Wimbledon 2026 CTV ad base widens as linear TV volumes rise 30%
TAM AdEx found Connected TV carried 25 advertisers across 21 categories during Wimbledon 2026, versus 10 advertisers and nine categories on linear TV. Linear TV ad volumes still rose 30% year on year, with mutual funds leading both platforms.
What happened
TAM AdEx found Indian Wimbledon 2026 advertising shifted toward Connected TV, which hosted more than twice the categories and 2.5 times the advertisers of
Key facts
- Linear TV ad volumes indexed at 129.5 in Wimbledon 2026 versus 100 in 2025, a 30% increase
- CTV carried 21 categories and 25 advertisers
- Linear TV carried 9 categories and 10 advertisers
- Wimbledon aired across 8 linear TV channels in 2026 versus 12 in 2025
- Mutual funds held 14.5% of CTV ad volumes and 8.7% of linear TV ad volumes
- William Grant & Sons India held 9.7% of CTV ad volumes
- ICICI Prudential AMC held 8.7% of linear TV ad volumes
Why this matters
Ad-tech, streaming, and measurement assets that unify CTV and linear sports inventory should become more strategically valuable as advertisers seek cross-screen reach.
What to watch
- Whether advertiser count on CTV repeats across other tentpole events rather than being unique to Wimbledon.
- The share of CTV buyers that are net-new advertisers versus existing linear TV buyers.
- Evidence of CTV budget growth accompanied by stable or growing total video spend, rather than substitution from linear.
- Ad-option of cross-screen reach and frequency measurement by broadcasters and agency holding companies.
- Live-stream concurrency, ad-load performance, completion rates and technical failure rates during major events.
- Category expansion beyond finance into retail, automotive, telecom, travel and direct-to-consumer brands.
- Broadcasters will package major live-event inventory as linear-plus-CTV reach products instead of selling CTV as a standalone add-on.
- Agencies will shift sports planning toward deduplicated reach, incremental audience delivery and frequency management metrics.
- Mutual funds and other regulated financial advertisers will expand CTV tests, increasing demand for compliant creative versioning and audience controls.
- CTV publishers will compete for repeat sports budgets by improving live-stream reliability, brand-safety assurances and post-campaign measurement.
- Smaller and digitally native advertisers may enter premium sports sponsorship-adjacent buys through lower-threshold CTV placements.