Social media lit up Jo Koy with devastating attacks about his hosting duties at the Golden Globe Awards on January 7. 

But something funny happened on the way to the dustbin of Golden Globes history. Ratings had a dead-cat bounce, rising to 9.4 million viewers — a 50% jump from 2023’s record low of 6.3 million viewers.

Whether more people tuned in from social media’s lambasting of Koy’s unfortunate performance or whether they were drawn to the quality of the nominees (Barbie, Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon), and attendees (Taylor Swift, Greta Gerwig, Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Scorsese, Robert DeNiro), is difficult to determine.

Linear TV is still quite a powerful advertising platform for live sports and tentpole events such as awards shows. The reasons are simple: ratings, cultural relevance via social media, and the ripple effect for days or even months after the fact in the form of user-generated shareable content (tweets, posts, hashtags and memes). 

Each year, Q1 is brings the linear-TV ad trifecta: the Grammy Awards (February 4), Super Bowl LVIII (February 11), and the Oscars (March 10). Perhaps the Golden Globes should be included to make Q1 a “quadfecta?” 

In 2020, the Grammy Awards drew about 19 million viewers, which fell to under 10 million in 2021 and 2022 before rising in 2023 to 12.5 million. And the bored Ben Affleck meme is still memorable a year later. 

The Super Bowl never fails to disappoint as a ratings draw with roughly 100 million viewers each year. While ratings for the other two shows fluctuate wildly, all are amplified by social media commentary.

When our clients ran TV Super Bowl commercials, they experienced increased engagement and a significantly higher response rate on their websites and apps.

Despite the high out-of-pocket cost, the substantial volume of web traffic more than offset the cost, resulting in a lower cost-per-visit for the Super Bowl. The down-funnel impact on new customers and conversions from the Super Bowl was similarly strong and efficient, with the greatest impact realized within the first three days and measurable for approximately 25 days post-spot.

Pregame spots have proven to generate a strong response for numerous brands. Placing ads in tentpole programming elevates awareness among consumers and adds legitimacy and credibility. This is important because there has been a steady decrease in ratings for primetime programming each year, showing a decline of 13.83% from 2022 to 2023.

Clever creative in the right placement drives conversations that happen outside of live broadcasts; what used to be called the “water-cooler” effect — next-day conversations in the workplace — can become immortal online.

The “Breaking Bad” Super Bowl spot for PopCorners last year was widely shared and discussed on social media, even though it aired only once on TV. However many millions the brand spent to run the 60-second spot helped to ensure it reached a substantial audience beyond the telecast and generated a lot of positive buzz for the brand.

Super Bowl LVII in 2023 drew the most viewers in the past five years with 115 million in total, up 16% compared to 2019. Naturally, eyeballs vary depending on the quarter in which an ad appears and whether the game is lopsided.

Like the Grammys, Academy Awards viewership has declined significantly, down 37% in 2023 versus 2019. Yet the Oscars broadcast was one of only seven non-NFL sports programs in the top 100 most-watched TV broadcasts of 2023, making it a still-valuable buy. It remains to be seen whether the current beef between New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers and scheduled Oscars host Jimmy Kimmel has legs that can stretch to March. 

To maximize impact, brands might consider leveraging strategic partnerships with popular platforms such as YouTube AdBlitz to amplify brand creative and achieve even more mass reach. The coupling generated five times the views of the Super Bowl game itself and provided opportunities to reach incremental consumers, aged 18-49 who didn’t see an ad on TV. The most successful YouTube AdBlitz ads during the 2023 Super Bowl garnered anywhere from 11 million to a staggering 140 million views, showcasing the immense reach of the platform. 

Considering the magnitude of pop-culture influence from a tentpole linear TV event through shareable content and the data derived from sentiments, conversation and interactivity, buying ads on these shows is practically a guarantee for return on ad spend. 

Think of it this way: Despite dismal material and the near-universal panning of his performance, the Taylor Swift death-stare meme generated from one of Koy’s jokes about the singer is worth its viralness in gold. At least now everyone knows who he is.

The supply chain crisis that is affecting the economy is also likely to have an impact on television advertising.

Ad sales executives say that after a gangbusters upfront, fourth quarter scatter got off to a slow start, then had an early spurt as retailers wanted to get shoppers into their store now before facing the possibility of bare shelves. Advertisers are also looking to move some of the fourth-quarter inventory they bought in the upfront into the first quarter, when they’re hoping to have more goods for sale.

MoffettNathanson research analyst Michael Nathanson Research also expressed concern that supply chain issues will affect media company revenues.

