Streaming’s biggest draws can create some of its biggest planning challenges. Consider a brand that builds a connected TV (CTV) campaign around a major streaming premiere or live sports season. The event ends, viewers move on, and the campaign still has weeks to run. Is the audience the brand planned to reach still there?
For advertisers, the answer has implications for how media investments are evaluated and optimized. A platform’s ability to attract viewers for a particular title or event doesn’t guarantee those viewers will remain active throughout a campaign. If they stop opening the app, the audience that a media plan was built around is no longer available there.
This is the challenge created by today’s viewing behavior. This is ghost viewing. Today’s TV viewers engage with a streaming app for a specific moment, then stop using it while continuing to watch elsewhere across the TV ecosystem. The viewer hasn’t abandoned television altogether, or even canceled a streaming subscription. Their attention has simply moved.
For agency investment leaders, brand marketers, and CTV buyers, this raises a critical question: How do you adjust a campaign when the audience drawn to a premiere or sports seasons begins to move on?
When content-driven audiences move on
Streaming platforms invest heavily in programming that draws new viewers, from major sporting events to highly anticipated original series. These moments can create valuable opportunities for advertisers, but the viewers who arrive for a specific title, event, or season may not stick around once the content ends.
Research from Samsung Ads’ “The Rise of Ghost Viewers” report details the scale of the challenge. During the last two NFL seasons, two out of every three viewers whose first use of one of the three apps streaming regular-season games during the season disappeared from those services after the season ended.
The pattern extends beyond sports. Across Nielsen’s 10 top general entertainment streaming original series of the first half of 2026, new users were nearly 5X as likely as existing viewers to stop using the apps in the month following the season finales.
A platform’s ability to attract an audience doesn’t necessarily translate into sustained viewing. And canceled subscriptions tell only part of the story. Some viewers continue paying for an app without returning to it, while others shift their attention to different streaming services, free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) channels, or linear TV.
For advertisers, the distinction matters. When a campaign extends beyond the content that initially attracted its audience, buyers need to understand how viewing changes over that period and whether those changes call for a different allocation.
The challenge is translating a moment of audience acquisition into a media plan that accounts for what happens next.
Build audience changes into the media plan
A campaign’s initial audience assumptions are just that: a starting point. A subscription streaming service’s audience may include some of those viewers attracted by a season premiere or sporting event several weeks later, but buyers need to regularly re-evaluate whether their investment is reaching the people they intended to reach.
The issue isn’t that every campaign needs to move on when a tentpole ends; it’s that the decision should reflect in-the-moment audience behavior rather than an assumption of continued engagement.
To account for those shifts before and during a campaign, buyers can start with three questions.
How recently has this audience been active? Ask partners to clarify whether audience figures reflect subscribers, people with access to a service, or viewers who have recently used the app. Understanding the difference can help buyers assess whether reported audience size reflects a realistic advertising opportunity during the campaign period.
What happens to viewing after the tentpole ends? Request visibility into post-event activity, including how audience engagement changes after a season finale or the conclusion of a sports schedule. Buyers should also establish how frequently these signals will be reported and whether they can inform campaign optimization. This makes it easier to identify when the audience assumptions behind an investment may need revisiting.
What changes should trigger a budget review? Before a campaign launches, establish what audience shifts warrant a closer look at performance and allocation. A decline in active viewing or evidence that audience behavior has changed could prompt buyers to reassess whether their investment remains well positioned. For example, if viewing drops after a finale while the campaign still has several weeks to run, the buyer could review delivery and performance before deciding to adjust the allocation. Agreeing on those criteria in advance makes optimization a planned part of the campaign rather than a reaction to disappointing results.
Reach audiences where they watch next
Buyers should also consider how to reach viewers across their broader TV journeys. Someone who stops opening one streaming app is likely to be watching elsewhere, creating opportunities for campaigns and partners that can identify and reach audiences across multiple environments. A broader view of viewing activity can help buyers evaluate where audiences remain available, rather than treating a single platform as the entirety of their TV consumption.
Content-driven audiences can create valuable opportunities, but their viewing patterns may change on a different timeline than your campaign. Building regular audience reviews into the media plan gives buyers a way to assess those changes while there is still time to act. Ghost viewing is a reminder to ask what happens after the premiere, finale, or final game and to make that answer part of the campaign plan from the start.
A large audience can be valuable, but buyers need to understand how much of it is actively watching and reachable while a campaign is live.
As streaming viewing becomes increasingly driven by individual titles and events, and as content, particularly professional sports, continues to fragment across the landscape, media plans need to reflect that fluidity. Ghost viewing offers advertisers a reason to revisit how audiences are measured, how often campaign assumptions are reassessed, and how budgets follow attention as it moves.
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Jimmy White currently serves as managing director, head of large customer sales at Samsung Ads. With more than a decade of experience at top media companies, White most recently served as head of industry at Google, overseeing the media and entertainment and automotive verticals.