As digital businesses are looking for new ways to improve their brand recognition and performance outcomes in 2026, convergence is quickly becoming one of the online ad industry’s most talked-about buzzwords.

Over the past decade, it seemed that digital video broadly, and the CTV advertising sector, in particular, were in constant battle for media budgets with linear TV. According to the IAB/PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report, digital video grew 25.4% in 2025, while linear TV dropped by 14.4% over the same year. 

In 2026 the tables have turned. Across the industry, a growing number of online ad professionals are discussing the strategic shift from conventional, more siloed ad buying tactics to the more unified “total video” approach or “convergence”, meaning the strategic blending of advertising across digital video, CTV, TV streaming, and even video podcasts into a single, cohesive strategy to achieve maximum performance results at scale.

Namely, as the Premion’s 2026 CTV/OTT Advertiser Survey, conducted in partnership with Advertiser Perception, showed, hybrid or somewhat integrated teams currently control 55% of streaming & CTV budgets, and this trend is only likely to grow in the near future.

Why Convergence is Becoming an Operating Model in 2026

While TV brings its brand-building powers at scale to the table, digital advertising channels offer targeting and measurement capabilities.

This is driving the shift toward converged media budgets and execution strategies, where linear TV and digital video are no longer managed separately, unlocking a range of meaningful benefits for digital businesses.

These, namely, include: 

  • the more flexible buying models that accommodate both upfront and programmatic buying, helping to redistribute the frequently limited budgets into the newly accessible premium inventory; 
  •  incremental reach beyond traditional linear audiences; 
  • AI-driven campaign optimization across the full video funnel, and more. 

Ultimately, this leads to stronger brand awareness, better video ad recall, and ROI that neither linear TV nor digital video can deliver as effectively in isolation.

Barriers to Growth Persist

In 2026, many ad companies still run linear TV and digital ads as separate teams with distinct KPIs, citing significant barriers to adoption of the converged approach to their media planning.  

In this respect, what remains a continued pain point in the digital video advertising industry is the lack of an efficient outcome-based measurement framework, despite the launch of IAB’s Project Eidos initiative, introduced shortly after the release of its CTV-focused programmatic ad guidelines. 

Another persistent challenge is the lack of transparency and interoperability driven by the rise of walled gardens, which fuels bid duplication issues among other problems. Major platforms like Roku and Amazon, for instance, have built closed ecosystems that force inventory purchases through their own DSPs, driving up CPMs while limiting advertiser flexibility and transparency.

How to Navigate Convergence

For most advertisers looking to get ahead, the next steps forward are quite obvious: merge linear TV and digital video planning under one department, rely on shared KPIs, and move from measuring each channel separately.

Investing in AI-driven optimization is equally important. Real-time optimization is already considered the most valuable AI capability by 58% of advertisers, yet only 44% believe it will be widely available in 2026, according to the same Premion survey. Causal AI attribution modeling, in particular, looks likely to become the new standard, replacing conventional attribution models. 

Finally, simplifying the tech stack is the most impactful operational step advertisers can take. Yet convergence sounds strategic on paper, but without a unified planning and buying platform underneath it, the silos don’t actually go away – they just get rebranded. And “convergence” stays a buzzword.