For a medium that promises the precision of digital with the impact of television, Connected TV should have triggered a creative renaissance. Bigger screens, lean-back viewing, high attention environments—on paper, it’s everything advertisers have been asking for. And yet, somewhere between the excitement around targeting capabilities and the obsession with measurable outcomes, the creative conversation has quietly slipped through the cracks. In many campaigns today, CTV is not being built as a distinct storytelling canvas; it’s being treated as a distribution layer. The result is a strange contradiction: a premium medium powered by recycled thinking. Or, as one creative director put it bluntly, “CTV isn’t suffering from a lack of opportunity—it’s suffering from a lack of intention.”
The root of the problem lies in how CTV enters the planning process. More often than not, it doesn’t start with a brief—it gets added in later. A campaign is conceptualised for digital or television, assets are produced, and somewhere down the line, CTV is slotted in as another endpoint. At that stage, there’s little room—or appetite—for rethinking the creative. What runs on CTV is either a cut-down TVC or a repurposed digital video, neither of which is designed for the nuances of the platform. The irony is hard to miss. A medium defined by its context—household viewing, larger screens, often co-viewed—is being served assets built for entirely different consumption behaviours. It’s not just inefficient; it’s a missed opportunity to do something meaningfully different.
Part of this comes down to how CTV has been sold within organisations. The conversation is heavily weighted toward targeting, reach extension, frequency management, and increasingly, performance. Those are important levers, no doubt. But they also push creative to the background, reducing it to something that needs to “fit” rather than something that needs to lead. Media teams optimise delivery, platform teams showcase capabilities, and dashboards track outcomes—but very few stakeholders are asking what the ad actually feels like on a living room screen. That gap between media sophistication and creative ambition is where most CTV campaigns lose their potential.
There’s also a structural issue at play. In many agencies and brand teams, creative and media are still operating in parallel rather than in sync. CTV, sitting at the intersection of both, ends up belonging fully to neither. It’s too “digital” to be treated like television, and too “TV-like” to be approached with digital-first thinking. The result is a kind of creative limbo. Without a dedicated brief, without clear ownership, and without platform-specific guidelines, the work defaults to what already exists. Efficiency wins over originality, and adaptation replaces intention. Over time, this becomes the norm—and the absence of a CTV-first creative approach stops feeling like a gap and starts feeling like standard practice.
What makes this more frustrating is that the ingredients for better work are already in place. CTV offers data that can inform storytelling in smarter ways—audience segments, viewing patterns, even contextual relevance based on content. It allows for sequential messaging, interactive formats in some environments, and a level of precision that traditional TV never had. But none of that translates into impact if the creative itself isn’t built to take advantage of it. A high-impact screen with low-impact storytelling is still low impact. The medium can elevate the message, but it can’t compensate for its absence.
The hesitation to invest in CTV-first creative also reflects a deeper uncertainty. Many brands are still in an experimental phase with the channel, testing budgets, evaluating performance, and trying to understand where it fits within the broader mix. In that context, committing additional resources to bespoke creative can feel like a risk. It’s easier—and safer—to repurpose existing assets and focus on optimising media delivery. But this short-term efficiency comes at a long-term cost. Without deliberate creative investment, CTV risks being judged not on what it can do, but on what it’s currently being used for.
There’s a familiar pattern here. Every emerging medium goes through a phase where it’s treated as an extension of something else. Early digital borrowed from print. Social borrowed from display. Mobile borrowed from desktop. In each case, it took time—and often a few standout examples—for the industry to recognise that the medium demanded its own creative language. CTV is at that inflection point now. The difference is that the stakes are higher. With its blend of scale, attention, and measurability, it has the potential to become a cornerstone of modern media strategy. But only if the creative evolves alongside it.
For that to happen, the brief needs to change—quite literally. CTV has to be considered at the start of the planning process, not at the end. That means asking different questions upfront: How does this idea play out on a large screen in a shared environment? What does engagement look like when the viewer isn’t scrolling but watching? How can storytelling adapt to a format that sits somewhere between passive and interactive? These aren’t just executional details; they shape the idea itself. And without them, the work will always feel like it’s been adapted, not designed.
It also requires closer collaboration between teams. Media planners need to bring creative partners into the conversation earlier, not just hand over formats and durations after decisions are made. Creative teams, in turn, need to engage more deeply with platform capabilities and audience data, treating them as inputs rather than constraints. When those two sides align, CTV stops being a compromise and starts becoming a canvas.
Ultimately, the challenge isn’t technological—it’s behavioural. The industry knows how to create great work for television. It knows how to optimise for digital. CTV sits comfortably between those two worlds, yet it hasn’t fully inherited the strengths of either. Until that changes, it will continue to underdeliver on its promise.
Because the real issue isn’t that CTV lacks creative potential. It’s that, in too many cases, it never had a proper brief to begin with.
