Advanced Audience Planning Drives TV’s Next Phase: ISpot’s Dan Hickox

Why It Matters

These shifts make TV planning more efficient and accountable, giving healthcare marketers clearer evidence of ROI and enabling true omnichannel strategies that tie media spend to measurable patient outcomes. Standardized clean-room measurement could unlock broader industry adoption and better cross-channel optimization.

Summary

As TV budgets shift from linear to connected TV, marketers are increasingly using direct-to-audience targeting in CTV while linear TV is embracing big-data planning to build campaigns against advanced audiences rather than broad demographics. For healthcare advertisers, on-target reach, frequency and incremental reach across channels are key KPIs to prove campaign value and cross-platform impact. Innovations in compliant data sharing—data clean rooms and proprietary matching—now allow marketers to link media exposures to healthcare outcomes, demonstrating upper-funnel TV driving lower-funnel conversions. The next step is productizing clean-room methodologies to enable standardized cross-platform reach and frequency measurement across linear, CTV and social.

Original Description

LAS VEGAS – Media budgets are steadily moving from linear television to connected TV, opening new ways for marketers to reach audiences with greater precision, according to Dan Hickox, vice president of business development and partnerships at iSpot.

Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at CES 2026, Hickox said the shift allows brands to activate direct audience targeting while bringing more data-driven rigor to traditional TV planning.

“As media budgets shift from linear to CTV, marketers can take advantage of the direct to audience targeting available via CTV channels,” Hickox said. “They’re able to upload audiences directly into those platforms and then reach audiences within those platforms.”

Audience-based planning replaces demographic guesswork

Hickox said linear TV is also evolving through the adoption of big data in media planning systems, changing how campaigns are built.

“What that’s enabling is it now allows for marketers to create media plans directly against advanced audiences,” he said. “That’s a little bit different from how they’ve traditionally planned, which was against broad demographic-based audiences.”

Planning against defined audiences rather than age and gender groups makes campaigns more efficient and more effective, particularly as advertisers seek accountability across channels.

Healthcare marketers focus on reach and frequency

In healthcare advertising, Hickox said measurement priorities center on reaching the right audience consistently rather than chasing vanity metrics.

“On target reach and frequency are really great KPIs,” he said. “They measure how well marketers are able to deliver their message on target to the right audience and at frequency.”

He added that incremental reach and frequency have become increasingly important as campaigns extend across platforms. “Marketers need to understand where they’re reaching their audience and where they’re able to reach more of that audience across other channels,” Hickox said.

Linking TV exposure to real outcomes

Advances in compliant data sharing are helping marketers connect TV advertising to downstream impact, including healthcare outcomes.

“Marketers now have the ability to directly correlate media exposures with healthcare outcomes,” Hickox said. “That unlocks the ability to measure how well upper funnel media is driving lower funnel conversions.”

He noted that data clean rooms and matching methodologies are central to this progress, allowing analysis without compromising privacy.

Linear TV still informs omnichannel strategy

Despite perceptions of TV as a legacy medium, Hickox said linear platforms offer valuable insight for omnichannel planning.

“There’s a lot of great insight that marketers can pull out of linear platforms,” he said. “With the injection of big data, marketers really have access to rich content viewership data.”

That includes understanding which shows, programs and genres resonate with target audiences. When combined with demographic and psychographic information, Hickox said those insights create profiles that inform planning across other channels.

Clean rooms move from bespoke to productized

Looking ahead, Hickox pointed to the integration of data clean rooms into standardized measurement tools as the most impactful development for healthcare TV.

“I don’t think it’s a net new innovation,” he said. “It’s the integration of data clean rooms into productized measurement solutions.”

That shift enables cross-platform reach and frequency measurement against advanced audiences across linear TV, CTV and social media. “It’s something the market’s been asking for for a long time,” Hickox said.