CTV Isn’t Broken. Your Marketing Strategy Might Be

CTV isn’t living up to the promise. Not because it’s a broken channel, but because a lot of marketers are dragging broken strategies into it.

For years, the ad wizards have declared CTV the future of TV advertising. And fair enough, it is – or at least part of it. Streaming now accounts for more TV viewing than traditional broadcast, and ad dollars are finally following the eyeballs.

The IAB says CTV spend will hit $26.6 billion this year, up 12% from 2024.

So, what’s the problem?

But marketers are still treating it like 2005. Worse, they’re still treating it like 1941. That’s when Bulova bought the first TV commercial during a Brooklyn (yes, Brooklyn) Dodgers game btw. (Targeting strategy: “Owns a TV.”)

Fast forward 84 years, and most marketers are still running interruptive spots with minimal creative investment into pre-roll inventory and calling it innovation. There are exceptions…companies like Transmit and others are actually rethinking what TV advertising can be.

Gracenote sent me some data recently that captures this disconnect perfectly:

Only 30% of marketers say brand awareness is their top CTV goal.

But performance-based tactics still dominate campaign planning.

32% of media professionals say CTV is “not very effective” as a media channel.

It’s like saying you want to build a brand, then chasing lookalike audiences who already clicked your last ad.

You’re trying to fish upstream while your boat’s tied to the dock.

CTV isn’t underperforming. Marketers are under-delivering.

The Tactical Mismatch

Brand building requires scale, repetition, and emotional salience. None of those things come from narrow targeting tactics designed to convert someone already halfway down the funnel.

And yet, this is exactly how most marketers approach CTV.

Gracenote found that demographic and behavioral targeting accounted for over 50% of CTV tactics, despite the overwhelming majority of marketers citing brand awareness as their top goal. That’s like booking a national stadium tour and only selling tickets to your email subscribers.

This isn’t a new problem. The performance marketing mindset has trained us to equate targeting precision with success. For the last 15 years, success has meant “finding the right user, with the right message, at the right time,” even if that means serving the same retargeting ad to the same person 27 times.

This playbook works in some environments, search, social, eCommerce. But CTV is not one of those environments.

CTV is about attention. It’s about brand memory. It’s about meeting the consumer in a lean-back mindset, not chasing them across the internet with flash-sale CTAs.

What’s worse? The creative usually doesn’t match the channel. Marketers repurpose digital video, strip out the nuance, and serve it to audiences who are halfway through an hour-long drama. The context is all wrong. The message doesn’t land. And then they blame the medium.

If you’re optimizing CTV campaigns based on performance KPIs (CTR, CVR, view-through rates) you’re not optimizing brand. You’re just minimizing accountability.

Here’s the truth:

• Reach without resonance is wasted spend
  
• Resonance without scale is an art project
  
• CTV demands both

And you don’t get there by over-segmenting your audience and crossing your fingers that a :15 version of your Facebook video will move hearts and minds.

You get there by designing for television, with storytelling, emotional cues, strong creative, and contextual alignment.

Why Marketing Is Broken Inside Most Orgs

Here’s where we stop blaming the ad channel and start blaming the mirror.

CTV isn’t broken. Most marketing orgs are. And CTV just happens to expose it more clearly than most.

Non-Marketers Expect Magic, But Don’t Believe in It

Ask a CFO or CRO what they think of marketing and you’ll hear one of two things:

1. “Marketing is a cost center. Show me the ROI.”
   
2. “Also, why aren’t we growing brand awareness, leads, pipeline, retention, and market share faster?”

It’s the business version of “I don’t believe in astrology, but Mercury must be in retrograde.”

This paradox creates structural dysfunction. Marketing is expected to perform both top-of-funnel alchemy and bottom-funnel accountability, simultaneously, with fewer resources and more visibility.

So what do marketers do?

They default to what they can measure. They lean into digital metrics. They show lift. They slice the audience into “high intent segments.” They optimize for CTR. They create dashboards that make everyone feel safe, even if no one remembers the campaign three days later.

Marketers Have Internalized the Wrong Playbook

Worse than external pressure is the internalization of it.

