OTT/CTV Advertising: What Brands Get Wrong About the Channel

OTT and CTV advertising put your brand inside the television screen without requiring a traditional broadcast buy. OTT (over-the-top) refers to streaming content delivered over the internet, bypassing cable or satellite. CTV (connected TV) is the device doing the delivering, whether that is a smart TV, a Roku, a Fire Stick, or a games console. In practice, most marketers use the terms interchangeably, and for planning purposes that is close enough.

What makes the channel genuinely interesting is not the technology. It is the combination of television-quality attention with digital-grade targeting. That pairing has not existed before, and it changes how you should think about audience reach, measurement, and where the channel sits in your go-to-market plan.

Why CTV Deserves a Seat at the Strategy Table

I spent a long stretch of my career overvaluing the bottom of the funnel. Performance marketing felt clean and accountable. You could see the numbers, defend the spend, and walk into a board meeting with a cost-per-acquisition that looked like proof. The problem is that much of what performance marketing gets credited for was going to happen anyway. You are often paying to intercept intent that already existed, not creating new demand. At some point you run out of people who were already looking.

CTV sits in a different part of the equation. It reaches people who are not yet in-market. It builds the mental availability that makes someone more likely to respond to your performance activity later. Think of it like a clothes shop: the person who has already picked something up and tried it on is far more likely to buy than someone browsing from the door. CTV is part of how you get people to pick things up in the first place.

That framing matters for how you evaluate the channel. If you measure CTV purely on last-touch conversions, you will systematically undervalue it and cut it at exactly the wrong moment. The smarter approach is to understand what role the channel plays in your overall demand architecture, which is a broader question than any single channel can answer. If you are working through that question for your business, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub is a useful place to start.

What Actually Differentiates CTV from Other Digital Video

The distinction matters more than most media plans acknowledge. When you run pre-roll on a desktop browser, the viewer is in task mode. They have somewhere to be. The ad is an interruption and they know it. When someone is watching a streaming series on their television at 9pm, they are in a fundamentally different psychological state. They have chosen to sit down, commit attention, and be entertained. That is the lean-back environment that linear TV has always sold, and CTV inherits it.

The completion rates on CTV ads reflect this. Non-skippable CTV placements regularly see near-complete view-through rates because the viewer is settled and the ad is full-screen. There is no second tab, no notification pulling focus, no scroll. That quality of attention is rare in digital advertising and it is worth paying for, but only if your creative is built for it.

This is where I see brands make their first mistake. They take a 30-second digital video asset, one that was cut for social or pre-roll, and run it on CTV without adjustment. The production quality shows, the format feels wrong, and the opportunity is wasted. CTV creative needs to work like a television ad: it needs to be watchable, not just informative. The bar is higher because the context is higher.

The Targeting Capability Most Brands Are Not Using Properly

The reason CTV is commercially interesting beyond just reach is the targeting layer underneath it. You can serve ads at the household level using first-party data, purchase behaviour signals, demographic overlays, and geographic precision that linear TV simply cannot match. A regional challenger brand can run a campaign that looks and feels like a national television buy but only reaches the specific zip codes or postcodes where it actually distributes. That used to be impossible without a significant media budget and a lot of wasted impressions.

For B2B marketers, the opportunity is different but equally real. Account-based targeting through CTV, matching your target account list to household IP addresses and serving ads to decision-makers at home, is a genuine tactic that some B2B teams are using effectively. It is not a replacement for your core B2B channels, but as a supporting layer in a more sophisticated go-to-market motion, it has a role. I have seen this work particularly well for organisations running structured B2B financial services marketing programmes where the buying cycle is long and brand familiarity matters at multiple points in the process.

The caveat is that targeting precision requires data quality. If your first-party data is patchy, your CTV targeting will be patchy. Garbage in, garbage out. Before you build an audience strategy on CTV, it is worth running a proper audit of what data you actually have and whether it is fit for purpose. The checklist for analysing your company website for sales and marketing strategy is a useful starting point for identifying where your data gaps are before you start building audience segments.

