The Pitfalls of Performance Obsession in Connected TV Advertising

A version of this was originally featured on ANA.

Connected TV (CTV) is rapidly emerging as a dominant force in the advertising landscape, blending the best features of traditional TV and digital channels. However, as CTV gains traction, a concerning trend is surfacing—many marketers are treating CTV primarily as a digital performance channel. This approach is often driven by the fact that CTV budgets come from digital allocations, leading to a narrow focus on immediate, quantifiable results, much like in digital advertising.

This performance-centric mindset mirrors past digital missteps, where overemphasizing short-term CTV metrics leads to diminishing returns. By focusing too heavily on immediate outcomes, marketers risk missing out on CTV’s broader, long-term advantages. The key question is: how can marketers leverage CTV’s unique strengths while avoiding performance overkill? A more balanced approach that drives results while building lasting brand value is essential.

The Digital Mindset’s Impact on CTV Strategy

Many digital marketers approach CTV advertising with a mindset shaped by paid search and paid social experiences. These channels are built around performance-driven models, where success is measured by immediate actions like clicks and conversions. They carry this narrow focus to CTV, prioritizing short-term results over long-term brand-building.

In both paid search and social, the emphasis is on driving immediate outcomes—whether it’s capturing high-intent users through clicks or optimizing social ads for conversions. However, CTV operates differently. There’s no direct "click" in CTV; performance is gauged by how effectively the TV ad drives actions on other household devices, such as a website visit, made possible through vendors’ back-end device household graphs. The risk is that marketers, used to the immediacy of digital channels, may apply the same mindset to CTV, underestimating the medium’s potential for brand-building and long-term engagement.

Moreover, multi-touch attribution models, common in digital campaigns, can sometimes skew the perceived effectiveness of these channels. Practices like cookie bombing, where retargeting campaigns flood users with cookies to increase a channel’s conversion credit, deliberately gamed these attribution models. While some may not explicitly consider it fraud, cookie bombing manipulates attribution models by inflating touchpoints, giving certain channels undue credit. This overemphasis on volume—pervasive in display advertising—often detracts from engagement quality and true contribution to brand growth. CTV retargeting is a legitimate strategy that allows brands to re-engage audiences. However, as CTV grows, there may be a temptation to adopt similar practices like cookie bombing, which favors inflating impressions to game attribution models at the expense of meaningful brand-building interactions.

Marketers must move beyond narrow digital performance metrics to tap into CTV's potential. By recognizing CTV as a powerful tool for both performance and brand-building, they can craft strategies that drive immediate results and foster long-term brand growth and loyalty.

Maximizing CTV’s Potential with a Full-Funnel, Brandformance Approach

Connected TV (CTV) offers a unique opportunity to blend traditional TV’s mass reach and emotional impact with digital advertising’s precision and measurability. To harness this potential, marketers should adopt a full-funnel strategy that integrates brand-building with performance marketing—a concept known as "brandformance."

CTV’s versatility allows brands to engage audiences at every funnel stage. While digital channels like paid search and paid social excel at driving conversions, they face limitations in brand building. Paid search, primarily text-based, struggles to create emotional connections. Paid social has become increasingly expensive, and its long-term brand-building effectiveness remains uncertain. Social ads, often consumed on small mobile screens and shortened to fit fast-paced user-generated content, make it challenging to tell a rich brand story in just a few seconds. In contrast, CTV offers broad reach and the ability to use 15- or 30-second video ads that allow for deeper storytelling and emotional resonance while also supporting precise targeting to nurture and convert audiences lower in the funnel.

A full-funnel brandformance approach with CTV means investing in creative that resonates emotionally and suits the immersive viewing experience CTV provides. Viewers engage with content in a lean-back setting, often on the biggest screen in the house, enhancing message retention and brand recall—critical in a media environment where ads on other channels are easily skipped, scrolled past, or ignored.

Thanks to generative AI, producing high-quality CTV creative is now more accessible. This technology has lowered production costs, enabling even smaller advertisers to create stunning TV-ready videos. By leveraging CTV’s capabilities and these cost-effective tools, brands can craft campaigns that engage audiences across the entire funnel, from awareness to conversion.

Adopting a brandformance approach involves creating campaigns that drive immediate actions while building long-term brand equity. Effective brandformance in CTV requires balancing brand-building with performance metrics across the funnel. Upper-funnel efforts should maximize the campaign’s strategic audience reach, ensuring key potential customers are aware of or reminded of the brand. While CTV metrics like brand lift and ad recall are valuable, they are often supplemental due to their slower collection process, which can limit real-time optimization—a digital strength.

Mid-funnel actions, such as site visits or app installs, nurture interest and guide prospects closer to conversion. Finally, lower-funnel optimization focuses on converting these engaged prospects into customers, with success measured through direct conversions—areas where paid search and social excel.

This comprehensive approach ensures that CTV effectively contributes to top-of-funnel awareness, mid-funnel consideration, and bottom-of-funnel conversions, creating a virtuous cycle in which each stage of the funnel reinforces the other.

Understanding the Halo Effect of TV Advertising

The "halo effect" of TV advertising is a compelling reason to integrate CTV into a full-funnel marketing strategy. Both traditional and streaming TV have consistently shown that the powerful combination of sight, sound, and motion on the big screen amplifies the effectiveness of other marketing channels. TV ads not only capture viewers’ attention in the moment but also boost brand recognition, making audiences more likely to engage with the brand across platforms like paid search and social.

This halo effect occurs because TV’s broad reach and emotional resonance significantly enhance brand awareness and recall, which in turn improves the performance of other channels. For instance, after watching a TV ad, consumers are more inclined to search for the brand online, interact with social media ads, or click on paid search results.

While this effect is more challenging to measure than direct response metrics, it is quantifiable through Incrementality lift studies. These studies are essential for any Brandformance TV campaign, as they measure how TV exposure drives key actions like site visits or clicks on organic, paid search, and social ads. They provide a gold-standard method for understanding CTV’s impact on the broader marketing ecosystem.

Best Practices for Implementing a Successful Brandformance Strategy in CTV Campaigns

To effectively incorporate brandformance into a well-formed CTV campaign strategy, it's crucial to balance brand-building with performance metrics across the entire funnel. Here are key steps to guide your efforts:

• Set Clear Funnel Objectives: Define specific goals for each funnel stage. In the upper funnel, focus on maximizing the reach of your strategic audience to ensure potential customers are aware of or reminded of your brand. Mid-funnel campaigns should nurture interest through actions like site visits or app installs, while lower-funnel efforts should target direct conversions.
• Leverage High-Quality Creative: Use compelling video content to capitalize on CTV’s immersive experience. Generative AI tools have made high-quality video production more affordable, enabling even smaller brands to create ads that resonate emotionally and capture attention.
• Employ Robust Measurement Techniques: Use Incrementality studies to measure the true impact of your CTV campaigns on other channels, such as site visits or clicks on paid search and social ads. These studies provide critical insights for optimizing your strategy by quantifying how TV exposure enhances overall marketing performance.
• Optimize Campaigns in Real-Time: Regularly monitor performance data and make dynamic adjustments. Real-time optimization lets you respond quickly to audience behaviors, ensuring that each funnel stage aligns with your objectives and contributes to campaign success.

By following these best practices, you can maximize the impact of your CTV campaigns, ensuring they drive immediate actions and build long-term brand equity. A comprehensive Brandformance strategy ensures each funnel stage reinforces the others, creating a sustainable cycle of engagement, consideration, and conversion.