You’ve probably heard a CMO, or VP, or media lead say something like:

• “We’ll use CTV for reach but still want to optimize conversions.”
  
• “Let’s repurpose our :06 bumper from YouTube. It’s performing well.”
  
• “Can we get MTA (that’s Multi-Touch Attribution) set up before launch?”

None of this is malicious. It’s the byproduct of a generation of marketers raised on performance platforms. Most have never run a brand campaign from scratch. They’ve never had to think about what makes a message stick. They just run variants and optimize the winner.

In this environment, “what’s the story?” gets replaced by “what’s the targeting logic?”

It’s no wonder CTV strategies are failing. We’re putting people who’ve only ever driven Uber in charge of flying a plane.

Organizational Fragmentation Makes It Worse

Modern orgs make things even harder by splitting marketing into disconnected functions:

• Creative reports to brand
  
• Media reports to performance
  
• Data reports to Ops
  
• Leadership wants results yesterday

Who owns the narrative? Who aligns the message with the medium? Who ensures the campaign feels like a brand, not a stitched-together Frankenstein of mismatched assets?

Usually: no one.

And because no one owns the whole, everyone optimizes their part. Creative optimizes for internal buy-in. Media optimizes for CPM. Ops optimizes for reporting. But no one optimizes for resonance.

This fragmentation means CTV becomes a compromise. The creative isn’t made for TV. The targeting is lifted from paid social. The measurement is misaligned. And the outcome? Mediocrity.

If you want CTV to work, you have to fix your internal marketing org first.

Not with a reorg. Not with a new martech vendor. But with a rethinking of what marketing is supposed to do.

Spoiler: it’s not to “drive MQLs.” It’s to create demand before demand exists.

And that takes storytelling, emotional relevance, and media strategy that understands the medium, not just the metrics.

CTV Isn’t Display So Stop Running It Like It Is

CTV is not a banner ad with motion. And yet, that’s exactly how too many marketers are treating it.

Here’s how the logic goes:

• “We have a :15 that worked on YouTube, let’s drop that jawn into CTV.”
  
• “We’ve got our audience nailed, don’t worry about what they’re watching.”
  
• “As long as the CPM looks right, we’re Gucci.”

That’s not strategy. That’s media laundering.

Let me say something that needs to be said more often: your creative is probably the problem.

You can’t build emotional resonance with repurposed social videos. You can’t anchor brand memory with a logo slap and a “Learn More” CTA. And you definitely can’t expect someone to fall in love with your brand when they’re watching The Bear and you interrupt the moment with a $4.99 flash sale.

Good TV advertising isn’t interruptive, it’s immersive. It matches the tone of what’s around it. It respects the cadence of long-form storytelling. It doesn’t scream “buy now,” it whispers, “this brand gets you.”

But most CTV spots feel like they were made by someone who’s never watched TV.

Let’s call this what it is: performance-washed creative. Ads made for click-throughs, dressed up for the big screen, hoping to fake their way into relevance.

The irony? Many of these marketers also complain about display ads underperforming. You know, those autoplay video units stuck between a celebrity divorce headline and a pop-up. You can’t wait to click away. but somehow, we expect that same logic to work in someone’s living room?

We took the worst parts of digital and ported them into the most powerful screen in the house. And then we act confused when the results feel…meh.

If your CTV strategy is built around efficiency metrics, you’re playing the wrong game. 

Television is about emotion. Context. Storytelling. Time spent.

Treat it like display, and you’ll get display results – high impressions, low impact, zero memory.

Contextual Targeting: The Escape Hatch Everyone’s Ignoring

So what’s the way out of this mess?

Contextual targeting. The oldest trick in the book, now more relevant than ever.

At its core, contextual means this: instead of targeting people based on who they are, you target based on what they’re watching. It’s alignment, not surveillance.

That might sound basic. But it’s also radical in today’s identity-obsessed, signal-choked ecosystem.

And here’s the kicker: it works. Why?

Because attention is contextual. Message receptivity is contextual. Brand safety is contextual. And most importantly…memory is contextual.

When your ad aligns with the content around it, your message is more likely to land, stick, and convert (eventually). Not because you followed someone around the web. But because you made sense in the moment.

