Since the first promos appeared in the early days of broadcast television, marketers have followed the same playbook: capture attention, make them care. Get them to watch. Awareness, intent, and tune-in. Across generations and through every tech shift, those same three pillars have defined TV marketing, from broadcast to cable to streaming to today’s media universe increasingly shaped by AI.
Without the people who execute that playbook, there is no TV industry. No show finds its audience on its own. No streaming service retains subscribers without someone making the case, again and again, that what's on the platform is worth their time. TV marketers are the connective tissue between content and culture, and for most of the industry's history, they have been dramatically underrecognized for it.
That's what the StreamTV Marketers’ Summit exists to change.
For years as CEO of PromaxBDA, I made it my mission to ensure that marketers received the credit they deserve. This summit is a direct extension of that work, a dedicated forum that treats TV marketing as the strategic discipline it actually is. And it arrives at exactly the right moment.
What has changed, relentlessly and with increasing brutality, is how difficult the job has become. In an industry navigating streaming fragmentation, FAST channel proliferation, algorithmic gatekeeping, and the arrival of AI as both threat and transformative tool, the barriers to audience-building have never been higher, even as the stakes have never been greater.
That's why the conversations taking place at this year's summit matter. Leaders from companies including Tubi, Peacock, Paramount, DirecTV, AMC Networks, NBCUniversal, Fremantle, ITV, and Crunchyroll are all confronting versions of the same challenge: how to build awareness, drive discovery, and create lasting audience relationships in a media landscape where attention is increasingly scarce and distribution is increasingly controlled by algorithms.
The numbers tell the story. Based on Social Dept's work with entertainment clients and data from the platforms themselves, effectively marketing a single piece of television IP today requires between 80 and 120 social assets per month. A team managing five shows needs 400 to 600 original pieces of content every month, across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook simultaneously. Each platform with its own format requirements, its own algorithmic preferences, its own definition of what good looks like.
That is not a workflow problem. It is a structural one, and it cannot be solved by asking the same team to work harder.
Networks have historically solved volume by scaling up: 300-person marketing departments, dozens of agency partners, 25,000 promotional spots per year flowing through owned distribution channels directly to captive audiences. But that infrastructure is no longer economically sustainable for most of the industry.
Today, before a human being sees your Reel, your Short, or your TikTok, a machine has already decided whether to show it to anyone at all. That machine rewards volume, consistency, and engagement. Most of what feeds the algorithm is functional, not exceptional — and that's by design. What you're buying with that volume is algorithmic trust, and algorithmic trust is what earns distribution for the work that truly matters.
This is the environment TV marketers are operating in. And understanding how to navigate it is exactly what the StreamTV Marketing Summit is designed to address.
We've chosen Crunchyroll as this year's Brand of the Year because they represent the model at its best. Building a passionate global audience for anime required exactly the discipline the algorithm era demands: deep community fluency, content that speaks the native language of every platform it lives on, and a consistent publishing cadence that earned algorithmic distribution over time. Crunchyroll didn't just find its audience. It built the infrastructure to keep finding it, at scale, across every platform where that audience lives.
But Crunchyroll isn't alone. Across the industry, marketers are developing new playbooks for audience growth. Tubi has demonstrated how a FAST service can cut through an increasingly crowded market with sharp brand positioning and cultural relevance. AMC Networks continues to evolve from traditional network marketing into audience development across streaming, social, and fandom ecosystems. Companies like Fremantle and ITV are increasingly focused on building communities around their content.
The common thread is clear: the most successful organizations understand that marketing is a strategic capability that influences audience growth, content strategy, platform performance, and long-term brand value.
That discipline has always existed in the best TV marketers. What's new is that the tools to execute it are finally within reach for organizations that previously lacked the production capacity to run them.
The strategy hasn't changed. The tools have. For the first time, the marketers who have spent decades mastering audience-building have the production capacity to execute at the scale this moment demands.
Jonathan Verk is Founder/CEO of Social Dept, former CEO of PromaxBDA and chairs the Marketing Summit at the StreamTV Show (June 16 – 19).
Industry Voices are opinion columns. They do not necessarily represent the opinions of StreamTV Insider.