How to Think About Measurement Without Fooling Yourself

Measurement is where CTV conversations go wrong most often, and usually in one of two directions. Either brands try to apply last-click logic to a channel that does not work that way, conclude it is not performing, and pull the budget. Or they accept vague reach metrics, declare it a success, and never actually test whether it is doing anything useful. Both positions are intellectually lazy.

The honest position is that CTV measurement is still maturing. Attribution models for upper-funnel channels are imperfect by design because the causal chain between a brand impression and a purchase decision is long and indirect. What you can do is set up the right proxy metrics and commit to them before you launch, not after. Brand lift studies, search volume uplift in exposed geographies, site visit rates among households served the ad, and changes in branded search behaviour are all defensible signals. They are not perfect, but they are honest approximations.

I judged the Effie Awards for several years, and one thing that consistently separated the winning entries from the shortlisted ones was measurement discipline. The winners had defined what success looked like before the campaign ran, not after. They had chosen metrics that connected to business outcomes, not just media metrics. That discipline is exactly what CTV planning needs and rarely gets.

If you are building a measurement framework for CTV as part of a broader growth review, the principles in digital marketing due diligence apply directly. You need to know what you are actually measuring before you decide whether the channel is working.

Where CTV Fits in a Go-To-Market Plan

CTV does not operate in isolation. Its effectiveness is directly influenced by what surrounds it in your channel mix. A brand running CTV without any connected lower-funnel activity is essentially hoping that brand awareness converts itself. It rarely does. The channel works best when it is the upstream element of a coordinated sequence: CTV builds familiarity and primes the audience, paid search and social capture the demand that CTV helped generate, and retargeting closes the loop for people who engaged but did not convert.

This is not a complicated idea but it requires planning discipline that a lot of organisations do not have. Channel owners operate in silos, budgets are managed separately, and nobody is looking at the full sequence. I ran an agency that grew from 20 people to over 100 during a period when integrated planning was the promise every agency made and almost none delivered. The ones who actually did it had a single person accountable for the full customer experience, not separate teams accountable for separate metrics.

For B2B technology companies in particular, the coordination challenge is structural. Corporate and business unit teams often have different budgets, different agency relationships, and different views on what brand activity is supposed to achieve. If that tension sounds familiar, the corporate and business unit marketing framework for B2B tech companies addresses exactly how to align those competing priorities into a coherent go-to-market motion.

Vidyard’s research on go-to-market teams highlights how much untapped pipeline potential exists when GTM teams operate in disconnected ways. The same principle applies to channel strategy: disconnected channels produce disconnected results.

The Creative Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About

I have sat in enough creative briefings to know that the creative conversation is the one most brands avoid having honestly. CTV is a lean-back, high-attention environment. The creative standard is television, not digital display. If your brand does not have television-quality creative, you have three options: invest in it, accept that you are running a suboptimal campaign, or choose a different channel.

What I see most often is a fourth option that nobody admits to: running mediocre creative and blaming the channel when the results are soft. CTV gets a bad reputation in some quarters because brands have run poorly produced ads in a premium environment and concluded the environment was the problem. It usually is not.

The early days at the agency I ran were instructive here. We had a Guinness brief early on, a proper brand with proper standards, and the pressure to produce something genuinely good was real. There was no hiding behind technical complexity or data sophistication. The creative either worked or it did not. That standard, creative that earns attention rather than demanding it, is exactly what CTV requires.

Good creative for CTV has a few consistent characteristics. It establishes the brand quickly, within the first five seconds, because even non-skippable ads need to earn continued attention. It tells a story that works without sound for the first beat, because some viewers have the television audio low. And it has a single, clear message rather than trying to communicate a product catalogue. Less is more in a format where the viewer is relaxed and the pacing needs to match that state.