Gracenote is trying to evangelize this. Their report makes a clear point: the scale marketers are seeking in CTV doesn’t come from narrow targeting. It comes from aligning with content, and doing it at scale.

But the problem is most marketers aren’t doing this. Not because they’re lazy, but because:

• They don’t trust the metadata
  
• They don’t understand how to buy against content signals
  
• They think audience data is “more advanced”

Let’s unpack that.

Metadata Is a Mess

CTV runs on fragmented pipes. FAST channels, SVOD libraries, vMVPDs, all with their own identifiers, taxonomies, and (often outdated) tags.

Gracenote found that over 50% of sports programs on FAST channels were missing basic info, air dates, team names, or even genres. That’s like booking first-class and finding out you’re flying cargo.

Without clean metadata, you can’t do contextual targeting properly. You don’t know if the show is a live playoff game or a rerun from 2016. And no brand wants their new premium creative airing between two D-list reality shows at 2 AM.

Creative ≠ Contextual

Most marketers think contextual means “genre match.” But real contextual is richer. It’s about mood, tone, themes, visual pacing, and narrative framing.

You wouldn’t run an insurance ad about family protection during an episode of Dexter. Or launch a luxury product next to a docuseries about economic collapse.

Yet that’s exactly what happens when context is ignored.

Contextual targeting isn’t just safer. It’s more effective. When your creative matches what the viewer is already emotionally engaged with, the message lands deeper.

The Measurement Excuse

Another reason contextual gets ignored? You can’t track it as cleanly. There’s no deterministic “view-to-convert” graph. So marketers skip it.

But brand building doesn’t live in dashboards. It lives in memory. And memory isn’t built by measurement, it’s built by meaning.

FAST Channels: Growth on the Front-End, Chaos in the Back-End

FAST cracked the code: show up, stream free, no strings. Tubi. Pluto. Roku Channel. Samsung TV Plus, Vizio WatchFree+.

Why? Because it’s easy. Live TV without the bill. Viewers get access to sports, news, and fresh content without logging in or pulling out a credit card.

According to Horowitz Research, 40% of U.S. live TV viewers now use FAST services more than cable (36%) or SVOD platforms (33%). Among adults 18–34, that number jumps to 53%. It’s not sexy. The interfaces can be clunky. The content is mid, according to my seven year old. But it’s free, frictionless, and always on. That’s the magic.

But there’s a problem. And it’s massive:

The metadata infrastructure in FAST is a disaster.

Gracenote sampled sports content across FAST platforms. The results?

• 55% of titles were missing original air dates
  
• 68% lacked team names
  
• Some had placeholder text or reused IDs from unrelated events

For advertisers, that’s a red flag. You don’t know:

• What the program actually is
  
• Whether it’s live, taped, or archived
  
• Whether your ad is running in a relevant context

Would you buy linear inventory without knowing if you’re showing up during Shifting Gears or a colon cleanse infomercial?

And yet, because CPMs are low and scale is high, marketers are pouring in.

It’s a metaphor for the industry: scale now, clarity later.

We treat FAST like a value play. But without metadata, it’s a liability play.

If we want FAST to fulfill its promise, we have to treat it like premium inventory—which means cleaning up the backend:

• Standardized taxonomies
  
• Verified air dates
  
• Creative-safe signals
  
• Uniform content identifiers

Only then can we unlock the contextual opportunities—and brand-safe scale—that FAST is teasing us with.

The Streaming Wars Take

What’s happening in CTV isn’t just about campaign strategy, it’s about control.

We’ve moved past the “subscriber land grab” era. Now we’re entering the ad phase. 

And the rules are changing.

The companies that win here won’t be the ones with the most shows. Or the most viewers. Or the slickest UI.

They’ll be the ones who own three things:

1. The content
   
2. The data about that content
   
3. The infrastructure to sell against it

Roku and Amazon understand this. They’ve positioned themselves not just as distribution points, but as ad ecosystems. They control both the pipe and the signal.

But content owners aren’t blind. That’s why we’re seeing Netflix and Disney finally embrace advertising, not just because of revenue, but because who controls the ad tech controls the ad value.