“Despite Black Friday less than a month out, we’ve also heard from our channel checks that national TV scatter inventory (which is the top of the food chain) has yet to sell out 4Q,” Nathanson said in a research note Monday.

Nathanson said the categories that buy national TV advertising most likely to be affected by supply chain issues are auto, tech, retail and restaurants, due to labor shortages. He estimates those categories represented 30% of spending in 2019. 

As a result of the concerns, Nathanson is lowering his fourth-quarter national TV estimate to down 1% year over year. 

“Fourth quarter should be protected by the benefit of a strong upfront — with much of the inventory in the quarter already locked in — as well as strength in football ratings. However, if supply chain challenges persist  into the first half of 2022, we could see a larger impact on TV advertising,” Nathanson said. 

Similarly, Nathanson sees spending on ad-supported video on demand streaming, which had strong growth in the third quarter, cooling off in the fourth quarter, particular if there’s a supply-chain related slowdown.

For ViacomCBS’s Pluto TV, Nathanson projects revenue to almost  double from a higher base and reach about $245 million in U.S. advertising. For Fox’s Tubi, he sees  growth of 80% to  about $125 million in advertising revenue. Roku ad revenue is expected to be up 74% to $280 million.

He notes that in Comcast’s earnings report last week, Peacock was up 429% for the third quarter and Nathanson expects The Walt Disney Co.‘s Hulu, the AVOD leader, to be up 40% with revenue topping $900 million.

Tatari, an analytics platform for buying and measuring advertising, has formed an exclusive partnership with Clearco under which Clearco will provide young companies with up to $10 million for TV advertising, and Tatari will help them grow their brands by spending it.

The novel buy-now, pay-later arrangement comes at a time when direct-to-consumer companies are having more success buying television, and companies like Tatari can provide digital-minded marketers with data to confirm the effectiveness of their campaigns.

“The data consistently proves that TV advertising performs for growth-stage companies. When these brands want to scale their investments, the cost of TV media can become a barrier to entry,” said Todd Gordon, VP of client development at Tatari.

Also Read: Bad Audience Estimates Hurt Linear Television as Upfronts Approach

“Tatari’s deal with Clearco aims to address that sticking point,” Gordon said. “Brands can now fund their TV advertising with quick, sensible financing without having to raise it as venture capital, and we can immediately put that money to work in the form of data-driven, performance-minded TV ad buys.”

Since being founded in 2015, Clearco (formerly known as Clearbanc) has invested more than $2 billion in 4,000 online businesses.

“In the past year, we’ve seen consumers buy goods and services online, pushing more dollars into e-commerce,” said Andrew D’Souza, CEO & co-founder of Clearco. “While a larger market means more ecommerce merchants, advertising still is one of the largest costs for growing brands. And traditional equity-based financing can dilute the cap table. Our partnership with Tatari provides the solution for companies to grow and leverage data-driven practices to TV.”

Also Read: Comscore Adds Sling TV Data in Expanded Deal With Dish

Instead of taking equity, Clearco provides funds for media buying for a fee and a share of future revenues.

One of the first clients to take advantage of the Clearco partnership with Tatari is Resident’s Nectar Sleep Brands. Resident has been working with both companies separately.

“Performance marketers are always interested in inventory that can be proven to generate outcomes, and Tatari has made it possible for us to hold TV to that rigorous standard.” said Eric Hutchinson, co-founder and co-CEO of Resident. “Clearco was also a key partner to help fund our marketing spend in the early days of Nectar Sleep without diluting the business."

Also Read: Americans Planning Post-COVID Travel Heed CTV Ads: Magnite

Most young companies start slow with TV, but soon become believers, said Tatari’s Gordon, who headed negotiations as U.S. director at Magna Global before moving on to posts at Tube Mogul and Adobe.

“Our clients are growth junkies. They’re addicted to growth and we show them in small doses that TV can work,” Gordon said. “And then once it does, they’re off to the races. If you can show that Bravo works, if you can show that ESPN works, you can spend a million dollars a week.”

Tatari helps make sure the media spending pays off. “We read the data in the moment and take quick action to optimize away from the things that aren’t working and optimize towards the things that are working, and then try to scale,” Gordon said. “There’s more on-demand funding as you need it. It fits well with the way we look at the media world.”

The partnership is also good for Tatari, he said. “It brings benefits to our client and honestly, help us to continue to grow as amazingly fast as we are.”

