Breaking the screen silos: Why advertisers must rethink media planning

Television, for most of its history, was a place. A box in the living room, a fixed hour, a shared ritual. Today it is closer to a mood that trails the viewer through the day: a cricket over caught on a phone during the commute, a streaming drama picked up after dinner, the same story followed up in a YouTube highlights reel before bed. The set has not disappeared. It has simply stopped being the only door into the room.

That single observation is quietly rewriting the economics of Indian advertising. For years, media plans have been built the way television itself was built: in separate rooms. One team bought broadcast reach through rating points. Another negotiated OTT deals. A third handled Connected TV and YouTube almost as an afterthought bolted onto the digital budget. The viewer, meanwhile, never noticed the walls between these rooms because for her there never were any. She was always watching one continuous stream of video, only the industry insisted on measuring it in three.

The question now surfacing in boardrooms and planning decks is not whether this old structure is inconvenient. It is whether it is commercially indefensible. Nielsen's own April 2026 Gauge data, shows just how thin the lines between categories have become, with streaming holding 47.6 per cent of total television viewing, cable at 21.6 per cent and broadcast at 19.9 per cent, while YouTube alone commands 13.4 per cent as the single largest distributor on the chart. No category is dominant enough to be planned in isolation, and no category is small enough to be ignored. India's version of this story is unfolding even faster, and the people building media plans for a living are beginning to say so out loud.

The cost of planning in silos

The clearest sign that something is broken is what happens to the same viewer inside a single campaign. Russhabh R Thakkar, Founder and CEO of Frodoh, puts a number on the waste this creates. "The average CTV campaign today reaches only 19.64 per cent of eligible households, yet already delivers a frequency of 7.09," he says, arguing that brands end up "hammering a small slice of the audience repeatedly while a massive untouched audience sits right there unreached." His estimate is that between 30 and 40 per cent of television budgets are misallocated because broadcasters, OTT platforms and YouTube are still planned as though they answer to different masters.

Somendu Singh, Chief Contributor at CTV Scale, arrives at a strikingly similar figure from a different angle: the absence of a shared data language across platforms. He points out that without a single source of audience truth, "almost 90 per cent of total video advertising budgets are going to two to three mediums only," leaving genuinely incremental viewers untouched while the same eyeballs are counted, and paid for, again and again. Both describe the same phenomenon in different words, three plans pretending to be one, each optimising for its own scorecard rather than the business result the brand actually needs.

Varun Mohan, Chief Commercial Officer India at MiQ, frames the fix as a change in the first question a planner asks. "The opportunity now is to shift from platform-first planning to audience-first planning," he says. "Instead of asking how much to spend on each channel, marketers should ask where the next incremental consumer can be reached most effectively." He points to the scale already available for this shift, with India now home to more than 600 million OTT users and over 35 million Connected TV households, alongside YouTube's continued dominance as a video destination. He argues that consumers already experience one continuous viewing journey even while the industry still buys media in separate buckets.

From impressions to outcomes

If audience-first planning is the new starting point, the destination is a different measure of success altogether. One built on business outcomes rather than reach counted for its own sake. Badri Beriwal, Chief Strategy and Business Development Officer at Bata India, argues that most Indian marketing budgets remain built to achieve the single aim of awareness, when the consumer's actual path to purchase runs through several distinct stages. "A live cricket match builds awareness. A streaming show builds consideration. A creator led video, planned right, can drive the actual intent to buy," he says, noting that India's Connected TV audience alone grew 85 per cent in the past year, largely bought today as just another impression slot rather than a distinct stage in the decision journey. For a brand scaling into Tier 2, Tier 3 and Tier 4 India, he says, consumers move between a match, a reel and a store visit in the same week, which means planning has to work across every stage together or it amounts to reach without a path to purchase.

Underneath this shift sits a quieter, structural change in what fuels the decision itself: the data brands use to find and understand their audience. Ishank Joshi, Founder, MD and CEO of Mobavenue AI Tech Limited, describes an industry moving past third party identifiers toward first party data treated as a genuine business capability rather than a marketing convenience. "The real competitive advantage lies not in the volume of data a business owns, but in how responsibly and intelligently it activates that data," he says, adding that combined with artificial intelligence, this data can sharpen predictive intelligence and decision making across the entire customer lifecycle. His broader point cuts against the old obsession with reach for its own sake, that attention may open the first interaction with a customer, but sustained growth is earned through consistent relevance and trust built over time.

The next frontier lives beyond the metros

Perhaps the most striking part of this conversation is where the untouched audience actually sits. Thakkar's data suggests Indian viewers now spend 2.8 hours daily across OTT and linear television combined, with 93 per cent watching video on mobile and 71 per cent still watching on the television screen, a genuinely blended media life concentrated most heavily in regional India. "Tier 2 and Tier 3 audiences in West Bengal, Rajasthan, Gujarat and the South are watching on CTV in meaningful numbers, but most plans never reach them because regional OTT inventory is either ignored or bolted on as an afterthought," he says, describing campaigns built specifically to chase these pockets through vernacular content environments that neither a metro first OTT buy nor a traditional linear plan would ever touch.

What emerges is not a call to abandon television or crown any single platform as its replacement. It is a case for treating the viewer, not the screen, as the actual unit of planning, matching the right stage of the funnel to the right moment of attention and letting incremental reach, not habit, decide where the next rupee goes. As cross screen measurement matures and audience level data becomes easier to act on, the brands willing to plan this way early are likely to find an advantage that is difficult for slower moving rivals to close once unified audience buying becomes the industry's default rather than its exception.