For many advertisers, CTV ends up fairly divorced from the other components of their campaigns says Esme Robinson, Global Platform Solutions Director at Epsilon. But the result is that all brands really know about their campaigns with any certainty are delivery metrics, rather than the impact it delivered — ultimately making it harder to justify CTV’s place on a plan.
In this Q&A Robinson describes the benefits of taking a cross-channel approach to activation, the realities of CTV’s current limitations, and how brands can get the most out of the channel.
A lot of brands are investing in CTV right now. How are most advertisers currently approaching these channels when it comes to planning and measurement?
Most advertisers are still buying CTV as its own thing, running it against its own KPIs, and it ends up quite disconnected from whatever else they’re doing across display, online video or retail media. So the campaign gets measured in isolation, the learning stays siloed, and you can see how many people completed a view, but you can’t really see what happened after that, or whether CTV played any meaningful role in what the rest of the plan delivered. It just limits what you can learn from the channel and, probably more importantly, what you can confidently attribute to it.
What tends to go wrong when the results from those campaigns are assessed on their own terms?
There’s a risk in treating the end conversion as the only thing that matters. The hope is always to find some link to the sale, but that’s very hard to do when CTV is so divorced from everything else. All you can prove with certainty are delivery metrics, things like completion rates and impression volumes, rather than actually understanding whether that CTV exposure contributed to a real business outcome, whether a shift in brand consideration, a store visit or a sale. The budget comes under pressure as a result, and you might not get the chance to see the channel succeed for your brand. You need CTV to be linked through to other addressable environments, whether that’s display, online video, publisher inventory, apps or email, so you can actually follow behaviour as consumers move through the funnel and credit some of those key moments along the way.
What changes when AVOD is treated as part of a wider cross-channel strategy rather than a separate line item?
When you activate across channels, you begin to accurately capture the upper-funnel journey, the ongoing sequence of interactions that starts to resemble a real conversation with the shopper as they move into consideration. You can see shifts in brand recall, increases in search activity, growth in product page engagement, and you start to identify intent within the household based on the pattern of those behaviours rather than a single data point. Those are high-quality signals, things like rising visit frequency, and they tell you something meaningful about the demand you’re building.
IAB Europe found that only about 17 percent of European advertisers are activating the majority of their campaigns across channels, which tells you most of the market isn’t capturing any of this. The value of CTV is there, but for most brands it isn’t being seen because the activation model doesn’t allow for it.
One of the big challenges is reaching the right people consistently across different CTV environments. How should advertisers be thinking about that?
It starts with knowing who you’re reaching, and that’s one of the reasons multi-channel activation matters so much. When you extend from CTV into online video and display, where the devices are more often personal, you start to build a much more complete picture of who you’re reaching and how frequently. Identity resolution across those touchpoints is what allows you to manage frequency, reduce waste and avoid saturating one household while missing others entirely.
When brands do get this right, what kinds of results are they seeing?
Greater incremental reach, less duplication and, importantly, the ability to connect upper-funnel activity to measurable outcomes further down the journey. A good example comes from Currys’ retail media network, where a consumer electronics brand combined CTV, online video and display and saw a 46 percent increase in conversions compared with a single-channel approach. That campaign was also measured through to in-store footfall and sales, which really proved the commercial impact of connecting awareness through to action.
The online-offline divide is still a major gap here. ONS data shows something like 70 percent of UK purchases still happen in physical stores, so if your measurement framework only captures what’s happening digitally, you’re missing most of what actually matters.
Where should advertisers be honest with themselves about the limitations of how CTV performance is currently measured?
The biggest gap is between household-level delivery and individual-level understanding. CTV confirms an ad was served to a device in a home, but it doesn’t confirm who in that household actually watched it. There is progress being made, particularly when CTV is paired with channels that operate at the person level, like mobile or display, where you can start to connect exposure to individual behaviour, but treating a single CTV impression as equivalent to a verified one-to-one interaction overstates what the technology can do today. The honest position is that CTV works well for reach and early-stage awareness, and that its measurement sharpens considerably when it’s part of a connected, multi-channel approach rather than standing on its own.
If you could get the industry to change one thing about how it approaches CTV and AVOD, what would it be?
Stop treating it as a standalone channel and measuring it through a keyhole. When CTV is disconnected from everything else, assessed only against its own delivery metrics, you just can’t see how your audience is actually responding. You’re looking at one fragment of a journey and trying to draw conclusions from it, and that doesn’t reflect how people really move between screens, search, browse, compare and buy. The problem isn’t that CTV lacks value, it’s that the siloed approach makes it impossible to see the value that’s actually there.
When you activate across CTV, online video and display together, you can start to track positive shifts in how people think about and engage with a brand, and that kind of evidence is defensible. It’s worth a great deal, because that demand is what ultimately converts, whether at key commercial moments later in the year or during a seasonal peak you’ve been building towards for months. The brands getting the most from CTV right now are the ones proving that connected activation builds a persistent relationship with the shopper, the kind of demand that shows up in sales later.
Follow VideoWeek on LinkedIn.
