Beer brands and the $37.95 billion screen shift

Beer and television grew up together. The beer commercial is one of the few advertising forms that became culture in its own right, and for sixty years the arrangement was stable: brewers bought reach on linear television, and the reach was there to buy.

In 2026 that arrangement finished changing. The audience did not leave television. It left the delivery mechanism, and it took the economics with it.

The number, and the milestone underneath it

eMarketer forecasts US connected TV advertising spend at roughly $37.95 billion in 2026, a jump of about 15 percent year over year from $33.35 billion in 2025. That alone would be a large number. The structural milestone matters more.

The upfront is where the largest advertisers commit budget a year ahead. It is the most conservative, most relationship driven part of the television market, and it is the last place to move. When the upfront flips, the argument is over.

eMarketer projects connected TV will pass total traditional TV advertising around 2028, at roughly $47 billion against about $45 billion, and reach approximately $51 billion by 2029. Digital video already accounts for around 61 percent of all TV and video advertising spend, pushing linear below 40 percent for the first time.

Reach is no longer the objection

The standard defence of linear was always reach. That defence has expired. Roughly 89.5 percent of US households own at least one internet connected TV device, and eMarketer projects 243.6 million US connected TV viewers in 2026.

For a category like beer, which sells to a broad adult audience across every region and income band, that is functionally universal coverage on the biggest screen in the house. Marketers reallocated an average of 36 percent of their linear budgets to connected TV in 2025, and a Premion survey found 70 percent of advertisers planned to raise connected TV investment by an average of 17 percent in 2026.

One useful caution on all of this. These are vendor forecasts and buy side survey models, not audited results, and eMarketer itself publishes slightly different 2026 figures across different articles, with around $37.70 billion appearing in some. Use them to size the direction and the order of magnitude, not to plan to a decimal point.

Why 2026 in particular

The IAB attributes much of this year's acceleration to an unusually dense calendar of cyclical events: the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, the US midterm elections, and the FIFA World Cup, layered on top of the ongoing structural shift in viewing. The IAB projects connected TV growth of about 13.8 percent year over year, the second fastest of any channel after social.

For beer specifically, the World Cup is not a general tailwind. It is the single largest beer occasion on the planet, and in 2026 the most valuable inventory around it is streaming inventory. That is a very specific reason why this is the year the gap between where beer brands buy and where beer drinkers watch became expensive.

The part most beer plans are missing

Connected TV is being bought by beer brands. What is largely absent is beer brands owning a destination on the connected screen rather than renting thirty seconds inside someone else's.

Those are different businesses. Buying inventory gets you impressions that stop the moment the invoice stops. Operating a channel gets you an audience that returns. In the free ad supported streaming world, where hundreds of channels compete inside a grid, the difference between those two positions is the whole game.

And the constraint in that world is discovery. A viewer scrolling a channel grid makes a decision in under a second based almost entirely on the name. This is the one place where a plain, obvious, guessable category name is not a nice to have. It is the distribution strategy.

What beer has that most categories do not

Three things make beer unusually well suited to owning screen time rather than buying it.

The occasion is already the screen

Roughly half of global beer revenue is out of home, in bars, restaurants and stadiums, and the other half is at home. Both halves happen in front of a television more often than not. The product and the medium share a physical occasion, which is rare.

The content already exists and is not being used

Breweries produce enormous amounts of natural video material and mostly waste it: brew days, harvest, canning lines, collaborations, festival footage, taproom events. In craft, drinkers visited breweries an average of 5.5 times in the past year, which we cover in the taproom analysis. That is a documentary crew's worth of footage generated weekly and posted, if at all, to a platform that owns the relationship.

The growth segments require explanation

Non alcoholic is the fastest growing part of beer and the part drinkers understand least, as we set out in the zero proof piece. Explanation is what video does better than any other format. The categories that need video most are precisely the categories that are growing.

The counterargument, stated fairly

There is a real case against this, and it deserves to be made properly.

Connected TV in 2026 is pivoting from growth to accountability. Measurement remains fragmented, attention metrics are still being standardised, and combined TV plus connected TV spending is forecast to grow at only about 1.1 percent through 2029. In other words the total pool is roughly flat and connected TV is mostly taking share from linear, not creating new money. A brand that shifts budget without fixing measurement will simply buy the same uncertainty in a newer place.

Owning a channel is also a real operating commitment. It requires programming, rights, and sustained investment, and most beer marketing organisations are not staffed to run a media property. The honest version of this argument is not that every brewer should launch a network. It is that the address itself is cheap relative to the option it preserves, and it is available exactly once.

What we would take from this

• US connected TV advertising is around $37.95 billion in 2026, up roughly 15 percent, and forecast to pass traditional TV around 2028.
• Streaming upfront commitments passed primetime linear in 2026 for the first time, which is the conservative end of the market conceding the point.
• Reach is settled: about 89.5 percent of US households have a connected TV device and 243.6 million Americans are projected as viewers this year.
• Beer's advantage is not budget. It is that the product occasion and the medium already share a room, and the growth segments need explaining.
• In a channel grid, the name is the distribution. That is the single clearest argument for what Beer.TV actually is.