Television, finally accountable.
The biggest screen in the house became addressable, auction-bought, and measurable. We buy it like performance media and prove it with holdouts — not completion rates.
The audience already moved.
Drag the year. Streaming didn’t nibble at TV — it passed broadcast and cable combined in 2025 and never looked back. The money is still catching up to where people actually watch.
Nielsen The Gauge: streaming hit a record 47.5% of US TV in Dec 2025 (broadcast 21.4%, cable 20.2%); it first passed broadcast+cable combined in May 2025.1
One platform can’t buy reach.
Add platforms to your plan. Gross impressions climb in a straight line — but households overlap, so unique reach bends and frequency piles onto the same homes. Buying one app buys repetition, not new people.
The average CTV campaign reaches just 19.64% of households at a 7.09 frequency (Innovid 2025); ~4 apps per household and 55% use multiple services; deduplicating across platforms found 47% incremental reach (Samsung Ads).2
Completion is a vanity metric.
Flip the lens. Judge five campaigns on completion and they’re identical — ~95%, all green, because the format finishes for you. Judge them on incremental lift and the truth appears: most moved nothing, one is the winner.
CTV ads complete at ~95%+ by design (DoubleVerify 2025), so completion has almost no variance; yet only 52% of marketers run incrementality tests (eMarketer 2025). Campaigns illustrative — RGM analysis.3
After the sixth ad, you pay to annoy.
Slide the frequency. Early exposures buy reach; past six they buy irritation. Reach flattens, waste shades in, and the cost to touch one new household climbs. Frequency caps aren’t hygiene — they’re margin.
Over six exposures, viewers were 48% more likely to find an ad annoying and purchase intent fell 16% (MNTN 2025); average CTV frequency is 7.09 (Innovid 2025). Curve illustrative — RGM analysis.4
Run it as a sequence.
The big screen earns attention; the second screen closes the sale. Each step has its own screen, buy, and metric — and they only work in order. Tap through the play.
RGM big-screen performance method — test cheap, prove the winner, scale only it on non-skippable CTV, retarget the warmed audience down-screen. RGM analysis.5
Run the test the platform won’t.
Withhold ads from a matched group and press measure. The exposed group converts a little more — that gap is the only number that’s real. The dashboard counts every conversion as its own; the holdout counts only the ones you caused.
Exposed
Control (holdout)
Siloed/last-click ROAS overstates search 2×–10× and misallocates $0.35 of every $1 (Analytic Partners ROI Genome 2025). Figures illustrative — we build the real numbers on your data.6
No single number is the truth.
Stack your evidence. Platform metrics are cheap but biased; attribution steers day to day; holdouts prove cause; modeling plans the budget. Add each one and watch what you can actually trust.
Best-practice measurement triangulates MMM + attribution + incrementality; marketers rate MMM the most reliable single method (27.6%), and 75% say legacy measurement no longer delivers the trust they need (eMarketer/IAB 2026).7
CPM is the sticker price, not the cost.
Pick your inventory. The media CPM is only part of the bill — the DSP, the data, and verification stack on top and quietly add 18–30%. What matters is working media: the share that actually buys an impression.
FAST = free, ad-supported streaming TV (Tubi, Pluto, Roku Channel). AVOD = ad-supported video on demand (Hulu, Peacock, Max) — both forms of connected TV.
CTV CPMs run roughly $15–$25 (FAST) to $45–$85 (addressable), about 2–4× linear; DSP, data and verification fees add ~18–30% on top of media. Ranges are agency benchmarks, not audited — estimate.8
On the open exchange, fraud hides.
Toggle protection. Unprotected CTV buys leak budget to bots — and even direct deals aren’t clean. Verification isn’t a line item to cut; it’s the difference between a 9% tax and a rounding error.
CTV fraud schemes rose 140% year over year in Q1 2026; fraud ran under 1% in protected campaigns versus ~9% unprotected, and a direct healthcare buy still carried 34% bot impressions (DoubleVerify 2026).9
Creative is half the result.
Marketers think creative drives a fifth of sales. It drives nearly half — the single largest lever, and they under-credit it by 2.5×. On audio-on, lean-back CTV that edge is structural. Press play to see the gap.
Creative drives 49% of incremental sales — the #1 effectiveness lever — while marketers credit it ~19% (NCSolutions + Nielsen, ~450 studies, 2023); CTV is audio-on and full-screen by default.10
Five ways brands waste CTV.
Most wasted CTV budget fails the same handful of ways. Open each one.
Synthesis of Innovid, DoubleVerify, Analytic Partners, and NCSolutions/Nielsen findings cited throughout — RGM analysis.11
Bought like media. Proven like performance.
No juniors, no black boxes, no padded media plans. A senior team runs the sequence, the holdouts, and the math — and shows you the working-media share. Pricing is custom: flat, project, or a percentage, by fit.
