Reframing measurement and focusing on the user experience is a key part of CTV strategy
Disclaimer: The opinions represented here are those of the individual and do not necessarily represent those of their current or former employer.
As Connected TV (CTV) reshapes digital advertising and cookie-based tracking fades, marketers must rethink how they structure and measure media investments. Once a blunt awareness tool, television is now a measurable, programmatic performance channel powered by streaming, smart TVs, and cross-device attribution. To unpack what this shift means for modern growth teams, we sat down with Lomit Patel, Chief Marketing Officer at TYB, to see how brands can unlock CTV’s full potential in today’s fragmented, privacy-first landscape.
Watch the full interview below, or read on for a selection of key takeaways.
Key Takeaways
Patel points out that the primary friction in deploying CTV budgets stems from a misalignment between traditional executive expectations and the delayed, multi-touch reality of modern demand capture. In legacy mobile marketing, performance is measured through deterministic, last-click attribution. CTV works differently. Rather than driving immediate conversions on the television screen, it functions as a demand engine, sparking interest that converts later on other devices. While QR codes and vanity URLs exist, viewers rarely interrupt premium streaming experiences to act. Instead, CTV creates a measurable “halo effect,” prompting high-intent searches or social engagement hours or days later.
"From my experience if you're running a CTV campaign, really set the context early with teams, especially leadership. Because for the most part, people have different views on how to measure, getting aligned on measurement is the key piece. The measurement really comes down to not only what you're going to get directly attributed through TV, but how it's going to impact and lift all of your other channels. So it's a huge channel as far as generating demand, which tends to get captured through other channels like social and search."
To secure sustained investment in CTV, senior marketing leaders must redefine the KPIs they present to the C-suite before budgets are committed, shifting the narrative from isolated channel efficiency to total portfolio impact. Rather than relying on last-click attribution, leading brands use cross-channel lift analyses to measure how television exposure drives downstream behavior. Wolt, for instance, integrated CTV into its broader brand strategy to capitalize on co-viewing, increasing the likelihood of mobile transactions later in the evening. Executives should evaluate organic traffic, branded search growth, and social engagement in the weeks following activation, treating aggregate business lift as the true indicator of CTV effectiveness.
The belief that a single attribution window can accurately capture every consumer journey is a fundamental flaw in modern media buying, according to Patel. In reality, conversion timelines vary dramatically by vertical, shaped by differences in risk, cost, trust, and cognitive effort. In fast-cycle categories such as hyper-casual gaming, food delivery, or low-cost consumer goods, barriers to entry are minimal, and conversions often occur within hours of CTV exposure. By contrast, long-cycle industries like fintech, healthcare, automotive, and high-ticket e-commerce require extensive research, comparison, and trust-building before action is taken. Applying a standard 24-hour or seven-day lookback window to these complex purchases inevitably underreports performance, as many consumers convert only after their extended consideration phase has concluded.
Attribution windows on a financial or health product have to be different from something like a consumer gaming app. But the reality is you have to figure that out for your own business and you can't just take a look at a competitor and just because they're doing something, assume that they're doing it right. As much as businesses are similar, they're very different as well.
Closing this gap requires configuring mobile measurement partners (MMPs) and attribution platforms to reflect the realities of each vertical, rather than relying on default settings. Historical performance data should determine attribution windows: programmatic analyses show optimal lookbacks ranging from one to 24 hours for fast-action gaming apps to as long as 30 days for e-commerce and financial services. Companies that tailor these parameters consistently outperform peers.
As global privacy regulations tighten and identifier-based tracking erodes, deterministic pixel attribution is steadily being replaced by probabilistic models and rigorous incrementality testing. For CFOs overseeing multimillion-dollar budgets, the central question becomes how many conversions were incremental—outcomes that would not have occurred without paid media. This distinction is especially critical in CTV, a clickless environment dependent on household IP matching and cross-device graphs, where overlapping platforms often claim the same conversion. To eliminate inflated reporting and restore credibility, marketers must adopt randomized control trials, geo-based holdouts, and ongoing incrementality testing. By withholding exposure from a defined control group, teams can isolate true net-new revenue lift and provide defensible proof of CTV’s business impact.
Take a look at the impact... You're going to start seeing conversion rates starting to improve because that’s the reality of what CTV does. And most people haven't looked at it. It's one of the fastest ways to create trust and credibility for a brand, because being on TV is a huge lift. It's not as easy as just going in and creating a campaign on Facebook or Google, right?
