Connected TV Advertising: Why Most Brands Are Buying It Wrong

Connected TV advertising places video ads on internet-connected television screens, reaching audiences through streaming platforms, smart TVs, and devices like Roku, Fire TV, and Apple TV. Unlike traditional broadcast, it combines the visual impact of television with the targeting precision of digital, letting brands reach specific audience segments rather than paying for broad demographic buckets.

The opportunity is real. But so is the confusion. Most brands entering CTV are treating it like a performance channel, optimising for last-click signals that streaming environments were never designed to produce. The result is wasted budget and a channel that gets written off before it has a chance to work.

Why CTV Has Grown So Quickly, and What That Masks

Streaming has fundamentally changed how people watch television. Linear viewing has been in structural decline for years, particularly among younger demographics. The audiences that brands once reached through primetime slots are now distributed across dozens of streaming services, many of them ad-supported. CTV is where those audiences went.

That migration created a genuine opportunity. For the first time, brands can run television-quality creative against addressable audiences, at scale, with measurable delivery data. That is a meaningful improvement on the old model of buying GRPs and hoping the right people were watching.

But the growth of CTV as a channel has also attracted a lot of vendor noise. Every DSP, every streaming platform, and every ad tech intermediary is selling CTV as the future of advertising. Some of that is warranted. Some of it is margin dressed up as vision. When I was running agency teams and reviewing media plans, one of the first things I learned to do was strip out the vendor narrative and ask a simpler question: what problem does this actually solve for the client? CTV has real answers to that question. But you have to ask it first.

If you are thinking about how CTV fits into a broader go-to-market approach, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the strategic frameworks that sit behind channel decisions like this one.

What CTV Actually Does in the Purchase experience

There is a version of the CTV pitch that sounds like performance marketing. Precise targeting. Measurable impressions. Viewability guarantees. It is tempting to buy into that framing, especially if your organisation has spent the last decade optimising digital spend on last-click metrics.

The problem is that CTV does not work that way. Someone watching a streaming series is not in a buying mindset. They are not searching. They are not comparing options. They are watching television. The role of advertising in that context is to create familiarity, shift perception, and build the kind of brand memory that influences decisions later, when the person is in market.

I spent a long time earlier in my career overvaluing lower-funnel performance. We would see strong conversion numbers from search and retargeting, and the temptation was to keep pouring budget into channels that showed direct returns. What I came to understand, and what took longer than it should have, is that a lot of that performance was capturing demand that already existed. The people converting had already decided, or were close to deciding. The performance channel just happened to be the last thing they touched.

CTV operates upstream of that. It reaches people before they are in market, plants a brand in memory, and increases the probability that when they do start searching, your brand is in the consideration set. That is not a soft, unmeasurable outcome. It is a commercially important one. It is just harder to attribute directly, which is why it gets undervalued.

The Targeting Advantage Is Real, But Easily Misused

One of CTV’s genuine strengths is audience targeting. You can buy against first-party data segments, behavioural signals, purchase data from retail partners, and demographic overlays that linear TV simply cannot match. For brands that have historically bought television on age and gender demographics, this is a significant upgrade.

But precision creates its own trap. When you can target narrowly, there is a temptation to target too narrowly, reaching only the people who already look like your best customers. That feels efficient. It is not growth.

Growth requires reaching people who do not yet know they want what you sell. The analogy I keep coming back to is a clothes shop. Someone who has already tried something on is far more likely to buy than someone who has never walked through the door. But the shop still needs people to walk through the door. CTV, used correctly, gets people to walk through the door. Over-targeted CTV just keeps talking to the people who were already browsing the rails.

The right approach is to use targeting to improve relevance, not to shrink your audience to the point where reach becomes negligible. That balance is different for every brand, and it depends on category size, competitive context, and where you are in the growth curve. There is no universal answer, but the bias in most CTV buying leans too far toward precision and not far enough toward scale. Thinking through market penetration strategy before you set audience parameters is a useful discipline.

How CTV Inventory Actually Works, and Why It Matters

Not all CTV inventory is the same, and the gap between the best and worst placements is larger than most buyers realise. Premium CTV inventory means ads running within professionally produced content on established streaming platforms, in a brand-safe, non-skippable environment, often with high completion rates. Open exchange CTV inventory can mean something quite different: ads running on obscure apps, low-quality content aggregators, or environments where the viewing context is unclear.

The programmatic ecosystem makes it easy to buy CTV at scale without knowing exactly where your ads are appearing. Brands that buy through open exchanges without supply-path transparency are often getting a very different product to what they think they are buying. The CPM looks attractive. The inventory quality is not.

