Social Platforms Expanding into CTV

Social platforms are increasingly looking to monetize their audience data beyond their owned-and-operated environments. Platforms like Pinterest and Meta have generated value primarily within their own apps and advertising ecosystems. With the Converged TV streaming boom, that strategy appears to be expanding into audience and identity layers for the broader CTV marketplace.

Pinterest recently launched a CTV audience extension product following its acquisition of tvScientific, allowing advertisers to target Pinterest audiences across third-party streaming inventory. This new offering uses Pinterest’s intent and planning-based audience data. Early adopters indicate that this approach reportedly showed a 27% lift in performance.

Meta is also reportedly exploring ways to extend its advertising demand and audience capabilities into streaming TV through discussions with Magnite, FreeWheel, and TV manufacturers. No official product has launched, but these conversations suggest Meta views CTV as a significant future growth opportunity to move into the CTV and expand their revenue offerings.

What Specifically are Platforms Doing?

These two advancements reinforce a borader shift across the streaming ecosystem. As streaming inventory continues to become widely available across DSPs and activation platforms, data is emerging as the real differentiator. Here at Rain, we see our fair share of companies and partners selling us on how their audiences are the “next big thing” and how they will no doubt help us reach our clients’ goals, however, these moves feel different.

Pinterest brings high-intent planning behavior, while Meta brings scale, identity, and deterministic audience data. Both are trying to address one of CTV’s biggest industry challenges: measurable performance.

Enabling Performance in a Converged TV World

These moves show how the lines between social, programmatic, retail media, and CTV continue to blur and how it has become increasingly more important to have a diverse cross-channel media strategy. The focus is no longer just on premium video inventory, but on who owns the strongest audience intelligence and performance signals, and how they can be paired with premium, brand safe inventory.

The biggest opportunity for performance marketers is “performance TV.” Advertisers increasingly want streaming campaigns to drive measurable business outcomes. Platforms that can better connect ad exposure to downstream actions may ultimately become the most influential players in the future of CTV.