Program Note: Future's Advanced Advertising Summit is today (April 27), register for free at SpringTVEvents.com. On-demand session viewing after the event available for registered attendees.

With a new presidential administration and renewed bipartisan talk of significant investment in infrastructure as a means of kickstarting the economy post pandemic, it looks as though 2021 may be the year when the U.S. gets serious about addressing its aging infrastructure. The need to invest in critical infrastructure like roads and bridges is glaring. Without addressing cracks in the pavement and rusted beams, the country’s ability to function can be compromised.

Less visibly, television advertising has been experiencing the consequences of a similarly aging infrastructure. While digital advertisers have benefited from advanced targeting and measurement, TV advertisers have largely been left to use the same tools that have been in place for decades. However, changing consumption behaviors and privacy concerns are forcing us to rethink our models of connection and they provide us with the perfect opportunity to evolve the entire industry. 

We are at a tremendous crossroads in our industry, and to really move forward and better serve brands and put their increasing budgets for video content to best use, we need to completely rethink the infrastructure for TV advertising itself. 

When we talk about infrastructure in this context, we’re not just referring to the mechanics of advertising: getting ads to where they need to be and having the right software in place to collect data. We’re also talking about the infrastructure that facilitates the fundamental marriage between TV and data. That’s what will really help the medium move forward--beyond traditional age and demographic targeting and panel-based measurement. 

Just like lawmakers in Washington, the ad industry can’t afford to wait.

Inflection Drives Evolution

As a result of the quickly changing consumption and privacy environment, media companies have been working to retrofit established business models to this new reality. Unfortunately, the bridge between digital and TV is not an easy one to cross.

These companies have found that the models for linear TV are a challenging fit for on-demand media, and the access to data and attribution that marketers have come to appreciate from digital advertising is not yet easily achievable through the new TV platforms.

While it would seem like the solution is simple—leveraging first-party data (from device manufacturers and content distributors) and applying digital marketing tools to streaming content—the real world isn’t so cut and dry. Rather than developing effective tools from the ground up for a brand new medium (as was the case with the advent of performance-driven digital advertising), the TV industry is still working to evolve and find the right solutions for today’s reality—this, for a medium that is approaching its 100th birthday. 

The tenets of speed, efficiency, and cost are table stakes now. Let’s build the right on-ramp for data that focuses on quality, connectivity, and privacy.

Building a New “Highway” System

The industry can’t just attempt to copy what worked for the digital giants. Flexibility - in utilizing new systems, while leveraging existing legacy investments - is critical to the success of a new infrastructure. A data-driven future must meld the best of traditional TV (safety and reach) with the best of digital advertising (targeting and measurement) while preserving consumer privacy at the core.

This isn’t just limited to the current media darling, CTV, either: in spite of the cord-cutting trend, many consumers still bounce from linear TV to CTV to DVR to mobile streaming. What’s more, the growth of walled gardens introduces a new range of systems and devices that must be factored into brands’ strategies. 

Addressing all of this is a complicated task, but it isn’t insurmountable. A logical approach would be a unified platform that brings all of the disparate TV companies, devices and systems together holistically. But getting all these different groups to work together in concert isn’t very realistic so we need to think about the right connective tissue that allows them to come and go as they please. 

This begets the advent of a simple connective layer—a data highway of sorts—designed to facilitate and ease the flow of data and information across platforms and from one party to another. All of this can also be done while preserving first-party data control, built first and foremost with a commitment to privacy. The data and insights can, in turn, be used in a manner that is consistent with each companies’ privacy, confidentiality, and security policies. 

With this connective layer, the viable future of data-driven, advanced advertising is finally visible.

But for this to happen, like our nation, we need to think “industry first,” understand where we came from, learn from our challenges, and build a new infrastructure that serves as the backbone of this new economy. When we do that, this rising tide will lift all of our boats.

Blockgraph is a privacy-first infrastructure for TV data that ensures that the highest levels of control, quality and security for data owners. It is owned by three of the largest media and video distribution companies in the world—Comcast NBCUniversal, Charter Communications, Inc. and ViacomCBS Inc.

In recent years, savvy advertisers—particularly those working with innovative young direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands—have accelerated their paths to TV advertising, upending historical patterns in which brands slowly built presences in other channels for years before launching their first TV efforts. Since the onset of COVID-19, this trend has increased dramatically, with young DTC brands racing to fill the void left by traditional TV advertisers that cancelled campaigns amid the pandemic.