When I was managing large media budgets across multiple agency accounts, the discipline we developed was to always audit the supply path before we optimised for efficiency. Cheap impressions in the wrong environment are not a bargain. They are a cost with no benefit. For CTV specifically, I would always recommend starting with direct publisher deals or curated private marketplace packages before opening up programmatic buying, and treating open exchange inventory with scepticism until you have verified what you are actually getting.

This also has implications for brand safety. The streaming environment is generally safer than the open web, but it is not uniformly safe. Content adjacency matters for brand perception, even if it is harder to measure than click-through rate.

Measuring CTV Without Lying to Yourself

Measurement is where most CTV strategies fall apart. The channel produces a lot of data: impression counts, completion rates, reach and frequency metrics, viewability scores. That data creates an illusion of accountability. But none of it tells you whether the advertising actually worked in any commercially meaningful sense.

The attribution problem in CTV is structural. Streaming environments do not support cookies in the same way the open web does. Cross-device tracking is imperfect. The path from a CTV impression to a downstream conversion is long and indirect, passing through multiple touchpoints that other channels will claim credit for. If you measure CTV purely on last-touch or even multi-touch attribution models built for digital, you will consistently undervalue it.

Better measurement approaches for CTV include brand lift studies, which measure changes in awareness, consideration, and purchase intent among exposed versus unexposed audiences. Geo-based incrementality testing, where you run CTV in some markets and hold out others, can give you a cleaner read on causal impact. Search lift analysis, tracking changes in branded search volume in markets where CTV is active, is a useful proxy for upper-funnel effect.

None of these are perfect. All of them are more honest than attributing a CTV impression to a conversion that happened three weeks later on a different device via a paid search click. The goal is not perfect measurement. It is honest approximation. That distinction matters more than most marketing teams acknowledge. Tools like those from Vidyard’s research on pipeline visibility illustrate how difficult it is to connect upper-funnel activity to revenue, and CTV faces the same challenge in a television context.

Creative Is Where CTV Either Works or Wastes Money

CTV is a television environment. The creative expectations are television expectations. Audiences sitting in front of a large screen, watching a streaming series, are not in the same mindset as someone scrolling a social feed. They are more attentive, but they are also less forgiving of ads that feel cheap, poorly produced, or tonally wrong for the context.

One of the most common mistakes I see is brands repurposing social video creative for CTV. A vertical-format, text-heavy, sound-off social ad does not translate to a horizontal, full-screen, sound-on television environment. The formats are different. The viewing context is different. The creative brief should be different.

Early in my career, I was handed a whiteboard marker in a brainstorm for a major drinks brand and expected to lead the room. The pressure of that moment taught me something I have never forgotten: creative confidence comes from understanding the context you are creating for. You cannot make good work for an environment you do not understand. CTV is no different. Before you brief creative, understand what the viewing experience actually feels like from the audience’s perspective. Watch the platform. Watch the ads. Most of them are forgettable. That is the bar you need to clear.

Good CTV creative establishes the brand quickly, tells a story that works in the full-length format, and leaves the viewer with something memorable. The non-skippable format is an advantage if your creative is worth watching. It is a liability if it is not.

How CTV Fits Into a Broader Channel Strategy

CTV does not work in isolation. The brands that get the most from it are the ones that coordinate their CTV investment with the rest of their media mix, using it to prime audiences and then reinforcing that exposure through other channels.

A practical example: a brand running CTV to build awareness in a new market should expect to see uplift in branded search volume as a downstream signal. If they are also running paid search, that search campaign should be funded to capture the demand that CTV is generating. If the search budget is not there, the CTV investment is doing work that nobody is there to collect. The channels need to be coordinated, not just co-existing on the same media plan.

The same logic applies to social, display, and any other channel that touches the same audience. CTV creates familiarity. Other channels can reinforce it, deepen it, and convert it. That sequencing, and the messaging consistency across it, is where the compounding effect of a well-built media strategy comes from. Coordinated go-to-market campaigns, where multiple channels reinforce a single message, consistently outperform siloed channel strategies. CTV is most powerful as part of that kind of orchestrated approach.

For B2B brands, CTV is underused. The assumption is that television is a B2C medium. But B2B buyers watch streaming services too, and the ability to target by job function, industry, or company size through CTV is more sophisticated than it was even a few years ago. The CPMs are higher than B2C, the audiences are smaller, but for enterprise brands trying to reach senior decision-makers, CTV can be a credible part of the mix.

Budget Allocation: How Much Should CTV Get?

