CTV’s Billion-Dollar Blind Spot: Why Attention and Ad Spend Have Stopped Matching Up

There is a gap sitting in plain sight in most media plans right now. Connected TV accounts for somewhere around 20 to 25% of all content consumption, yet it is still attracting less than 10% of global ad spend, a disparity independently confirmed by eMarketer, whose own analysis puts CTV at roughly 20% of US media time against only 7.7 to 8.1% of ad budgets. We heard the same gap raised directly at a recent DigiDay webinar on CTV performance strategy and 2027 planning, featuring Aarti Saxena from World Gold Council and Jeremy Straight from TCL Ads. The conversation was less about whether CTV works and more about why so much of the industry is still planning around an old assumption: that CTV is an awareness channel, and nothing more.

The attention-spend gap no one has closed yet

That old assumption is increasingly out of date. CTV carries a data layer that linear television never had: exposure files that can be matched to household graphs, enabling marketers to track outcomes and web visits, not just reach. Ad spend simply has not caught up with where attention already sits, and the panel were clear that this gap is not closing on its own. It closes when marketers start planning CTV the way they plan any other performance channel, with a measurement framework that actually looks for the outcomes CTV is capable of producing.

CTV was never built to close the loop alone

The most useful reframe from the session came from Affinity, the webinar’s host: CTV and mobile are not two separate placements, they are a connected journey. The old objection to CTV, that there is no click on a television screen, misunderstands what the format was ever meant to do. CTV builds the moment of attention. Mobile is where that attention becomes an action you can actually see and count. Marketers who combine the two see roughly 10% higher conversions than those treating CTV and mobile as competing budget lines rather than complementary ones.

What that looks like in practice: the World Gold Council case study

World Gold Council’s own journey through CTV makes the case concretely. The brand started with a conventional, awareness-only framing: large-screen storytelling aimed at Gen Z and younger millennials. That shifted once their attribution agency confirmed CTV was performing well alongside linear TV and digital, and the brand began treating it as a genuine performance lever rather than a pure brand-building spend.

Their recent omnichannel campaign combined CTV for storytelling with mobile retargeting for engagement, targeting women aged 18 to 35 with a Gen Z skew. The results were well above category norms: a video completion rate of around 94%, against an industry average of 70 to 80%, alongside 150,000 image generations and 145,000 shares, a near 1:1 share rate that is unusually high for any campaign format. A follow-up brand lift study found purchase intent had risen 17%, a significant jump given it already carries high purchase intent in the Indian market where the campaign ran.

One detail from the panel is worth noting on its own: a single CTV impression reaches an average of 2.5 people per household, which aligns neatly with how gold jewellery is actually bought, around shared family occasions like weddings and festivals rather than individual purchase decisions.

The data behind the pattern

World Gold Council’s results are not an outlier. Affinity’s own CTV and mobile product, mCanvas, has been independently benchmarked by Kantar, and the figures hold up under scrutiny. Kantar assessed 31 mCanvas campaigns across 15 verticals against a norms base of over 3,000 CTV campaigns and close to 11,000 respondents, a study corroborated in a separate interview with Affinity’s own VP of Global Marketing. Against those norms, the omnichannel campaigns delivered 3.4 times higher brand favourability and 3.3 times higher purchase intent, both genuine lower-funnel outcomes rather than the softer awareness metrics CTV is usually judged on.

TCL’s data points to the same pattern from a different angle. In a case study for a financial services brand, streaming reached 52% net new households compared with linear TV, at a fifth of the exposure, meaning 1.4 CTV exposures delivered the same audience composition as 6.5 to 7 linear TV exposures. The same campaign produced a trickle-down effect across the rest of the brand’s marketing: a 22% lift in organic web search, a 9% lift in social engagement, and a 19% lift in email marketing open rates, all after the CTV campaign ran. Separately, one of TCL’s platform partners reported 77% higher purchase conversion among audiences exposed to CTV compared with those who saw only linear TV.

What this means for 2027 planning

Both brands on the panel are moving in the same direction for next year. World Gold Council plans to shift further budget from linear TV into CTV while continuing its omnichannel strategy, with a new focus on driving website visits alongside engagement. TCL is investing heavily in non-interruptive ad formats: pushback units, shoppable in-game moments, and electronic programme guides repurposed for consistent brand messaging rather than just content navigation, all aimed at getting closer to genuine one-click conversion without disrupting the viewing experience.

The wider industry direction points the same way: QR codes, click-to-basket formats similar to what Amazon has trialled during Thursday Night Football, and location-triggered offers. The metric that came up again and again as the one worth prioritising beyond reach and impressions was engagement, alongside website visits and purchase intent, the same lower-funnel outcomes that showed up consistently across both the World Gold Council and TCL data.

The takeaway for anyone planning media into 2027 is straightforward. CTV has already moved well beyond an awareness-only channel, and the brands treating it as a genuine full-funnel format, paired deliberately with mobile, are the ones seeing results most of the industry has not caught up to yet.

Wondering whether CTV belongs in your channel mix next year?

We help businesses work out where CTV fits alongside the rest of their media plan. Drop us an email at sales@hurstmediaagency.co.uk and we will talk it through with you.