Premium Live Event CTV Expansion Leads to Increases in Upfront Spending: A Q&A With JamLoop’s Jeff Fagel
A new survey by the performance-focused CTV advertising platform JamLoop has revealed a notable shift in marketing budget strategies toward premium live event CTV. Their survey of 120 brand and agency marketing leaders showed that perceptions of live event CTV have shifted toward performance capabilities, with an emphasis on accountability and measurable results.
Key Findings:
- 73% of marketers plan to increase their Upfront spending allocations in 2026
- 67% cite price protection against projected CPM increases as a primary driver
- 49% prioritize securing access to premium live inventory, such as sports and tentpole events, through early commitments – rather than relying on the scatter market
- 52.5% now view live event CTV as a dual-purpose vehicle capable of supporting both brand awareness and performance-driven business outcomes
- 68% would further increase investment if stronger proof of business outcomes were available
- 31% are prepared to significantly grow spend if measurement providers can bridge the gap between live viewership and bottom-line impact
- 27.5% cite limited flexibility in Upfront commitments as a key concern, followed by rising CPM costs and inventory transparency.
In this Q&A, JamLoop CMO Jeff Fagel discusses the survey details and what its findings reveal about evolving shifts in live CTV marketing and Upfront spending strategies.
JamLoop CMO Jeff Fagel
Compared to what the industry was talking about heading into the 2025 Upfront season, what are some of the biggest shifts revealed in your 2026 survey?
The biggest shift is how marketers are evaluating live-event CTV investments. Reach still matters. Premium inventory still matters. But increasingly, marketers want to understand what business outcome those investments are going to drive.
One of the clearest signals in the research was that 52.5% of marketers now believe live-event CTV can support both awareness and performance goals. That’s important because streaming TV is increasingly being measured against the same expectations marketers already apply to channels like Search and Social. The conversation has expanded well beyond exposure metrics alone.
Historically, marketers focused heavily on questions like: How many people saw the ad? How broadly did the campaign reach an audience? Those questions still exist, but now they’re accompanied by deeper performance questions around site traffic, customer demand, sales impact, and measurable business lift.
That shift is also showing up in budget behavior. Seventy-three percent of marketers said they plan to increase Upfront spending allocations in 2026, despite continued pressure around efficiency and measurement. Marketers clearly continue to see premium live inventory as strategically valuable, particularly as sports and live programming become even more central within streaming ecosystems. What’s changing is the level of accountability attached to those investments.
Could you discuss some of the key reasons marketers are shifting their budget strategies toward premium live-event CTV?
Premium live environments continue to deliver something that’s becoming increasingly valuable in today’s fragmented media landscape: highly engaged audiences experiencing content together in real time.
That’s one of the major reasons marketers continue leaning into sports and tentpole live programming heading into the Upfront season. These environments consistently command attention and remain some of the few places where brands can engage audiences at scale in shared viewing moments.
At the same time, marketers are also looking for more certainty around pricing and inventory access. In the JamLoop survey, 67% of marketers cited protection against rising CPMs as a primary reason for increasing Upfront commitments, while 49% said securing earlier access to premium inventory was a top priority.
Underneath those numbers is a broader issue around confidence and predictability. Advertisers want greater assurance around what inventory will be available, what it will cost, and how those investments will ultimately perform throughout the year.
We’re also seeing growing confidence in live-event CTV as a business driver, not just a visibility play. As marketers become more comfortable tying premium streaming environments to measurable outcomes, the economics of those investments start to change. The value conversation becomes much broader than audience scale alone and starts incorporating performance, attribution, and long-term business impact.
What are some of the primary challenges with live event CTV in terms of delivering accountability, control, and measurable results?
One of the biggest challenges right now is that the industry still tends to confuse reporting with accountability. Most platforms can explain what happened inside the media buy. Far fewer can clearly explain what happened inside the business after exposure occurred.
That gap came through very clearly in the research. Sixty-eight percent of marketers said they would increase investment further if premium live-event CTV offered stronger proof of performance outcomes. That’s a significant number because it shows demand for premium live inventory is already strong. What marketers want now is greater confidence around business impact.