Plan to unique reach
Cross-platform, deduplicated, frequency-capped at the household — not one app’s inventory.
Prove with holdouts
Geo and audience holdouts, triangulated with attribution and MMM. Incremental, or it didn’t happen.
Spend on the winner
Test creative cheap, scale only what clears the bar, reallocate to incremental lift every week.
RGM engagement model — senior-led, measurement-first, custom pricing. RGM analysis.12
Questions buyers ask.
Is CTV a brand channel or a performance channel?
Both. CTV is the most addressable and measurable television ever, so it carries direct-response accountability and brand impact at once — if you sequence it (prove in social, scale the winner, retarget down-screen) and measure by incremental lift, not completion.
How is CTV different from linear TV?
CTV is addressable and measurable; linear is a daypart bought on reach. CTV upfront commitments now exceed primetime linear and most marketers say it targets better — but the advantage only shows up if you measure incrementally.
What does CTV advertising cost?
CPMs run about $25 to $45 — roughly $18 for CPG up to $50 for B2B and SaaS — by inventory and targeting. Management pricing is custom; media spend is separate and stays in your accounts.
What is a good CTV completion rate?
About 94 to 97 percent on premium non-skippable inventory, mid-roll highest. But completion is high by format, so judge CTV by incremental reach and lift, not completion.
How do you measure CTV incrementality?
With a geo or audience holdout that isolates the lift CTV caused, triangulated with attribution and media-mix modeling. Only about 45 percent of advertisers run incrementality — which is why it is an edge.
Why test creative in social before CTV?
Because the living-room screen is too expensive to learn on. Social is the cheapest place to find a winning video, so only proven creative earns the premium CTV impression.
No juniors. Ever.
Every engagement is reviewed by hand — twelve a year. We don’t chase logos; the work chooses us.
Apply for an engagementThe market moved again. Here’s the read.
- Audience shift: streaming reached a record 47.5% of US TV viewing in Dec 2025 (broadcast 21.4%, cable 20.2%) and first passed broadcast+cable combined in May 2025 — Nielsen, The Gauge, 2025–26.
- Reach & frequency: the average CTV campaign reaches 19.64% of households at a 7.09 frequency — Innovid CTV Advertising Insights, 2025; ~4 streaming apps per household (MNTN, 2025); 55% of homes use multiple services (tvScientific, 2025); 47% incremental reach from cross-platform dedup (Samsung Ads, 2025). Reach model illustrative — RGM analysis.
- Completion vs lift: CTV ads complete ~95%+ by design (DoubleVerify, 2025); only 52% of marketers run incrementality tests (eMarketer × TransUnion, 2025). Campaign examples illustrative — RGM analysis.
- Frequency: after six exposures viewers were 48% more likely to find an ad annoying and purchase intent fell 16% — MNTN Research, 2025. Diminishing-returns curve illustrative — RGM analysis.
- RGM big-screen performance method — RGM analysis.
- Incrementality: siloed/last-click ROAS overstates search 2×–10× and misallocates $0.35 of every $1 — Analytic Partners, ROI Genome, 2025. Holdout figures illustrative; we build the real numbers on your data.
- Triangulation: best practice combines MMM + attribution + incrementality; MMM rated most reliable single method (27.6%); 75% say legacy measurement no longer delivers needed trust — eMarketer / IAB State of Data, 2025–26.
- Economics: CTV CPMs ~ $15–$25 (FAST) to $45–$85 (addressable), ~2–4× linear; DSP, data and verification add ~18–30% — agency benchmark aggregators, 2025–26. Estimate, not audited.
- Fraud: CTV fraud schemes +140% YoY (Q1 2026); <1% fraud in protected vs ~9% unprotected; a direct healthcare buy carried 34% bot impressions — DoubleVerify, 2026.
- Creative: drives 49% of incremental sales (the #1 lever) while marketers credit it ~19% — NCSolutions + Nielsen, ~450 studies, 2023. CTV is audio-on and full-screen by default. Custom pricing; directional — calibrate with your own tests.
- eMarketer — “CTV Becomes TV’s Growth Engine as Linear Collapses” (2026). US CTV upfront ad spending reaches $17.73 billion for the 2026–27 season, passing primetime linear ($16.98 billion) for the first time. emarketer.com (accessed 6 Jul 2026).
- IAB — “U.S. Digital Video Ad Spend to Surpass $80B in 2026” (May 5, 2026). Digital video ad spend grows 11% to over $80 billion and passes 60% of total TV/video ad spend for the first time. iab.com (accessed 6 Jul 2026).
- IAB — “2026 Outlook Study Forecasts 9.5% Growth in U.S. Ad Spend” (Jan 28, 2026). Connected TV ad spend is forecast to grow 13.8% in 2026, against 9.5% for the total US ad market. iab.com (accessed 6 Jul 2026).