This sudden shift sets the stage for a potential sea change within the competitive landscape of TV advertising in the coming years—provided that the brands that are accelerating their entry into TV are seeing the returns needed to continue their investments. Which begs the question: Do brands that launch their first TV campaign earlier in their lives see a greater impact on their digital performance than more-established brands?

To explore the implications of brands entering the TV advertising space earlier in their life cycles, Effectv and VAB recently took on an expansive analysis of hundreds of brands, both DTC and non-DTC, that have turned to TV as a way to drive their businesses forward. Let’s take a deeper dive into the motivations of these brands and the results that their TV efforts have delivered to date. 

The Pandemic-Driven Shift to TV

The diversification of advertisers within the TV space in 2020 has been swift and significant. According to a VAB analysis, nearly $460 million entered the national TV marketplace in the first half of 2020 from 110 first-time national advertisers across 59 categories. Impressively, nearly 70 percent of new first-half national TV dollars were invested during Q2, the heart of the pandemic. 

There’s a number of reasons why these young DTC brands are now accelerating their paths to TV advertising. These include the continued expansion and evolution of targeting and measurement capabilities within the TV space, both of which create greater efficiencies and lower costs of entry in TV. But it goes deeper than that. The legitimizing effect of TV advertising for brands, along with the medium’s enablement of deeper brand storytelling, are rapidly making TV a must-have for the type of growth that today’s young startups need to deliver. 

The Outsized Impact of TV Advertising for Young Brands

Given the short-term, lower-cost TV inventory opportunity opened by the pandemic, it’s not terribly surprising that more early stage companies started to experiment with TV advertising. But according to our analysis, the results these brands are achieving suggest that they are going to continue to invest—and likely attract more and more young brands like themselves to the channel. 

For our analysis with Effectv, we looked at the average monthly unique website visitors that were recorded in relation to the TV campaign launches for 190 new TV advertisers. When we examined results according to the age of the advertising companies, interesting patterns emerged. While both DTC and non-DTC brands across all life stages saw an immediate double-digit increase in unique visitors to their digital platforms during their TV launch month, the results were even more striking among younger companies. 

According to our analysis, younger brands (3 years old or less) saw the largest lift—23 percent—in average website traffic within their launch month alone. Younger DTC brands are particularly aggressive as they challenge the incumbent brands in their spaces. They’re spending more (33-36 percent more) and advertising more consistently than the older brands, resulting in a greater return on their investment. The results speak for themselves. 

TV can serve as a great validator for new brands, bringing swift credibility and scale, fast-tracking them to become household names quicker than those confined to digital channels. But our analysis also found that TV’s power as a growth engine isn’t confined to young brands. Across all measures, we found that TV campaigns drove improved results across brands, DTC and non-DTC alike, regardless of age. 

As the economy accelerates and younger brands seize their opportunity to challenge incumbents on their own turf, the TV advertising landscape will look a lot different than it did back in 2019. Established brands that continue to invest in TV advertising will be able to hold their ground and catapult their businesses forward. But in areas where legacy brands pull back their TV spend amid the uncertainty of the pandemic, there will be no shortage of hungry young brands waiting to battle it out. 

VAB, the trade group representing the video industry, is an insights-driven organization that inspires marketers to reimagine their media strategies resulting in smarter, more educated decisions that drive business growth.    

At a time when digital ad spending is growing while spending on traditional TV is flat at best, Comcast's Effectv ad sales unit has released a study showing that marketing strategies that employ both forms of media perform best for brands.

The study, conducted with Mediascience, notes that TV now uses data to reach target consumers. At the same time, TV has a unique ability to legitimize new brands. The study found that consumers were 35% more likely to make a purchase of an unknown brand’s product after seeing the ad on TV, compared to those exposed on digital alone.

Brand recall more than doubled when a digital ad is accompanied by a TV ad for the same brands and there was a lift in purchase intent of 15% when ads aired on TV plus digital compared to digital alone.

“This study demonstrates TV advertising’s impact on consumer awareness of and attitude toward both established and lesser-known brands,” said John Brauer, executive director of data, insights and innovation at Effectv. “TV is a trusted source of information, and pairing TV with digital video more effectively builds brand strength than digital alone.”

Other findings of the study were that adding TV improves total campaign performance, that TV provides a halo effect for digital ads, causing the digital ad to be more appealing and that viewers spend three times more time with digital ads when they’re preceded by a TV ad.

Digital ads were perceived to be less intrusive and less “annoying” after TV exposure, the study said.

“Brands, no matter what their stage of maturity or size, stand to benefit from a combined TV plus digital strategy,” the report concludes. “One without the other could erode brand strength and purchase consideration over time. This study proves the memory effects of digital video are enhanced with the brand building power of TV, and that’s why digital loves TV.”

