The Step-by-Step Process Agencies Use to Launch and Scale TV for Their Clients
How Tatari Helps Make TV a True Agency Advantage
Introduction
The most forward-thinking agencies are no longer just service providers. They are becoming operating systems; the decisioning infrastructure at the center of their clients’ growth. They run the data, manage the media mix, analyze the measurement, and increasingly, own the technology stack that ties it all together. As agencies continue to shift from a purely labor-based model toward one of continuous optimization, the platforms they plug into become part of their operating system.
Nowhere is that more apparent than in TV.
TV advertising has never presented more opportunity for agencies, but it has also never been more complex. The landscape now spans linear, CTV, programmatic marketplaces, and a growing list of ad tech vendors promising scale, automation, and outcomes. Some offer only streaming inventory, regardless of how they market themselves. Others claim to automate TV buying end to end. Many still operate in black boxes, making it difficult to understand where ads actually run or how performance is measured. Those are not minor details. They are the very questions agencies are expected to answer for clients every day.
The result poses familiar questions: Where do you start? And, who can you trust?
The answer is invariably the same: find a partner that will help you give your clients the reach and impact of TV without the complexity that has historically made it so hard to manage.
That's why so many agencies choose to partner with us to plan, launch, and measure their clients’ TV campaigns without the need to piece together multiple tools and platforms.
Here’s the step-by-step process agencies follow to launch and scale TV with Tatari…
Step 1: Assess Your TV Maturity Level and Platform Readiness
Not every agency approaches TV from the same place. Some already run large linear campaigns and have established buying teams. Others mainly operate in digital channels and are exploring TV for the first time. Increasingly, many fall somewhere in between; running CTV through a DSP but unsure how to connect it with traditional TV.
Understanding that starting point shapes the entire strategy.
For example, a performance-focused social agency may initially want to test streaming because it feels familiar. A legacy TV buyer may want help measuring linear campaigns in the same way they measure digital media. And a digital agency may simply want an easier way to access TV without negotiating with dozens of networks individually.
Once an agency understands where it sits on the TV maturity spectrum, the next part of the assessment is reviewing the tools and platforms already being used for planning, buying, and measurement. This helps determine how Tatari fits into the agency’s workflow — whether as a new TV buying platform or a unified system for managing both linear and streaming.
That review naturally leads into onboarding. Agencies are introduced to the platform, teams align on how campaigns will be planned and launched, and workflows are established for reporting and optimization. Agencies maintain full control over planning and execution, while Tatari provides the infrastructure and dedicated account support to access inventory, manage campaigns, and analyze results across the TV ecosystem.
Step 2: Self-Service or Fully Managed?
Part of that initial assessment is also a practical one: how do you want to work? This is where a key decision tree plays out for every agency partner.
Agencies that want to own the controls directly can access Tatari’s self-service platform with full visibility into planning, buying, and measurement for national linear and upstream inventory. The platform is purpose-built for teams that are ready to drive, backed by the empowerment, thought leadership, and training Tatari provides to make them genuinely self-sufficient.
For agencies that prefer a more hands-on partnership, we operate as a true extension of their team. Think of it as white-glove support that’s completely transparent: agencies always have a clear line of sight into where campaigns are running, how they’re performing, and why decisions are being made. There is no black box. No hidden login. Just shared access and shared accountability.
Many agencies land somewhere in between, and the right partner can help determine which model makes most sense for your business.
That review of readiness and preferred operating model naturally leads into onboarding. Teams align on how campaigns will be planned and launched, and workflows are established for reporting and optimization. Agencies maintain full control over planning and execution, while Tatari provides the infrastructure and dedicated account support to access inventory, manage campaigns, and analyze results across the TV ecosystem.
Step 3: Build the Right TV Plan
Once there’s alignment on how you’d like to partner with us, the next step is straightforward: build a plan around your client’s goals.
A concrete TV plan typically addresses three foundational questions:
What are the Goals?
First, determine how success will be measured. Depending on the client, that could include:
Customer acquisition cost (CPA)
Return on ad spend (ROAS)
Incremental reach
Website visits or app installs
Brand awareness
Defining this upfront ensures the campaign is built around outcomes that matter to the client.
Who’s the Audience?
Next comes audience definition. That includes understanding demographics, psychographics, competitive positioning, and how potential customers currently interact with the brand.
This step helps shape where campaigns should run and how TV can complement other channels like search, social, or digital video.
What’s the Right Inventory?
From there, agencies map the right mix of inventory across the TV ecosystem, from linear to streaming to online video.
Unlike many TV ad platforms that rely heavily on programmatic pipes, Tatari works directly with major publishers from Netflix to Hulu. Those direct relationships give agencies access to premium inventory across the TV landscape, including sponsorships, integrations, and major cultural moments that are often unavailable through programmatic marketplaces. That includes major events you won’t find in DSPs like the Super Bowl. Tatari has helped agencies like DAC unlock premium TV placements and sponsorships that were not accessible through programmatic, proving to be a home run for clients.
