Small advertisers are flooding connected TV (CTV). Media data shows brands spending under $1 million per year on CTV platforms are increasing, opening TV advertising to buyers who could never afford it. That shift is reshaping performance marketing as AI disrupts traditional channels like search and social media.

"The environment is perfectly tailor-made for exactly this to happen," said Matt Collins, vice president of product marketing at MNTN, during EMARKETER's Future of Digital summit this week. "Digital infrastructure allows for precision of audience targeting and measurement, to be able to give advertisers a very clear read for budgets that are very deliberate."

CTV is absorbing performance marketing budgets as traditional digital channels face AI-driven challenges.

AI is eroding trust

AI is changing how consumers interact with social media and search, two pillars of performance marketing. Some 72% of US consumers believe AI could be used to distort and create misleading information, according to recent research from Gartner. Asked whether that would affect their social media consumption, respondents said they would consume far less.

The problem extends beyond social platforms. Some 83% of searches ended in an AI overview generating a response, per an April 2024 report from Solid Content.

"For the last two decades, PPC marketers could count on being able to drive a click to a website," said Collins. "What happens in a world where AI captures that and it goes no further?"

AI-generated answers are intercepting the path from search query to website click. For performance marketers who have built two decades of practice on paid search and social advertising, that interception removes the conversion opportunity itself.

CTV lowers the entry cost

The shift to CTV removes traditional barriers that kept smaller advertisers off television screens. In the linear TV era, advertisers needed six-figure media budgets and professionally produced creative just to generate enough signal to measure effectiveness.

"You can advertise on CTV for about the same budget that it would cost to test on social platforms," said Collins. The digital infrastructure underlying CTV enables precise audience targeting and measurement at budget levels previously impossible for television advertising.

A brand can now test CTV with the same investment it would allocate to social media experiments, and get the trust and cultural cache of television along with it. Television has become a medium a brand can buy into at experiment-sized budgets.

Trust gives CTV a structural advantage

Television has been earning consumer trust since summer 1939, when the first TV commercial ran for Bulova Watches during a New York Giants baseball game. Collins pointed to that 85-year history as the medium's edge over digital-native channels.

"We've had 85 years to be comfortable and associate television advertising with the culture of entertainment," he said. "There's only one screen that any of us own that we literally will hang next to pictures of our families. And that's a television."

That trust gains value as consumers grow skeptical of AI-generated content elsewhere. The television screen still carries an association with human creators, which is exactly what the other digital platforms are losing.

Performance marketers make three common mistakes on CTV

As brands transition from traditional performance channels to CTV, Collins identified three systematic errors:

Audience targeting: Only 10% of any total addressable market is ready to purchase at any given moment, and marketers routinely miss it. "We rely on performance marketing to reach that 10%," Collins said. "The first area where we see customers go wrong is in not taking a really fine granular approach to audience strategy."

Creative adaptation: Brands often repurpose creative built for TikTok or for brand building, which CTV does not reward. Effective CTV creative drives viewers to pick up their phones, typically sitting right next to the remote control, and act immediately.

Measurement setup: Basic metrics will not tell advertisers whether a CTV campaign worked. Incrementality measurement, which Collins said is drawing growing interest, isolates the customers who came because of the campaign from those who would have purchased anyway.

Creative quality drives 49% of sales outcomes

Creative accounts for 49% of all sales outcomes in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) category, according to research from NCS. Everything else, including recency, channel impact, brand impact, and frequency, splits the remaining 51%.

"If you have immaculate media math and the campaign is perfectly set up, but you put out a dud of a piece of creative, it's probably going to sink the campaign," Collins said. "Whereas if you're maybe a little sloppy on the media math, but you happen to have creative that can go viral, you'll be wildly successful."

Creative deserves the same rigor brands already apply to media planning. That means producing enough creative variations to run real A/B tests, then carrying what wins into the next campaign.

Watch the full session.

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