LAS VEGAS – The app stores on connected televisions are becoming more like the app stores for smartphones, offering a growing variety of streaming video, gaming and shopping. The ensuing fragmentation makes audience data more valuable for brands and their media agencies.

“We still have a big issue of fragmentation. There’s just amazing content, but it’s distributed everywhere, which creates a lot of challenges around just planning and measurement,” Pete Stein, global president of Dentsu’s Merkle, said in this interview at CES 2025 with Julian Zilberbrand on behalf of Beet.TV.

The quality and timeliness of streaming video can vary, too, with some apps showing endless re-runs of decades-old TV series and video-sharing sites serving user-generated content. In this environment, marketers are still seeking ways to place ads within content that induces audiences to pay attention to their brand messaging.

“At Merkle…data science is the core of what we do and helping clients to understand the value of the advertising that they’re doing,” Stein said. The agency’s data integrations with CTV publishers helps “clients to really understand with those high propensity audiences, what was the impact? Did it really drive a lift and really get a true sense of the value of the advertising they’re doing?”

CES this year showcased some of the latest ways artificial intelligence technology is being applied in consumer electronics, making them more useful to people. AI also is having an effect on marketing and media.

“From a customer standpoint, it’s going to help with content discovery, which is beneficial to the platforms as well,” Stein said of AI. “But AI is gonna flatten everything. Right now, we do so much work planning in channels individually, it’s going to give us that holistic view of the customer.”

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