There is no universal answer, and anyone who gives you one is either guessing or selling something. The right CTV allocation depends on your category, your growth objectives, your current brand awareness levels, and what the rest of your media mix looks like.

That said, a few principles hold across most situations. CTV is a reach channel, not an efficiency channel. It should be funded from the brand-building portion of your budget, not taken from performance channels that are generating measurable returns. If you are moving budget from paid search to CTV and expecting the same kind of direct attribution, you are setting the channel up to fail.

For brands with limited budgets, CTV requires a minimum threshold to work. Spreading a small budget thinly across a large geography will produce reach numbers that look reasonable on paper but will not generate the frequency needed to build memory. Better to concentrate spend in fewer markets, build genuine frequency, and measure the effect before expanding. The scaling principles from BCG’s work on scaling efficiently apply here: prove the model in a contained environment before committing to full rollout.

Frequency is an underappreciated variable in CTV planning. One exposure to a CTV ad rarely changes anything. The research on advertising memory consistently points to multiple exposures being required before a brand registers in long-term memory. Plan for frequency, not just reach, and cap it sensibly so you are not burning the same audience repeatedly to the point of irritation.

The Programmatic CTV Buying Checklist

If you are buying CTV programmatically, these are the questions worth asking before you commit budget.

First, what is the supply path? Are you buying direct from publishers, through a curated private marketplace, or through open exchange? The answer should inform your CPM expectations and your quality assumptions.

Second, what content adjacency controls are in place? Can you specify the types of content your ads will appear against, and can you exclude categories that are inappropriate for your brand?

Third, what does the measurement framework look like? If the only metrics on offer are impressions and completion rates, push for brand lift measurement or incrementality testing before you scale.

Fourth, what are the frequency caps, and how are they enforced across devices? Cross-device frequency management in CTV is still imperfect, and without caps you risk overexposing the same households.

Fifth, what does the competitive landscape look like on the platforms you are buying? Category exclusivity is not always available, but understanding who else is advertising in your category, and at what frequency, is useful context for creative and messaging decisions.

These are not exotic questions. They are basic due diligence. But in my experience, they are not asked often enough, particularly by brands that are new to CTV and relying heavily on vendor guidance.

Where CTV Is Heading and What to Watch

The CTV landscape is still evolving quickly. A few developments are worth tracking for anyone building a CTV strategy over the next few years.

Shoppable CTV is growing. Several platforms are experimenting with formats that allow viewers to interact with ads directly from their remote, adding products to a cart or requesting more information without leaving the viewing experience. The early results are mixed, but the direction of travel is clear. If this matures, it will change the measurement conversation significantly, because the gap between CTV exposure and downstream action will narrow.

First-party data is becoming more important as third-party signals erode. Streaming platforms that have strong subscriber data, including viewing behaviour, purchase history from retail integrations, and demographic profiles, will command premium prices for inventory that can be matched against advertiser first-party data. Brands that have invested in building their own customer data will be better positioned to take advantage of this.

The consolidation of streaming platforms is also worth watching. As the streaming market matures and some services merge or exit, the inventory landscape will shift. Concentration among fewer large players could increase CPMs and reduce the fragmentation that currently makes CTV buying complex. That would be a simplification for buyers, though potentially at a cost.

Growing into new audiences through coordinated channel strategies is one of the consistent themes in effective go-to-market and growth planning, and CTV is increasingly a component of that approach for brands with the scale to use it well.

The Honest Summary

Connected TV advertising is a genuinely useful channel for brands that understand what it is for. It is a brand-building medium with better targeting than linear television and a viewing context that commands more attention than most digital formats. Those are real advantages.

But it is not a performance channel. It will not produce the kind of direct attribution signals that paid search or paid social generate. Measuring it as if it should will produce misleading results and bad budget decisions. The brands that write CTV off as ineffective are usually the ones that bought it with the wrong expectations and measured it with the wrong tools.

The brands that get it right treat CTV as part of a coordinated media strategy, invest in quality creative, build measurement frameworks that are honest about what can and cannot be attributed, and give the channel enough time and frequency to do the work that brand-building requires. That is not complicated. But it does require resisting the pressure to make every channel look like a performance channel, which is one of the more persistent problems in how marketing budgets get managed.

If you are building a growth strategy and trying to work out where CTV fits, start with the business objective, not the channel. What audience do you need to reach that you are not currently reaching? What does your brand awareness look like in that segment? What would shift if more people in your target market knew who you were? CTV may be part of the answer. It is rarely the whole answer. But it is worth understanding properly before you decide.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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