viewers aren't overwhelmed by all their options, they actually like them, and the job is simply making them easier to navigate.
The industry sees fragmentation. Consumers see choice. Streaming hasn't become fragmented because it's failing - it reflects an expanding streaming ecosystem that gives viewers more choice than ever before. Our job isn't to reduce that choice; it's to make it easier to navigate. As viewers move seamlessly across services, the Home Screen becomes the common layer that brings the streaming ecosystem together, connecting viewers with the content they came to watch while helping content partners and advertisers reach them.
Guy Edri, CEO of V, posits that fragmentation is just a way station and that TV, like computer operating systems and smartphones before it, will wind up with two competing ecosystems, one open and one closed.
Fragmentation is not the future of television. It's part of the process. Today, technology companies, retailers, advertising powerhouses, and smart TV manufacturers all want to become the platform for the connected home. But I believe the TV has a unique advantage. It's the biggest screen in the home, the one that naturally brings people together, and the device best positioned to become the hub for entertainment, commerce, communication, and AI.
History tells us that platform markets don't stay fragmented forever. They consolidate around two dominant models: one open and one closed. We've seen it with computers, where Windows and macOS emerged as the defining ecosystems. We saw it again with smartphones, where Android and iOS became the platforms that mattered. Even web browsers followed the same pattern, with Chrome representing the open web and Safari the tightly integrated ecosystem. And we're beginning to see the same process unfold in AI, where dozens of assistants are competing today, but only a handful of ecosystems are likely to define the future.
Television is likely to follow the same path. At V, we're building the leading open platform—one that brings together the best content, services, AI, commerce, and partners without competing with them. We believe the future of TV will be built on openness, choice, and collaboration.
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