• by Rob Williams , Yesterday

Left to right, Brian Quinn, AppsFlyer; Fraser Woollard, MNTN; Melissa Velasco, Talkspace; Eran Dunksy, AppsFlyer (Photo: Rob Williams)

MIAMI BEACH, FL — Connected TV (CTV) has spent years promising marketers the best of both worlds: television’s premium screen with digital media’s targeting and accountability. Yet at POSSIBLE on Wednesday, executives said many advertisers still treat CTV like traditional TV with better menus.

During a panel hosted by AppsFlyer, speakers argued that performance-oriented CTV is advancing faster than the systems used to evaluate it.

“The bottleneck has moved,” said Brian Quinn, president and general manager, North America at AppsFlyer. “Attention is the constraint.”

Quinn said marketers now operate in a world where content, creative and products can be produced faster and cheaper than ever. That makes distribution — getting in front of the right consumer at the right moment — the real competitive battleground.

Measurement Still Lags Reality

One of the clearest themes from the discussion was that many marketers still rely on attribution models that undercount TV’s contribution.

“Measuring CTV on a last-touch basis discounts the value that’s going to be created,” said Eran Dunsky, head of product, North America at AppsFlyer.

A consumer may see an ad on television and later search on mobile, then convert on desktop. In many measurement systems, search gets the applause while TV gets ignored.

Panelists said that needs to change through broader use of incrementality testing, assist metrics and cross-channel measurement.

Talkspace Put CTV Under Performance Pressure

Melissa Velasco, marketing director at Talkspace, said the mental-health platform brought CTV buying in-house as budgets tightened and efficiency became more important.

“I try to hold it to the same level of scrutiny I do my other performance channels,” Velasco said.

That meant evaluating CTV not only for reach and awareness, but for metrics such as cost per site visit, cost per acquisition and business impact.

Velasco said Talkspace also benefited from lower-cost creative options that made television more practical than in the past, when production budgets often created barriers.

Her broader point was that CTV should not be judged by legacy TV standards alone. It should be tested like any other accountable media channel.

Smaller Brands Are Already Moving

Fraser Woollard, head of business development at MNTN, said many of the company’s clients are brands that never historically used television because they assumed it required large budgets and slow planning cycles.

“It can be both together,” Woollard said of brand and performance marketing. “It doesn’t have to be one or the other.”

Instead, he described brands shifting dollars from search and social into CTV campaigns that can be launched quickly and tied to site traffic, conversions or customer acquisition.

That is especially attractive to marketers trying to drive traffic to their own websites rather than paying commissions to large marketplaces.

Real Barrier May Be Human, Not Technical

While panelists praised improvements in targeting, automation and measurement, they repeatedly returned to softer obstacles: internal silos, finance skepticism and habit.

Many organizations still separate brand budgets from performance budgets. TV teams may sit apart from digital teams. CFOs often prefer established metrics to newer frameworks that take longer to prove.

Woollard said some marketers continue buying media the same way simply because that is how it has always been done.

That dynamic may explain why CTV’s promise often exceeds current budget allocations.

Brand Versus Performance Is A False Choice

Several attendees argued marketers have overcorrected toward short-term metrics in recent years, prioritizing channels that capture demand over channels that create it.

CTV may offer a middle ground: emotional storytelling on the largest screen in the house, with increasing data signals to optimize toward outcomes.

The panel’s verdict was that CTV has already gone performance. Measurement, culture and budgeting just need to catch up.