CTV Was Never Just Brand Media

The budget line tells you everything. Right now, across most DTC and omnichannel brands, CTV spending sits inside the brand budget. The measurement model that came with the channel was borrowed from linear television — reach, frequency, brand lift studies — and the money followed the measurement. The result is a channel with the targeting precision of digital and the creative impact of television, being evaluated like a billboard, held to the same KPIs as a sponsorship, and deprioritized every time a CFO wants to see direct return.

That mismatch has nothing to do with how CTV actually performs. It has everything to do with how it has been framed.

Matt Skai has watched this mistake play out across roughly 120 consumer brands. As Operating Principal at L Catterton, the world’s largest consumer-focused private equity firm. It has a portfolio that includes Kodiak Cakes Cakes, Golf Lab, and Mizzen+Main, his job is to identify what is working commercially and transmit it across brands at every stage of scale. He came up as a CMO before moving into private equity. And he has a view on top-of-funnel thinking that most brand teams are not ready for.

“I really like to think of every channel in marketing as a performance channel,” Skai said at Lead SummitNYC.

“This applies to CTV, it applies to a billboard in Times Square, and it applies to your Meta ads. My core belief as a marketer is that if a consumer doesn’t buy from your ad, then it wasn’t anything.”

Not eventually profitable. Not brand-building. Nothing.

That reframe matters more than it sounds. If every channel is a performance channel, then the question is never whether CTV can drive return, it is whether you are measuring it in a way that lets you see it.

The Measurement Problem

The reason CTV has been parked in brand budgets is not that the channel behaves like brand media. It is that the measurement tools borrowed from linear TV could only show brand-like metrics. And when your measurement is unaided awareness, that is what you optimize for.

Skai is precise about where incrementality testing typically goes wrong. “The lowest level of incrementality testing is saying: we ran ads, we exposed a million people, we’re then going to look at a million people that look like them and measure the uplift. The problem is there could be reasons why people were not exposed — they were on vacation, they had a really busy week at work – things that would automatically lead that group to be less likely to convert than the group that was exposed. You’re introducing a bias into that analysis, which is almost always going to show some sort of incrementality. It’s kind of a smoke and mirrors magician act.”

Geo testing is the next rung up. Expose New York, hold out Texas, measure the difference. Better, but still imperfect. People in New York are different from people in Texas, and there are media biases within geographies that further muddy the signal.

The standard Skai actually trusts is ghost ad testing, and it is what his session co-presenter, Bryan Brennan from Vibe.co , has built into the platform’s measurement infrastructure.

“There are two people sitting in front of a screen, both ready to be exposed to a CTV ad,” Skai explained. “One gets the branded ad, one gets a different ad entirely. Now you have true parity between your control and test group, and you can measure the real uplift. A true randomisation of the audience that gets exposed is always going to be the cleanest incrementality measurement you can get.”

Brian, who co-presented the session, framed Vibe’s role in plain terms from the outset: “We are really trying to make CTV as easy as buying Meta, and more importantly, making it measurable.” Ghost ad methodology is central to that promise. As Brian put it: “Incrementality is the number one thing, the very first thing you should be looking at.”

The channel was never the problem. The measurement model built for linear television was.

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When the Test Fails, Check the Creative

I was in the room at Lead Summit in New York when this conversation landed, and the part that hit hardest was not the methodology. It was Skai’s diagnosis of why brands walk away from CTV after one bad test and why that decision is almost always wrong.

“I think this is the biggest mistake that marketers make,” he said. “They go: ‘Oh, I tested CTV, it didn’t work, CTV must not work for my business.’ No. Your approach to advertising on that channel fundamentally failed. It doesn’t mean the channel fundamentally failed.”

He backed it with a sharp piece of context: walking through New York City on a normal day, the average person sees around 3,000 ads. The average recall the following morning? Two. “You have to be one of those two,” Skai said. “If you went on CTV with a mediocre ad and ran an incrementality test and it showed no lift — and then concluded CTV doesn’t work for your business — it is a failure as a marketer, not a failure of the channel.”

The implication is uncomfortable but correct. Most failed CTV tests are a creative verdict, not a channel verdict.

The Investment Frame

On timing: when a brand should start, Skai was equally direct. Waiting until you have hit diminishing returns on Meta and Google before experimenting with CTV is the wrong instinct:

“If you wait until you hit that wall, you’re forced to rush to market on a top-of-funnel strategy without giving yourself the room to test and learn. And when you do hit that wall, your incremental return on Meta and Google is higher than it will be for a new channel. Now you’re scrambling, and you don’t have the cash flow to support investing in new channels.”

On benchmarks, the perennial conference question, he had the most quotable answer of the session: “I hate benchmarks with a burning passion.”

What he trusts instead is the conversation with the CFO, built on the right numbers: incremental LTV, incremental CAC, cash position, payback period. “If I’m having all of those components in a package that I take to my CFO, that CFO would be derelict in their fiduciary responsibilities if they say don’t make an investment that we can afford to make that’s going to drive profitable growth.”

His summary framework for any marketing organisation: “I don’t want you to have a marketing engine. You should have an optimization engine. If a channel is generating a return in a time period your balance sheet can afford, go make that investment.”

Put those two things together – clean incrementality measurement through ghost ad methodology, and accessible performance buying infrastructure that Vibe has built, and the nature of the CTV investment decision changes. This is no longer a question of whether CTV belongs in the awareness plan. It is a question of how much of the performance budget should be reallocating toward a channel where you can now measure the true incremental return with the same rigour you apply to search or paid social.

The brands that make that reallocation in the next 18 months will have a structural advantage. Not because CTV suddenly started working. Because they started measuring it correctly.

CTV was always performance media. The measurement tools to prove it just caught up.