The most revealing conversations in advertising rarely make it to stage. They unfold in budget meetings—half pragmatic, half political—where conviction is tested against numbers. Connected TV (CTV) often sits right at the centre of that tension. Publicly, it’s heralded as the inevitable evolution of television: smarter, sharper, more accountable. Privately, it’s still treated with a degree of hesitation that tells a different story. Everyone agrees it matters. Fewer are willing to commit to it in a way that reflects that belief.
Spend a little time inside planning cycles and you’ll notice something telling: CTV budgets are seldom designed from the ground up. More often, they’re pieced together. A portion quietly moves from digital video, another is shaved off linear TV, sometimes a test budget is carved out from innovation spends. It gives CTV presence, but not always purpose. That lack of clarity shapes how the medium is used. For legacy brands, it tends to be handled cautiously—measured, tested, and often held to stricter scrutiny than channels with far longer track records. For newer, performance-led brands, the expectation flips entirely. CTV is pushed to deliver outcomes it wasn’t built for—direct attribution, immediate conversions, clear ROI in tight windows. In both cases, the channel ends up being evaluated through mismatched lenses. There’s a quiet contradiction at play: marketers recognise CTV’s potential for brand-building, yet judge it with the impatience of performance media. As one planner put it to me recently, “We say we want storytelling, but we measure it like a click.” It’s not entirely fair to the medium—and it shows.
Part of the challenge is structural. Inside most organisations, budgets don’t just follow audiences; they follow ownership. Television teams still operate with a broadcast mindset, built on scale and reach. Digital teams are wired differently—focused on agility, targeting, and measurable outcomes. CTV sits awkwardly in between, often claimed by both but fully integrated by neither. The result is work that doesn’t quite play to its strengths. You see television creatives simply repurposed for streaming environments, missing the opportunity for precision. Or digital-style campaigns that feel out of place on a big screen, ignoring the lean-back, immersive experience CTV offers. The allocation, in many ways, becomes a reflection of internal silos rather than audience behaviour. It’s not intentional—it’s just how systems evolve. But it does mean that a medium designed to bridge two worlds often ends up caught between them.
Then there’s measurement, which continues to shape decisions more than most would openly admit. The industry has made real progress—there are better tools, smarter attribution models, more granular reporting. And yet, confidence isn’t consistent. Different platforms define success differently, cross-device tracking still has its blind spots, and benchmarks are far from standardised. For marketers managing real budgets, that uncertainty matters. So they hedge. They invest enough in CTV to stay in the game, but not enough to fully depend on it. It becomes a balancing act—participate, but don’t overcommit. The irony is that this caution can limit what CTV is capable of delivering. It’s a medium that benefits from scale and consistency. Small, fragmented spends rarely unlock its full potential, which then reinforces the perception that it’s still “emerging.” In trying to reduce risk, brands sometimes end up delaying learning.
That said, there are signs of a more mature approach beginning to take shape. Some advertisers are starting to step back from rigid channel definitions and rethink how CTV fits into the broader ecosystem. Instead of asking whether it belongs to TV or digital, they’re asking what role it can uniquely play. That shift, subtle as it may seem, changes the conversation. It moves planning closer to audiences rather than platforms. It also allows for more realistic expectations—recognising that not every impression needs to drive an immediate action, and not every campaign needs to be tracked down to the last decimal. CTV, at its best, sits somewhere between performance and persuasion. It can drive outcomes, yes, but it also builds memory, shapes perception, and creates moments that feel more considered than most digital environments allow. Or as one industry veteran described it to me, “CTV is where precision meets presence—you’re not just reaching someone, you’re showing up properly.”
Ultimately, the story of CTV budgets isn’t just about allocation—it’s about mindset. It reflects how comfortable brands are with transition, with nuance, with investing in something that doesn’t fit neatly into existing frameworks. The brands that will get the most out of CTV aren’t necessarily the ones spending the most, but the ones thinking about it more clearly—aligning creative, context, and measurement in ways that suit the medium rather than forcing it into old models. Because the real shift isn’t about moving money from one column to another. It’s about recognising that the columns themselves may need to change.