Tatari’s AI-powered planning engine also helps agencies build these campaigns using historical performance data from thousands of TV campaigns, allowing them to generate recommended media plans tailored to specific goals, budgets, and audiences. It’s what helped brands like Breeo generate campaign plans in seconds and cut customer acquisition costs by 47%.
The result is a flexible plan that treats linear and streaming not as separate channels, but as part of a dual-channel, convergent TV strategy.
Step 4: Start With a Test Campaign
For many agencies, the most time-consuming part of launching TV campaigns isn’t planning — it’s execution. Managing creative across multiple vendors, coordinating ISCI codes, handling QC feedback, ensuring S&P compliance, and trafficking assets can quickly become a significant resource drain for Ad Ops and Media Ops teams.
Tatari eliminates this complexity. With our Creative Library, agencies simply upload assets and generate creative codes. From there, Tatari manages the entire downstream process — from slating and watermarking to metadata management, third-party QC, and network S&P approvals — delivering a genuinely turnkey experience. What would otherwise require coordination across multiple vendors and weeks of back-and-forth is handled in one place, so agency teams can focus on strategy and client outcomes instead of operational overhead.
Most agency partnerships begin with a pilot campaign. Rather than committing to a long-term TV strategy off the bat, agencies typically run a four-to-six week test to see how TV performs for a specific client. These campaigns generate the insights needed to determine what inventory, creative, and targeting strategies work best.
Some TV tech vendors will tell you that you can be successful at virtually any spend level. Possibly. But with ten years of TV data and a track record of agency results behind us, we know what a true stress test actually requires if you want to do TV the right way. In practice, that typically means enough budget to produce statistically meaningful results, often around $100k or more over the course of the test window. $500 a day won't do much to move the needle, despite the “vibes” vendors are giving you. The fact is if you;re cutting corners on investment, you're likely cutting corners on the results you’ll get.
This approach allows agencies to introduce TV to clients in a controlled way. Agencies that have worked with us have used pilot campaigns to test TV for clients, analyze performance, and expand once the results demonstrate clear value.
Step 5: Measure Real Outcomes
One of the biggest reasons agencies are rethinking TV today is measurement. Historically, linear TV relied heavily on panel-based ratings. Streaming introduced new data signals but often fragmented reporting across different buying platforms.
A more modern approach focuses on outcomes agencies already understand from digital media — metrics like website visits, app installs, customer acquisition cost, or return on ad spend. The goal is to understand not just whether ads aired, but what impact they had.
That includes measurement approaches such as:
Closed-loop outcome measurement
Incrementality
Reach and frequency across channels
Next-day National linear reporting
Uniform reporting across linear and CTV
View-through attribution
Audience overlap analysis
Cross-channel halo effects
ROAS and CAC
For example, Tatari’s streaming halo analysis helps agencies understand how TV exposure improves performance across other channels like social or search. In many cases, users who see a TV ad and later click on a digital ad convert at significantly higher rates than users who were never exposed to TV.
This deeper measurement helps agencies connect the dots between TV and the broader marketing ecosystem, showing how TV drives both direct conversions and performance across other channels.
Step 6: Optimize the Campaign
Once the pilot campaign produces data, the next step is optimization.
Agencies can shift spend toward top-performing networks, adjust dayparts, refine targeting, or test new creative. The goal is to continually improve performance while identifying opportunities to scale. For many brands, TV campaigns also evolve beyond short flights into always-on strategies that support both performance and brand objectives.This optimization process is where TV begins to look less like a traditional media buy and more like a measurable, iterative marketing channel.
One of the more underrated features in Tatari’s platform is built-in creative A/B testing. Agencies can test different creative executions across networks, dayparts, or audience segments and identify which spots are actually driving outcomes, not just impressions. For agency teams constantly under pressure to prove creative ROI to clients, this is a meaningful differentiator: the ability to run controlled creative experiments within a TV campaign and bring hard data back to the creative conversation.
Step 7: Scale TV Across Multiple Clients
The most successful agency partnerships rarely stop with one campaign.
Once an agency proves the process internally — from planning to measurement — TV becomes easier to introduce across its broader client portfolio. What started as a single test can quickly become a repeatable capability.
For example, Merlino Media Group integrated TV into its broader media strategy and expanded the approach across multiple clients, using the platform to simplify planning, execution, and reporting.
At that point, TV stops being an isolated channel and becomes part of the agency’s core offering. And that’s ultimately the goal: not just helping one campaign succeed, but giving agencies the infrastructure to make TV a measurable, scalable part of their media strategy.
Ready to Turn TV into an Agency-Advantage?
Today, more than 80 agencies have used Tatari to plan, execute, and measure TV campaigns. For agencies, the value is simple: complete access to the TV ecosystem, lower media costs through direct publisher relationships, and measurement that connects TV performance to real business outcomes. Instead of navigating a fragmented landscape of platforms and vendors, agencies gain a single foundation for making TV a consistent and scalable part of their media strategy. Let’s talk.