Connected TV has been part of the advertising conversation for more than a decade, but the industry is entering a very different chapter. For years, CTV was seen as a premium reach tool: great for awareness, excellent for storytelling, but disconnected from the precision and attribution that performance marketers depend on. Most advertisers treated it as a CPM-based branding line item: something adjacent to performance, but not part of it.
That has changed dramatically.
Today, CTV is no longer an unmeasurable awareness channel. It’s becoming a performance-compatible medium with real attribution, real optimization levers, and real synergy with mobile. And in many cases, the smartest programmatic partners running mobile campaigns are now also running CTV, giving advertisers unified control over two channels that increasingly belong together.
Across campaigns and categories, we’re seeing a clear pattern: when CTV and mobile are planned jointly, brands unlock reach, frequency control, and measurable lift that neither channel can achieve alone. The challenge for marketers is learning how to balance both effectively.
For a long time, CTV carried a major limitation: it couldn’t prove performance.
Marketers could measure impressions and general reach, but they couldn’t connect those impressions to real downstream outcomes. Install? Purchase? Subscription? Reactivation? None of it was trackable at the device level in a reliable way.
Because of that, performance teams viewed CTV as a “nice to have,” not a revenue-driving channel. Many advertisers explicitly passed on CTV because it didn’t meet their core requirement: measurability.
In many ways, CTV in 2017 was where mobile display was in 2010: high potential, limited attribution.
But today, we’re looking at a completely different landscape.
The shift began when data availability expanded across the CTV ecosystem. Smart TV manufacturers, streaming platforms, cable providers, and OEMs started enabling more deterministic identifiers and household-level signals. Combined with cross-device graphs, this made it possible to connect:
A CTV ad exposure → to a mobile device → to a conversion.
If the model sounds familiar, it’s because major retailers have used this type of cross-device matching for years. What used to be a proprietary capability is now accessible to a wide range of advertisers through the right programmatic partners.
This single development changed the trajectory of CTV.
It moved the channel from “trust us, it works” to “here are the users who saw your CTV ad and converted on mobile within the last 30 minutes.”
And that opened the floodgates for performance budgets.
Mobile-first performance partners have a structural advantage when it comes to CTV:
So when CTV inventory expanded and became more addressable, mobile programmatic partners naturally became CTV partners as well. This created a major benefit for advertisers:
One partner, one data layer, one optimization logic across two channels.
In the network space, this works seamlessly. In OEM environments, it’s straightforward to buy.
And even with mid-tier or smaller cable providers, the right programmatic stack can unify supply and reporting. For marketers, the takeaway is simple: If a partner can execute high-performing mobile campaigns, they can likely execute high-performing CTV campaigns and integrate both into one strategy.
Another factor accelerating CTV’s performance adoption is the sheer expansion of supply. What used to be limited to a few premium streaming apps is now a wide, diverse inventory landscape, including:
This diversity matters because performance campaigns need both precision and volume. Premium inventory brings quality, while mid-tier supply brings scale. Today, advertisers can reach households across income tiers, content preferences, and device types, all in one programmatic ecosystem.
What truly propelled CTV into the performance stack is data, specifically, cross-device attribution.
Performance advertisers can now answer questions that were previously impossible:
Attribution blends several data types:
For performance marketers, this means CTV impressions can be connected to real revenue events on mobile, making the channel actionable, optimizable, and accountable.
As CTV becomes part of the performance toolkit, advertisers need a playbook that maximizes impact without inflating costs. Here are the best practices we consistently see delivering measurable lift.
Performance on CTV improves when the ad invites action.
Some effective approaches include:
Even when users don’t directly scan QR codes, they strengthen attribution by linking CTV exposure to device-level behavior.
Attribution is what makes CTV performance-compatible.
Teams should combine:
This ensures conversions are correctly assigned and CTV impact is not inflated or undercounted.
CTV shines brightest when paired with mobile programmatic.
We’ve seen strong results with strategies like:
This creates a full-funnel flow: awareness → intent → action.
Not all CTV supply performs equally.
A balanced mix is essential:
The goal is to blend quality with reach while maintaining control over cost and frequency.
Without frequency management, CTV CPMs climb quickly and cannibalization risks increase.
Performance teams should set:
This is where mobile + CTV consolidation under one programmatic partner becomes extremely valuable.
Balancing these channels requires treating them as complementary, not competitive.
Here’s what works:
In the strongest campaigns, CTV expands the funnel and mobile converts it. When balanced correctly, mobile performance improves, not declines, with the addition of CTV.
If you’re exploring how to blend CTV with your programmatic mobile strategy, let’s talk.