The TV industry is going through a renaissance, providing consumers with a huge number of programming choices all powered by a revenue mix of advertising and subscription fees. However, with cord-cutting accelerating (though perhaps less quickly because of the coronavirus), some have said that TV advertising will suffer. If so, where will the money come from?

To my television industry colleagues: The reckoning is here.

First, some stats.

Even before the coronavirus impact on 2020 ad spend became increasingly apparent, eMarketer’s most recent U.S. advertising forecast noted that TV ad spending peaked in 2018 at $72.4 billion. Not surprising, since that was an election year.

Less encouraging was eMarketer’s forecast — again, offered in mid-February — that U.S. TV ad spending would drop in 2023 to $68.9 billion. That’s a level last witnessed in 2015.

Perhaps equally troubling, eMarketer projected TV’s share of total U.S. media ad spending to dip to 22.8% in 2023, vs. 39.2% in 2014. Digital already garners the largest slice of the overall ad pie — and it’s growing.

How about subscription revenue as a growth alternative to make up for the shortfall?

There’s a wrinkle there too: eMarketer projected pay TV households to drop 16% from 86.5 million in 2019 to 72.7 million in 2023 — reducing pay TV penetration from 68.3% in 2019 to 56.5% in 2023. And patterns suggest steep price hikes merely hasten cord-cutting.

SVOD Growth Limits

As for the prospects of OTT and multichannel video programming distributors’ vMVPD extensions to pick up the TV-subscription slack: The average SVOD household will pay for 3.3 SVOD platforms by 2025 vs. 2.3 at yearend 2019, according to the firm Digital TV Research. In other words, the average SVOD home would be adding all of one subscription between 2019 and 2025. How many beyond legacy SVOD leaders like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Peacock and CBS All Access will prevail?

In other words, what is the television industry’s best avenue? Advertising ARPU.

MVPDs that have achieved growth in average revenue per unit (ARPU) — excluding ad revenue — lately have accomplished this via price hikes and reductions in promotional offers. How successfully can this strategy work over the longer term as program costs rise and consumers seek alternatives?

In this environment, the ad revenue component arguably becomes all the more crucial.

Share shift (or slice shift) from TV to digital advertising jibes with the narrative that digital delivers stronger metrics. That does not have to be the narrative longer-term.

Indeed, 49% of participating video viewers — and, importantly, 69% of younger viewers — in a recent Valassis study said ads on streaming TV “are more relevant” to them than traditional TV ads. And 52% of all participants said they were more inclined to purchase a product or service seen on streaming TV. This helps crystallize two likelihoods: that data-supported, targeted advertising vehicles more accurately connect marketers with receptive audiences; and that younger video consumers have come to accept, even expect, targeting.

Will COVID-19 accelerate addressable advertising? Not in the immediate future. However, this crisis will convince many advertisers that the sight, sound and emotion of TV combined with the power of data and targeting are critical to reaching their desired audiences. Equally important, addressable advertising will increase the needed ad revenues for the TV industry ecosystem.

Cable TV inventory providers have been working on targeting for years of course, while television broadcasters are, sensibly, transitioning to impressions-based selling in order to access the programmatic marketplace.

Targeting Is Key

The good news is that marketers are embracing various forms of targeted, or “advanced” TV advertising.

A recent Advertiser Perceptions survey of marketers and agencies conducted for FreeWheel found that addressable TV was bought by 57% of respondents; 66% have bought advertising on OTT or connected TV, 57% on full-episode players, 56% on audience-based linear, 33% on vMVPDs and 33% on set-top box VOD.

The days of gross ratings points are waning, making way for more tangible metrics like impressions — but ultimately also for those that resonate with the CEOs and CFOs, such as ROI and ROAS (return on advertising spend).

Once we’re all back at full capacity following the coronavirus crisis (hopefully soon), consider this call to action: If you’re in the linear TV business, dive into the programmatic marketplace. The win-win is a larger — and growing — pool for your inventory, while legacy programmatic participants get access to your premium curated content. And get serious about linear TV advertising.

Members of the TV ecosystem can arrest, even reverse, the trends posited by eMarketer. In other words, the TV ad slice of the pie does not have to shrink.

National TV ad revenue rose 2.5% in July, thanks largely to gains in sports on cable, according to new figures from research company Standard Media Index.

Cable news and broadcast primetime entertainment also posted increases.