Programmatic CTV and the Inventory Quality Question

Most CTV buying now happens programmatically, which brings the same inventory quality questions that have followed programmatic display for years. Not all CTV inventory is equal. Premium publisher inventory on platforms like Hulu, Peacock, or Disney Plus carries a different audience quality and brand safety profile than the long tail of connected TV apps and free ad-supported streaming channels.

This is an area where the concept of endemic advertising is worth understanding. Endemic placements, where your brand appears in content that is directly relevant to your category, carry a different weight than broad reach buys. A financial services brand appearing in business news content on a streaming platform is in a different context than the same ad appearing in a true crime series. Context still matters, even in a digital environment.

When evaluating programmatic CTV partners, the questions to ask are straightforward. What supply-side platforms are they buying through? What publisher allow-lists are in place? How is invalid traffic filtered? What transparency is available on where your ads actually ran? If a partner cannot answer these questions clearly, that is a signal worth taking seriously. Forrester’s work on agile marketing operations is a useful reference for building the governance frameworks that keep programmatic buying accountable.

Budget Sizing and Who CTV Is Actually For

CTV is not exclusively a brand play for large advertisers. The targeting precision and the ability to buy at geographic or audience-level granularity means that mid-market brands with focused ambitions can run effective CTV campaigns at budgets that would have been laughably small for linear television. That accessibility is one of the channel’s genuine structural advantages.

That said, there is a floor below which CTV does not make sense. If you cannot sustain enough frequency against your target audience to build meaningful brand memory, you are not really running a brand campaign, you are running a very expensive impression. The minimum effective budget varies by market and audience size, but as a rough principle, if you cannot achieve meaningful weekly frequency against your core audience for at least eight weeks, the budget is probably better deployed elsewhere until you can.

For businesses in earlier growth stages where every channel needs to pull its weight immediately, the discipline of pay per appointment lead generation may be a more commercially appropriate starting point, with CTV added as the business matures and brand investment becomes more viable. The channel sequencing matters as much as the channel selection.

BCG’s analysis on scaling go-to-market strategies makes a related point: growth at different stages requires different channel mixes, and what works at scale is often not what got you to scale in the first place. CTV tends to be a scaling channel, not a launch channel.

Testing CTV Without Wasting the Budget

The right way to enter CTV is with a structured test, not a full commitment. Define a specific audience hypothesis: who are you trying to reach, what do you want them to think or feel after seeing the ad, and what downstream behaviour would indicate the campaign is working? Run the test for long enough to generate signal, typically a minimum of six to eight weeks, and measure against the proxy metrics you defined before launch.

Geographic holdout tests are one of the cleaner methodologies available. Run the campaign in selected markets, hold back comparable markets as a control, and compare branded search volume, site traffic, and conversion rates between the two groups over the test period. It is not perfect, but it is a defensible approximation of causal impact that does not require sophisticated measurement infrastructure.

Semrush’s analysis of market penetration strategy is relevant here. CTV as a testing vehicle for new audience segments aligns directly with the penetration logic: you are trying to reach people who do not yet know your brand well enough to be in-market, and you need a way to measure whether you are moving them.

The broader strategic context for CTV investment sits within your go-to-market architecture. If you are working through how channels connect to growth objectives across your business, the articles and frameworks in the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub cover the upstream planning that makes channel decisions like this one more coherent.

What the Channel Requires of You

CTV advertising rewards a specific set of behaviours: audience clarity, creative discipline, measurement honesty, and channel coordination. It punishes the opposite: vague targeting, repurposed assets, vanity metrics, and siloed execution.

The brands that are getting genuine commercial value from CTV are not necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones who treated the channel seriously enough to plan it properly. They defined their audience before they bought the media. They built creative for the format rather than adapting whatever was available. They set measurement expectations that were honest about what a brand channel can and cannot prove. And they connected the CTV investment to the rest of their marketing in a way that made the whole system more effective, not just added another line to the media plan.

That is not a high bar. It is just a bar that requires thinking before spending, which is still rarer than it should be.

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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