Where CTV is crowded, efficient reach wins

With the conversations from this year's NewFronts and Upfronts season taking center stage, the 2026 marketplace has been explored through activation, measurement, and optimization across platforms. Today, buyers are looking for proof that impressions are doing meaningful work, especially in the fragmented connected TV (CTV) environment. 

More than ever, the need for meaningful impressions has become a necessary metric for buyers. During Xumo’s NewFronts presentation, Ying Wang, General Manager, Xumo Advertising, acknowledged that buyers are being asked to demonstrate more impact with less investment. At the same time, ad inventory growth is outpacing ad dollars. 

As Guy Kuperman, Chief Strategy Officer at Innovid, said during NewFronts, “We’ve...seen strong results that demonstrate [Xumo’s] ability to extend audiences in meaningful ways. It’s been valuable working with Xumo to understand how incremental reach contributes to overall performance and helps ensure media dollars are working as effectively and efficiently as possible.

Not all reach is equal

In a fragmented CTV environment, gross reach often isn’t enough to prove results because it doesn’t guarantee a campaign is reaching new households efficiently. Sometimes, gross reach captures repeated exposures. Frequency climbs, value falls. That’s why today’s advertising needs measurement to go deeper and ask harder questions:

• How much net-new reach is a partner adding?
• How much duplication is hiding inside the plan?
• How efficiently are impressions converting into unique households?

Innovid case study: deeper measurement, higher efficiency

In a recent case study for a national financial services campaign, Innovid, an independent ad tech platform, pushed the measurement lens deeper to evaluate reach, unique reach, overlap, frequency, incrementality, and unique reach efficiency. Innovid defines incrementality as the percent increase in total reach that a publisher added, and unique reach efficiency is how efficiently a publisher turned impressions into unique reach.

What Innovid found is the kind of attribution that marketers and advertisers are looking for right now, and Xumo stood out on the metrics that matter most:

• Xumo delivered 16% of total reach from only 8% of impressions.
• 12% incremental reach added with Xumo.
• Lower average frequency.
• Higher unique reach efficiency.

Innovid’s findings also showed that Xumo reached nearly 80% of the distinct household volume of competing publishers with just half the relative impressions served. As Wang said during NewFronts, “Your CMO will love the reach, your CFO will love the math.”

What does this mean for marketers?

The metrics for a successful campaign are shifting.

When a partner helps extend a campaign into net-new households, keeps frequency in check, and improves the relationship between impressions served and unique households reached, media works harder. That’s what Xumo did in Innovid’s case study.

IAB’s 2026 Outlook Study says that cross-platform measurement has increased meaningfully, reflecting pressure for comparable, outcome-based measurement, and it lists incrementality among the areas where buyers will focus more attention in 2026.

In today’s fragmented, fast-moving market, efficient reach is less waste. And marketers need that.

Interested in learning more? Check out the full case study here.