Beyond Fragmented Signals: Unifying Linear TV and CTV Measurement

Solving TV’s Translation Puzzle

On July 29, 2025, Samba TV and Kochava announced a partnership designed to provide consistent measurement across TV and digital platforms—addressing one of the marketing industry’s biggest unresolved issues around cross-channel television attribution and measurement. The collaboration marries Samba TV’s first-party viewership data across 50 million smart TVs with Kochava’s attribution spanning mobile, CTV, web, and physical retail.

Kochava Founder and CEO Charles Manning described the partnership as a way to “bring verified outcomes to linear TV at scale”—aiming to move beyond basic data integration toward a unified view of the consumer journey.

For the first time, marketers can compare results across linear TV, CTV, and digital channels using shared metrics—clarifying which networks, time slots, and creative variants actually drive installs, orders, or visits. Not reach. Not frequency. Outcomes.

“There was a time when you could buy prime-time ads and probably reach 80% of the country,” Zaman observes. “Now you buy them, you might reach 20% if you’re lucky.” Consider this: 94% of TV ads now reach fewer than 50% of households. The mass in mass media has quietly evaporated.

Advertising dollars tell a different story—cautious reallocation rather than wholesale flight. Linear still commands majority TV ad spend, though CTV projects to overtake it by 2027. The inflection point approaches but hasn’t quite arrived.

Measurement Blind Spots

Shields captures the industry’s uncomfortable irony: “For the longest time, there was complaining about Nielsen having a monopoly. Meanwhile, they complained about the walled gardens in digital advertising. Now you’ve got all this fragmentation, every media company playing the walled garden thing—their own identifiers, graphs, way of measuring. Now everything’s a walled garden, and at least Nielsen was simple.”

Linear TV measurement offers broad averages with limited segmentation—useful for understanding markets, inadequate for optimization. CTV provides granular data trapped in publisher-specific silos, each with proprietary methodology. Netflix measures one way, Hulu another, YouTube TV yet another.

“Up to 40% of a brand’s ad buy might still be on linear,” Simmons explains. “But how does this 40% compare to their 60% CTV? Historically, they haven’t had the ability to make that comparison.”

The gap extends beyond media metrics to business outcomes. Marketers need to connect TV advertising—regardless of delivery mechanism—to app installations, ecommerce transactions, subscription activations, store visits. Without these connections, TV advertising remains trapped defending reach and frequency while digital channels capture performance budgets through superior attribution.

Architecting a Solution

The technical foundation: straightforward. The implications: profound.

Samba TV measures second-by-second viewership on 50 million opted-in smart TVs, tracking activity across more than 2,000 networks and 300 streaming apps. This data feeds into an identity graph that links ad exposure to households and devices.

Kochava provides outcomes infrastructure, tracking conversions across mobile apps, CTV apps, websites, ecommerce platforms, and physical retail. Software development kit (SDK) implementations span thousands of apps. Integrations include Shopify (DTC), Polk (automotive), footfall analytics (retail visits), and Fandango (theatrical outcomes).

Attribution Sleight of Hand

One of the webinar’s most compelling insights centered on how last-touch attribution systematically undervalues television’s role in driving conversions.

Simmons illustrates: “If you’re on an iPhone and you search Netflix, 9 times out of 10 you’ll click the first result. Netflix probably paid upward of $10 for that tap. But the reality is that lots of mid-funnel and upper-funnel things drove you to that search behavior.”

The data exposes the trick. In one analysis spanning 20 million installs, 500,000 users saw both CTV ads and search results. Of these dual-exposed users, CTV came first 95% of the time. For social media, CTV preceded social touchpoints 94% of the time.

Television drives search and social as outcomes. But who captures credit in the dashboard? The last touch.

This undervaluation creates perverse incentives—budget shifts toward channels capturing credit rather than those creating value. Unified measurement corrects this by revealing each touchpoint’s actual contribution.

“Linear tends to be more performative than folks give it credit for,” Simmons observes. “If you’re buying 60% CTV and 40% linear, you might want to pick up a little more value from linear.”

The secret: What looked like search performance was television’s work all along.

What the Numbers Reveal: A Case Study

A quick-service restaurant (QSR) case study highlights the unified TV measurement strategy. The brand allocated 80% of its budget to linear TV and 20% to CTV, tracking which platforms actually led to mobile app downloads. Unified measurement revealed what siloed data could not:

Geography: Southern California DMAs overindexed for store visits. Chicago underperformed. Regional reallocation followed.
Networks: Nickelodeon and ABC outperformed for in-app order completions—a not-so-obvious insight guiding future buys.
Creative and daypart: Primetime Family Meal ads drove 50% higher conversion than alternative messaging.
Frequency: Diminishing returns showed after five exposures, rationalizing budget deployment.

Performance data arrives within 48–72 hours through daily dashboards—enabling midflight optimization impossible with linear’s traditional measurement cycles.

“We delivered believable, defensible results,” Simmons recounts. “The brand could finally see, ‘Of my 40% on linear and 60% on CTV, what’s the actual downstream performance?'”

Performance Meets Brand (Finally)

Unified measurement collapses television’s brand-vs.-performance distinction. Historically, TV has meant mass marketing and vague awareness metrics, not incrementality testing and coefficient lift.

This is changing. CTV’s targeting capabilities and measurable performance attract new advertiser categories—Instagram-native brands previously viewing television as inaccessible.

Shields poses the question “Is the measurement ahead of buying capabilities?” The gap between what can be measured and how quickly budgets shift remains real.

“Do you need a good answer now or a perfect answer later?” Simmons asks. Performance marketers want signal as fast as possible.” Television’s cadence differs from mobile’s sub-hour optimization cycles. The partnership’s 48–72 hour reporting bridges that gap—not mobile-fast, but leaps beyond linear’s traditional weeks-long measurement cycles.

Fast enough to optimize. Precise enough to prove value. This is the new standard.

Advertising Landscape Inflection Point

To conclude, the panel turned to television advertising’s future trajectory. “It’s an existential moment for TV,” Shields observes. “The more sophisticated attribution you can bring, the more confident brands become. But the structural challenge is who controls media budgets. That’s where change happens slowly.”

“TV’s always been the best place to tell a story,” notes Zaman. “TV was one-to-many, but CTV makes it almost one-to-one. TV can still start a story; CTV lets you continue it with sequential messaging.”

The brands mastering this convergence—full-screen video’s emotional impact meeting digital advertising’s targeting precision—will capture television’s next chapter.

Linear TV + CTV Q&A Featuring Grant Simmons

Following the webinar, the Kochava Foundry team compiled questions from attendees alongside additional inquiries that frequently arise when brands explore unified TV measurement. Simmons offers detailed responses addressing technical infrastructure, measurement methodology, implementation considerations, and strategic applications of the Kochava-Samba TV partnership.