On July 1, 1941, a Bulova watch appeared on a TV screen in New York for ten seconds. That was the birth of TV advertising. 85 years later, the format hasn't just survived the internet, it's having its best decade yet, just wearing a different coat.
That coat is Connected TV. And for a network built to reach Muslim consumers, it might be the single best-fitting format we have got in our platform.
Image Source: campaignlive.co.uk
The oldest ad format just got a new address
Linear TV's share of global ad spend has fallen from roughly 41% in 2013 to about 12% today. That sounds like decline. It isn't. The combined linear and CTV television ad market is on track to surpass $100 billion in the US alone this year, and the money never left television, it just moved from the antenna to the app.
US advertisers are projected to spend nearly $38 billion on CTV in 2026, growing about 14.5% year over year, and roughly 89.5% of US households now own at least one internet-connected TV device. For the first time, CTV upfront commitments are on track to exceed primetime linear TV upfronts. That's not a niche channel anymore. That's the new prime time.
Why CTV is still one of the most-spent ad dollars in the industry
Three reasons keep CTV at the top of media plans, and they're the same reasons we lean on it so heavily:
The screen still commands attention. Completion rates on CTV routinely run above 95%, well ahead of the roughly 62% average completion rate across PC and mobile video combined. Nobody skips a living-room ad the way they skip a pre-roll on their phone.
It's the last true "must-see" surface. Advertisers cite reaching highly engaged, opt-in audiences and combining the branding power of traditional TV with digital precision as the top reasons they keep raising CTV budgets. About 70% of CTV advertisers plan to increase spend in 2026, by an average of 17%.
It closes the gap traditional TV never could. Retail media and performance-driven buyers are now using CTV to tie a living-room impression to an actual conversion, something Nielsen-era TV planners could only dream about.
CTV kept the emotional weight of television and bolted on the accountability of digital. That combination is why the dollars keep flowing here even as budgets everywhere else get squeezed.
We didn't just meet the viewability standard. We broke it.
Industry viewability benchmarks for video and CTV typically sit in the 90% to 97% range, and most advertisers treat that as the ceiling. Our CTV campaigns deliver 100% viewability!
That's not a rounding trick. It comes down to where the inventory sits: premium, non-skippable, full-screen placements across a trusted and curated network that we control end to end, instead of generic supply. When every single impression is guaranteed to be seen, on a real device, by a real viewer in our audience, the conversation with a brand stops being about whether the ad ran and starts being about what it achieved.
The part everyone gets wrong: measuring it by last-click
Most advertisers still measure CTV like a search ad. Someone sees a spot during Suhoor, doesn't click, and converts three days later on their phone. Last-click gives that sale to search and erases the TV spot that actually opened the door.
The better question isn't "what did CTV directly convert," it's "where does my best audience actually live, and how does this screen make everything else work harder." That means moving past siloed, channel-by-channel scorecards and toward incrementality: holding a matched audience back from seeing the ad, and measuring the real lift it created in search, social, and on-site activity, not just what CTV claims on its own. A dollar in CTV rarely shows up as a CTV conversion; it shows up as a cheaper, more efficient click somewhere else. Judge it that way, and it stops looking like a brand expense and starts looking like the thing making the rest of the media plan work.
The gold isn't the format. It's the audience.
CTV is a powerful pipe. But a pipe is only as good as what's flowing through it, and this is where the real advantage sits.
Over more than a decade, we've built a Muslim audience graph that doesn't exist anywhere else: a direct, first-party, opt-in relationship with Muslim consumers. That's not a targeting parameter you can bolt onto a system overnight. It's years of trust, compounded.
That's what makes our CTV inventory different from a brand simply adding "Muslim" as an interest checkbox in a generic platform: we're not guessing which viewers are Muslim from behavioral proxies. We know. And when you pair that audience precision with 100% viewability and a measurement framework built for exposure-based conversion instead of clicks, you get something the industry has been chasing since that Bulova ad in 1941: a screen that people actually watch, showing the right message to the right person, with a way to prove it worked.
Get your CTV Ad live in front of the community here: advertise.muslimadnetwork.com
Or reach us directly for more info: sales@muslimadnetwork.com