The golden age of streaming isn’t over; it’s just gotten more competitive.
If you’re in the business, you’re all too familiar with this tricky trifecta: slowing subscriber growth, climbing churn, and rising costs. Your brand is likely navigating difficult terrain where economic pressure is high and viewer attention is increasingly fragmented. As marketers, we’re still being asked to achieve ambitious growth goals, but with less room for error.
The number of Americans subscribing to four or more services has dropped for the first time, falling from 54% in 2022 to just 46% in 2024, according to a survey by The Motley Fool.
Meanwhile, 39% of consumers said they had canceled a streaming service in the last six months, according to a survey from Deloitte.
So what’s the plan? Across the whole maturity curve, from new brands launching high-stakes premieres to industry leaders navigating free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) models and bundling plays, it’s time to pivot from siloed acquisition strategies to holistic growth. Because the real opportunity today isn’t just more subs: it’s smarter, stickier, and more profitable subscriber relationships.
Performance alone won’t get you there
If your media plan still treats brand and performance as separate budgets, you’re already behind.
Successful streaming marketers are rethinking how they invest. With a brandformance mindset, they align performance and brand goals through a unified media strategy that delivers growth and builds long-term value. This shift isn’t philosophical. It transforms how teams plan, measure impact, and allocate spend across the full customer journey.
Take season launches, for example. Top streaming brands are using predictive signals like trailer engagement velocity and early social chatter to model likely lift and guide investment before dollars go live.
Then, they use real-time media mix modeling (MMM) and multi-touch attribution (MTA) modeling to rebalance spend mid-flight based on performance feedback loops. This is brandformance at work: brand-driven insight powered by measurable, performance-focused decisions.
Source: Deloitte
The result? Better customer acquisition cost (CAC) efficiency and ultimately stronger lifetime value (LTV). That’s critical in a market where, according to a Deloitte study, households spend $69 per month on streaming subscriptions, but churn remains a constant threat.
Audience design is a competitive advantage
Streaming audiences are incredibly diverse, with different tastes, cultures, habits, and interests. Treating them like one big group overlooks that nuance, making it easy to waste impressions and miss moments of real connection.
That’s why more and more streaming marketers are moving beyond surface-level targeting and into intentional audience design. Instead of relying on broad age ranges or platform data, they’re building audience groups based on deeper signals: what people care about, what they’re watching, how they talk about it, and the cultural context around it.
Take a niche show with multilingual appeal. Rather than defaulting to a general demographic buy, you might focus on a group of younger, multilingual viewers who are drawn to a specific genre or storytelling style. That kind of audience often flies under the radar in standard plans, but they can be key for driving early momentum.
Reaching these kinds of viewers takes more than just a wide net. It comes from creative experimentation, social listening, and message testing mapped to cohort-specific interests. And it delivers results: higher click-through-rates (CTRs), longer watch times, and better downstream retention.
Source: StreamTV Insider
With nearly 40% of consumers unsure where to find the content they want to watch, according to an LG Ad Solutions survey, the real opportunity is in designing campaigns that not only generate excitement but actively guide discovery, closing the gap between intent and viewing, and ensuring audiences can engage with your content wherever they enter the ecosystem.
Ecosystem agility > channel optimization
With direct-to-consumer (DTC) apps, device partners, wholesale aggregators, and emerging bundles, growth isn’t linear. It’s a matrix. And most streaming marketers aren’t set up to navigate it well.
Imagine a streaming platform running separate campaigns for its own app and a wholesale distribution partner. Without shared visibility, each team optimizes in its own silo, missing the nuances of how audiences move between channels. By unifying measurement and planning across both ecosystems, the platform could see and act on those cross-channel halo effects in real time.
That kind of coordination has the potential to reallocate spend toward the most incremental opportunities, improving acquisition efficiency, reducing wasted impressions, and strengthening overall brand impact over time.
The lesson? Channel silos kill efficiency. As platforms blend content, commerce, and partnerships, measurement must be built for fluidity. Anything less leaves value on the table.
Measurement that moves at the speed of launch
You can’t afford to wait for the QBR to know what’s working.
Make sure you have tools that inform decisions before you spend, guide optimizations during the campaign, and validate value after. Build phased, predictive measurement stacks into every campaign.
From scenario planning to geo-match incrementality testing to live title prediction modeling, adopt an approach (or partner) that empowers you to shift spend, change creative, and capture opportunity in real time. Especially in streaming, learning fast is essential
Creative isn’t optional; it’s the differentiator
Let’s be real: in a world where 62% of users say they think there are too many streaming options, your ad isn’t just competing with other shows, it’s competing with your viewers’ decision fatigue.
In streaming, creative that isn’t built for the platform risks wasting your media spend. That’s why leading teams put assets through rigorous pre-launch evaluations, such as Polaris IQ’s Creative Audit tool, to measure emotional resonance, assess platform fit, and predict performance. This kind of disciplined approach can yield up to double the engagement of a repurposed TV commercial.
What’s next? Smarter, not louder
The streaming market has moved into its consolidation phase. Growth is no longer about adding the most subscribers; it’s about creating the most value per subscriber. In this environment, simply acquiring new subscribers isn’t enough–without strong retention and meaningful engagement, that growth is unsustainable and short-lived.
The next winners will be the platforms that adapt their marketing playbooks for profitability and resilience, balancing high-intent acquisition with retention strategies that extend engagement across titles, formats, and release cycles.
That requires fluid investment strategies across DTC and partner ecosystems, creative that primes viewers for their next watch before churn risk sets in, and measurement that can surface these opportunities in real time.
To win now, focus on these four pillars:
- A brandformance strategy that doesn’t force tradeoffs
- Audience design rooted in culture, not category
- Measurement that empowers action, not just analysis
- Creative as a first retention lever, not just an acquisition tool
Content can start the conversation, but the right marketing determines whether audiences keep showing up. Is your holistic strategy designed to drive value on day one and build brand love that lasts?