A lot of advertisers receive dashboards showing impressions, completion rates, or viewership metrics suggesting campaigns performed well, but they’re still left asking a very straightforward question: Did the business actually move? Did site traffic increase? Did store visits increase? Did calls, appointments, purchases, or revenue change after exposure?
Increasingly, marketers want visibility into those downstream outcomes, not simply media delivery metrics. That’s where the next stage of growth for CTV is headed. The conversation is becoming much more centered around attribution, incrementality, and measurable business lift tied to streaming exposure.
Flexibility is another issue that continues to surface. Once Upfront plans are locked in, marketers still want the ability to adjust as audiences shift, campaigns evolve, or business priorities change throughout the year. In our research, 27.5% of marketers cited limited flexibility in Upfront commitments as a major concern, alongside rising CPMs and inventory transparency.
What kinds of pressures are marketers facing that have led to them becoming more reliant on Upfront commitments?
Several pressures are colliding simultaneously. Rising CPMs, increased competition around premium live inventory, and continued scrutiny around budgets and efficiency are all forcing marketers to plan more strategically around how and when they secure inventory.
That’s one reason predictability has become so valuable. Many advertisers increasingly view early commitments as a way to create more certainty around pricing and access before the market tightens later in the cycle. The survey reflected that directly, with marketers consistently pointing to price protection and premium inventory access as major drivers behind increased Upfront commitments.
There’s also a broader shift happening around how media investments get evaluated internally. Marketing teams increasingly need to prove impact, not simply activity. That changes the conversation around media planning because impressions and audience scale alone are no longer enough to justify investment decisions.
As more marketers evaluate streaming TV through a performance lens, they want greater transparency into what inventory they’re buying, how campaigns are performing, and whether those investments are contributing to measurable business outcomes. That’s pushing the Upfront conversation toward a much more data-oriented and accountability-focused model than what the industry operated under historically.
Does JamLoop have any data indicating what types of live events perform best both in terms of engagement and accuracy with measurement?
This particular research focused primarily on marketer sentiment and buying behavior heading into the Upfront season, but when we looked at live sports activity across the JamLoop platform, a few things stood out.
The first takeaway is that not all live sports environments perform the same from an audience engagement standpoint. There’s often an assumption that the NFL dominates every category because of its scale, but when we looked at audience attentiveness, some of the strongest signals came from other environments.
For example, MLS and soccer delivered over 99% watch-through rates, making it one of the most engaged audiences in our dataset. Playoff environments also approached 99%, while the NFL and NBA both remained above 98.5%. Interestingly, MLB completion rate trends lower at 95.1%. which is likely reflective of the casual/passive viewing posture during a 3-hour game.
The more important takeaway is not necessarily the completion metric itself, but what it suggests about audience behavior and attention. Different live environments create different viewing patterns, engagement signals, and levels of attentiveness.
Historically, TV buyers optimized primarily around reach. Increasingly, marketers want to understand which environments generate stronger engagement signals that eventually translate into measurable business outcomes. The next phase of the conversation is less about simply identifying who watched and more about understanding what happened after they watched.
How can live event CTV programmers help make marketers less reliant on the scatter market, in the sense of making early commitments more attractive?
The biggest opportunity is improving transparency, flexibility, and confidence in measurement. Marketers are clearly willing to commit earlier, but they want much more visibility into what they’re buying and how performance will ultimately be evaluated.
One of the strongest themes in the research was that advertisers want more than access to premium inventory alone. They also want stronger proof tied to business performance. Inventory by itself is becoming less of a differentiator over time because premium supply is only part of the equation. Confidence is increasingly what drives long-term investment decisions.
The companies that can connect streaming TV exposure to measurable business outcomes will ultimately create more trust with advertisers and likely capture more budget over time. That’s especially true as more marketers begin evaluating CTV through a performance lens and expect the same level of accountability they receive from other digital channels.
There’s also a flexibility component to this. Marketers want the ability to adapt campaigns, optimize against outcomes, and respond to changing conditions throughout the year, even when inventory commitments are made early in the cycle.
The future Upfront conversation will increasingly revolve around which platforms and programmers can combine premium live inventory with transparency, measurable outcomes, and flexible execution models that give marketers greater confidence in the investment.
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