As consumer attention shifts toward CTV, advertiser spending has been slow to catch up. The resulting gap is a clear market opportunity, but closing it requires more than just showing up on a new platform. It demands a fresh look at measurement, a re-evaluation of premium content like live sports, and a disciplined search for inefficiencies within existing media plans.
It's a transition Alberto Alvarez, the Chief Executive Officer of AdTech firms Endavant and Mediam Group, outlines on the State of Streaming podcast. With a history of steering global P&G brands like Ariel and Vicks, he brings a disciplined perspective to digital transformation. Named a "Top 20 LATAM Market Maker" and one of the "Leaders under 40" by the P&G Global Alumni Organization, Alvarez focuses on strategy first and technology second. "The chasm between consumer streaming adoption and lagging brand investment isn't a funding problem, but a strategic one, solvable through precise measurement and the smart reallocation of existing media budgets," he says.
The consultant's mindset: For any brand looking to capitalize on CTV, Alvarez's advice is to get your strategy in order. He advocates for anchoring the conversation in first principles, maintaining that establishing a rigorous framework for measuring business outcomes is a foundational step toward building a sustainable media strategy. "You become not only a consultant on CTV, but a consultant on the whole marketing strategy," Alvarez explains.
The halo effect: Nowhere is the CTV opportunity clearer than in live sports. Competition is in our DNA, Alvarez says, creating what he considers premium ad real estate. "You have that premium moment of attention. And when a brand appears, it's a premium brand, because in your mind, that's a premium moment," he envisions.
The focused attention and emotional investment of a live event can create a powerful halo effect for advertisers. That kind of engaged environment has long been perceived as the exclusive domain of the world’s largest brands, creating a barrier that led many others to conclude they couldn't afford to participate.
But CTV is helping to change that equation. Major sports rights are now moving to streaming platforms, a transition Alvarez describes as a matter of "simple math" where the highest bidder wins.
The awareness gap: The economic change is helping to democratize access to these premium moments, part of a larger flip moment for sports media. For Alvarez, the biggest hurdle for advertisers is not technical, but psychological. "The most important challenge, believe it or not, is awareness. It's ironic, but it is. Advertisers don't know you can advertise in these spaces because of a pre-selection process. They assume they don’t have the money for it and won't even start a conversation," he says.
If the fragmentation of CTV feels daunting, Alvarez points to the early days of display advertising. It was a mess of manual, place-by-place buys tracked in cumbersome Excel sheets. He sees the current moment as a familiar pattern, part of a cycle the marketing industry has successfully navigated before with aggregation and programmatic technology. "We're in that space now with CTV. You need to aggregate it in a smart way and make it easier for the advertiser to buy it, report on it, and make sense of it," he contends.
When faced with budget objections, Alvarez's answer is a masterclass in media allocation. The funds, he explains, are often already there, hidden within the inefficiencies of existing digital spend on mature channels that may have hit a point of diminishing returns.
Finding the funds: He cautions against the blended CPA myth, where a good average metric can hide wasteful spending on underperforming campaigns. The entire medium is underinvested, with opportunities across a wide range of content from niche channels to major events. "What people don't understand is that within that $10 CPA, you might have sub-campaigns that deliver a $3 CPA, but others that deliver a $15 CPA. So if you stop all of that money you're wasting and reinvest it in another medium, you get a way better result than what you're doing right now," he advises.
For Alvarez, industry training is foundational to developing the entire CTV ecosystem. His practical advice is part of a call for strategic evolution, driven by his philosophy of treating education as a core business strategy for building the market itself. “You don't need a bigger budget," Alvarez concludes. "Just remove inefficiencies and allocate smarter.”