And then there’s the marketers.

Most still operate under the illusion that they can ride this wave without evolving. That they can keep relying on audience segments and legacy KPIs. That they can make last-decade media tools work on next-decade platforms.

They can’t.

Because the new era of streaming advertising doesn’t reward “good enough.” It rewards:

• Contextual mastery
  
• Creative resonance
  
• Data fluency
  
• Infrastructure interoperability

It’s not just about “being in CTV.” It’s about knowing how to own your place within it.

The marketers who figure that out first won’t just build better campaigns. They’ll build brands that matter.

Fixing the Strategy, Not Just the Spend

If you’ve made it this far, here’s what the hell should you do about it?

Here’s your playbook, broken down by role.

1. CMOs: Rebuild Your Strategy Org

You don’t need another martech tool. You need a strategy function that understands audience and content. Build a team that:

• Oversees creative and media
  
• Understands narrative design, not just messaging
  
• Can brief CTV creative that fits the medium, not just repurpose old assets
  
• Measures success by attention, lift, and long-term brand indicators, not just clicks

And if you don’t have people who think this way? Hire them. Or partner with someone who can.

Media Teams: Stop Over-Targeting

Precision is your drug. It’s time to detox.

• Loosen your segments
  
• Embrace contextual signals
  
• Test reach-based buys
  
• Invest in programming data

Quit optimizing campaigns into a performance echo chamber. Start playing for growth.

Creative Leads: Design for the Medium

Your :15 isn’t failing because the media is wrong. It’s failing because the creative doesn’t belong on a TV screen.

Build spots that:

• Match the emotional tone of the content
  
• Tell a story, not just a slogan
  
• Assume lean-back engagement, not scroll-and-swipe behavior

Ask not “did they see it?” Ask “will they remember it?”

Ops + Analytics: Build for Context, Not Just Attribution

You need a measurement framework that captures brand effect and memory priming, not just conversions.

• Build incrementality models
  
• Include lift studies
  
• Partner with third-party measurement
  
• Accept that not everything worth doing is instantly trackable

Brand takes time. Your job is to prove it works, not prove it now.

Agencies: Get Your Sh*t Together

Too many agencies are stuck in channel silos. One team does video, one team does social, one team does programmatic, and the client sees a Frankenstein strategy.

Unify your thinking. Make sure your CTV buys are context-aware, creative-aligned, and KPI-relevant. And push your clients to stop thinking like performance addicts.

If they won’t listen? Challenge them anyway. Or fire them.

This Isn’t a Technology Problem, It’s a Marketing Problem

Let’s not overcomplicate this.

CTV isn’t failing. Most marketers are just using the wrong strategy for the job.

They’re applying short-term thinking to a long-term channel. Performance metrics to brand campaigns. Digital habits to a television context.

They’re repurposing, retargeting, and remarketing themselves into irrelevance.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Here’s the truth:

• The brands that win in CTV will treat it like television, not a TikTok pre-roll.
  
• They’ll invest in creative that lands in context.
  
• They’ll measure attention, not just attribution.
  
• And they’ll build orgs that understand brand building isn’t soft, it’s survival.

We’re at a crossroads in the streaming ad land.

You can keep running performance marketing playbooks and hope for the best.

Or you can reclaim the art of marketing, storytelling, emotional priming, cultural resonance, and pair it with modern tools

Because the screen isn’t the problem. The tools aren’t the problem.

The strategy is.

Fix that, and CTV becomes what it was always supposed to be: one of the most powerful branding channel in the modern media mix.

TL;DR 

• Marketers say brand awareness is their top CTV goal but 80% still run performance playbooks.
  
• The problem isn’t the screen, it’s the internal dysfunction in most marketing orgs.
  
• CTV is being treated like display. Ad formats haven’t changed in 80 years. Strategy hasn’t changed in 20.
  
• Contextual targeting is the escape hatch, but most teams aren’t using it.
  
• FAST is growing but suffers from metadata chaos, making scale risky.
  
• You don’t need better tech. You need better thinking.

(You can download the full Gracenote report here)