Cable networks registered a 3.7% rise in ad revenue with sports programming up 30% in July. Broadcast ad revenue was up 0.3%

Much of the cable gain came from the Wimbledon tennis tournament, which aired on ESPN and ESPN2 entirely in July. Last year, four days of Wimbledon were played in June. ESPN also aired the X Games in July after they were played in June last year. The network got a bump from a 12% increase in commercial unit prices on its sports talk shows.

Related: ESPN Fits Mobile App With ‘Watch’ Tab

Cable news networks were also strong, with an 11% increase across Fox News Channel, CNN and MSNBC. Of those, MSNBC saw the largest gain, up 33%, followed by CNN (up 10%) and FNC (up 5%).

Spending on broadcast sports was down 13% compared witha year ago, when the Olympic trials brought more than $20 million in spending to NBC. The broadcasters were also hurt by the PGA Championship returning to August; it was moved to July last year because of the Olympics.

Related: NBC Sports Rebrands Comcast RSNs

Overall ad spending in July rose 12%.

Digital returned to strong growth with an 18% gain. But SMI said one large advertiser, Unilever, which announced it will shift spending from digital to TV, spent 15% more on cable and broadcast than a year ago.

Digital video grew 12%, with premium video showing big gains. Hulu was up 37%, while YouTube was down 15%. Some advertisers have pulled advertising from YouTube because of concern ads might run alongside inappropriate content. TV network digital was up 11%.

“Despite national TV ratings challenges, the ad market opened the second half of the year with a real bang,” said James Fennessy, CEO of Standard Media Index. “Social and premium video remain the powerhouses of the digital sector.”

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.

For all the hand-wringing about cord cutting and commercial avoidance, it’s hard to top TV advertising as a medium, according to the findings of a new report.

A study by Neustar commissioned by Turner Broadcasting and Horizon Media found that for a $1 million investment, television’s lift is consistently 7 times better than paid search and 5 times better than online display ads across a broad list of advertising categories.

The study comes as advertisers, through their media agencies, and the networks are negotiating upfront ad deals for the next TV season. During this year's upfront presentations, networks bashed digital advertising for an array of issues, including viewability, bot fraud and ads landing near content that isn’t brand-safe.

Related: ANA: Fight Against Bot Fraud Is Winnable

The new study also found that the lift from TV ad campaigns from 2010 to 2016 provided a lift 5 times better than online display ads.

“Dollar for dollar, TV provides the most scale and delivers the highest return on ad spend from both a sales and awareness perspective,” the report said. “It’s important to note that even TV will reach a saturation point, and the next marketing dollar should be spent elsewhere. To ensure an optimized marketing mix, advertisers should adopt a data-driven approach that can inform the ideal media allocation across all channels based on all internal and external market conditions to meet their performance goals.”

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.

Facebook is working on a new video-focused app for the Apple TV, set-tops and other TV-connected devices as part of a strategy focused on grabbing more video ad dollars, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Facebook already does some limited app integration on platforms like Comcast’s X1 platform and Roku boxes, but the new strategy appears to have much bigger TV implications.

Facebook has been upfront about interest in evolving into a “video-first” company. “Facebook is “prioritizing putting video first across our family of apps,” company CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on the company’s Q3 call last November. Examples include Facebook Live, Instagram Stories, 360-degree video, and other video-focused activity delivered on its various platforms.

Facebook is scheduled to post Q4 results later today.

RELATED: Video Taking Lead Role at Facebook

But according to the WSJ, Facebook is also talking to media companies about licensing “long-form, TV-quality programming,” holding that a set-top box represents an appropriate conduit for that kind of fare.

Media agency ZenithOptimedia forecasts that advertising spending on TV will be basically flat over the next three years. Meanwhile spending on digital media, particularly video, is expected to climb.

In its second quarter forecast, ZenithOptimedia forecasts that TV spending will rise 2% to $68.1 billion in 2016, an Olympic year, after a small dip in 2015. The agency sees spending increasing negligibly in 2017.

TV dollars are expected to continue to shift from broadcast to cable. ZenithOptimedia sees broadcast network spending sliding from $15.7 billion in 2017 from $17.4 million in 2014 following a decline in ratings. “Networks are continuing to focus on recapturing audiences across other screens, fueling growth of their digital and mobile business. Among these opportunities is the advancement of dynamic ad insertion,” the agency says in its forecast. 

Spending on cable is seen rising to $24.2 billion in 2017 from $22.4 billion in 2014 as cable networks add more quality original programming to their lineups.

Read more at B&C.