Disciplined, scientifically structured incrementality testing gives brands the confidence to scale channels that drive genuine business outcomes rather than inflated attribution claims. In practice, this means embedding geo-based holdouts or randomized control groups into major campaign launches—especially during peak retail windows—so teams can compare exposed and unexposed audiences in real time. Streaming platforms and measurement partners can help separate organic demand from paid impact, but internal alignment is equally critical: finance, marketing, and data teams should agree in advance on success criteria and testing methodology. By making incrementality testing a mandatory prerequisite for budget expansion, organizations ensure that capital is allocated only to initiatives proven to generate causal, defensible growth.
Proving incrementality is only the first step to capturing and retaining that demand is what drives real, long-term profitability. Partner with Adikteev to turn CTV-driven intent into sustained user value and measurable ROAS.
The primary vulnerability of a standalone CTV campaign is the “leaky funnel” effect: premium inventory sparks curiosity, yet brands fail to capture that demand before consumers are distracted or intercepted by competitors. Today, discovery rarely happens on brand-owned properties. Instead, viewers turn to search engines, social feeds, Reddit threads, or even AI-driven tools to continue their research, creating a fragmented and difficult-to-track journey. Because this follow-up often occurs hours or days after exposure, relying solely on organic discovery leaves significant revenue on the table. To prevent leakage, marketers must deploy coordinated cross-device retargeting strategies that reconnect with exposed households, reinforce intent, and systematically convert top-of-funnel television awareness into measurable mobile action.
The reason why retargeting is an important piece of the demand capture is that once people become aware of you and you start creating some demand with CTV, people are going to come to the site or they're going to do their own research. The reality is a lot of this research doesn't even happen on your website. It happens on AI generated LLMs. People go to Chat GPT, they go to Gemini, they go to Perplexity where you can't even track, because it's not click driven.
To close the leaky funnel, advanced marketers rely on household identity graphs that link living room IP addresses to individual mobile device IDs, enabling precise cross-device retargeting. In practice, this means an emotionally driven CTV spot is followed by high-urgency, performance-focused creative delivered directly to a primed user’s smartphone. The sequencing matters: the television builds intent, while mobile removes friction and captures conversion. When layered with predictive machine learning models that optimize bids based on conversion probability, this strategy maximizes efficiency.
As CTV shifts from sporadic brand plays to an always-on performance channel, creative economics quickly become a breaking point. Patel says traditional TV spots are built on long production cycles, celebrity talent, and agency-heavy budgets. They simply cannot support the rapid iteration required in programmatic environments. Once spend reaches six figures per month, creative fatigue emerges fast; repeated exposure to the same polished ad drives irritation, depresses response rates, and inflates acquisition costs. To maintain efficiency at scale, brands are pivoting toward user-generated content (UGC) and creator-led production models. This approach reduces overhead, accelerates testing cycles, and resonates more deeply with Gen Z and millennial audiences who favor authenticity over high-gloss corporate storytelling.
For every channel — and it's not just CTV, search is a good example too — once you start being successful, you have to have a creative engine in place to be able to rotate and refresh creatives. Before it was really a bit of investment to come up with the perfect creative for TV. But now there’s a lot of AI tools out there and a lot of brands have great communities. One of the reasons why a lot of brands love working with TYB is because we connect them with their fans, and their fans end up becoming this huge user-generated content engine for them.
The business case for integrating UGC into premium streaming environments is increasingly compelling, signaling a structural shift in how enterprise teams resource creative. By replacing rigid commercial formats with customer-led storytelling, brands unlock a scalable pipeline of video assets that can be quickly edited (often with AI tools) and redeployed across CTV and mobile to combat creative fatigue. The key is to shift investment from legacy production toward community infrastructure and dynamic optimization capabilities.
Integrating CTV into a modern performance strategy requires abandoning legacy television thinking and committing fully to data-driven execution. The living room screen can no longer be treated as a vanity metric; it must function as part of a measurable, cross-device ecosystem. That shift begins with executive alignment on multi-touch attribution, customized lookback windows tailored to vertical-specific buying cycles, and mandatory incrementality testing to prove causal lift. When paired with predictive mobile retargeting and a scalable, community-powered UGC engine, CTV becomes a sustainable growth driver rather than a branding expense. In this algorithmic era, the brands that win will treat television not as a billboard, but as a precision tool for profitable, measurable expansion.
We had a lot of fun talking to Lomit Patel about everything CTV. Follow him on LinkedIn and check out his blog for more expert marketing insights.
Ready to turn CTV into a measurable growth engine instead of a branding line item? Contact Adikteev to connect living room exposure to precision mobile retargeting and drive scalable, provable performance.