Prove the Effectiveness of CTV With Brand Lift Studies

Since the first commercial to air in 1941, marketers have seen TV advertising as an excellent channel for growing brand awareness. 

After all, TV advertising places brands on the biggest screen in the house alongside premium, professionally produced content. The medium’s dynamic mix of sight, sound, and motion has helped bring countless companies to life. TV ads also drive better recall than any other channel, making television a perfect fit for establishing lasting connections with engaged audiences.

All this isn’t just true of the TV ads your grandparents grew up watching. It also applies to the connected TV (CTV) ads that run on today’s streaming platforms. 

That said, quantifying the success of TV campaigns hasn’t always been so clear cut. Back in the Mad Men days, sales lift and market share often served as proxies for brand awareness since a campaign’s direct impact on consumer attitudes couldn’t easily be measured.

The problem with this was twofold: For one, this approach didn’t account for the lengthy sales cycle that can occur between an initial ad exposure and conversion. It also assumed a direct correlation between ad campaigns and sales, even though a host of other factors can influence consumer spending.

Luckily, we’ve come a long way since then. CTV attribution tools now make it possible to measure every outcome and variable with confidence — from the foot traffic driven by a specific ad creative to the percent increase in purchase intent that results from a three-month campaign.

In this article, we detail exactly how advertisers can measure improvements in favorability and awareness using brand lift studies.

What Is a Brand Lift Study and How Does It Relate to CTV?

Brand lift studies measure how ad campaigns change consumer perception when surface-level metrics like impressions or clicks aren’t the best indicator of success. In the context of connected TV (CTV) advertising, brand lift studies fill a critical measurement gap by quantifying the top-of-funnel impact that occurs weeks or months before a purchase is made.

After all, viewers don’t often click on TV ads. Sure, today’s interactive CTV formats can be optimized for this type of engagement, but clicks still aren’t a great KPI for broad awareness campaigns.

Instead, brand lift studies gauge how an exposed audience's awareness, favorability, and intent toward a brand or product change as a direct result of being exposed to an ad. This provides definitive, data-backed insight into the effectiveness of a CTV campaign, helping agencies and brands understand their true return on ad spend (ROAS).

How Do CTV Brand Lift Studies Work?

At Strategus, we help advertisers move beyond proxies by capturing actual changes in consumer perception resulting from ad exposure.

Using a test-and-control methodology, brand lift studies compare responses between two groups — those who have seen your CTV ad and those who haven't. This approach isolates the true impact of your campaign by controlling for other variables that might influence brand perception.

Here's a step-by-step breakdown of how Brand Lift Studies work with Strategus:

Step 1: Identify Target Audience

First, our team works with you to identify your target audience. This audience is then divided into two groups: an ‘Exposed Group’ who will see your CTV ads, and a ‘Control Group’ who won’t be served the ads.

Step 2: Ad Creative Activation & Impression Tracking

We activate tracking on your ad creatives. As your CTV campaign runs, exposed viewers are identified and tagged.

Step 3: Survey Deployment

Both the exposed and control groups are invited to complete a short survey via email, in-app messages, SMS, or web-based offers. This allows us to collect daily, real-world feedback at scale.

Step 4: Data Collection and Real-Time Reporting

About a week after the survey launches, data starts populating our real-time dashboard. We share these insights as soon as they reach statistical significance, and also offer the ability to drill down into variables like age, gender, and frequency, and reporting at the campaign, ad group, and creative level.

Step 5: Campaign Optimization

Once the results are available, it becomes easier to understand the impact of campaigns and make agile adjustments based on the data.

At Strategus, part of what we deliver is real-time monitoring and ongoing optimization. As such, the brands and agencies we partner with can count on us to act fast — adjusting messaging, creative, or targeting mid-flight to maximize impact.

Metrics That Brand Lift Studies Track

Our brand lift studies look at several key metrics to capture a CTV campaign’s influence on consumer attitudes and perceptions.

• Brand Awareness: Are more people familiar with your brand after seeing your ad?
  
  
• Ad Recall: Can viewers remember your ad and associate it with your brand?
  
  
• Brand Favorability: Do people feel more positively toward your brand after exposure?
  
  
• Brand Consideration: Are viewers more likely to consider your brand as a purchase option?
  
  
• Purchase Intent: Has your ad influenced a viewer’s likelihood to buy?
  
  
• Message Awareness: Did your audience understand or retain the core message of your campaign?
  
  
• Brand Recommendation: Are viewers more likely to recommend your brand to others?
  
  

When Should Marketers Measure Brand Lift

The right KPIs and attribution tools for a campaign depend on several factors. CTV ads can be used for everything from driving online conversions to growing mindshare. As such, having a variety of attribution tools at your fingertips is key.

In our experience, brand lift studies are particularly valuable in the following situations:

1. When Brand Awareness Is the Primary Goal

Some campaigns are built to generate visibility and spark interest, not drive immediate conversions. This is common for:

• New product launches where awareness is the first hurdle to adoption
  
  
• Brand reintroductions or rebranding efforts targeting a broader or refreshed audience
  
  
• Political campaigns focused on name recognition ahead of key phases in the election cycle
  
  

In these cases, standard attribution methods fall short. Brand lift studies provide measurable insight into whether your CTV ads are improving awareness, recall, and favorability — giving marketers real data to validate their upper-funnel efforts.

2. When Other Forms of Attribution Can’t Be Activated

Sometimes advertisers face roadblocks when trying to implement traditional attribution like pixel tracking or first-party data matching. This often happens when:

• An agency doesn't have access to its clients’ website or is unable to implement third-party pixels
  
  
• Privacy concerns or regulatory constraints make online tracking impossible (e.g., financial services or healthcare)
  
  

In these cases, brand lift studies offer a powerful workaround — enabling measurement without relying on web behavior or conversion events. All that’s needed is the ad impression data.

3. When the Sales Cycle Is Too Long for Short-Term Attribution

For brands with high-consideration products or services, conversions can take weeks or even months. This makes it difficult to tie ad exposure to near-term outcomes using conventional KPIs. Common examples include:

• Automotive brands, where consumers may spend months researching and test driving before making a purchase
  
  
• Higher education institutions, which often target students in the awareness stage well before application season
  
  
• B2B companies marketing enterprise software or services that require long buying committees

In these scenarios, brand lift studies provide a window into upper-funnel impact, thereby validating and guiding campaign strategy, even before revenue is realized.

A well-known vodka distillery turned to Strategus after modernizing its image and introducing a new bottle design. The goal? Elevate brand awareness and appeal.

Our CTV experts designed and launched a multichannel rebranding campaign targeting more mature buyers. By combining foot traffic attribution with a brand lift study, we helped quantify both in-store impact and perception change — resulting in a 12.2% lift in brand awareness and 13,185 verified store visits.

Read Case Study → 

Get Started With Strategus

Programmatic advertising tends to focus on performance metrics like clicks, conversions, and purchases. These are all great outcomes to monitor and things that the Strategus dashboard tracks — but sometimes the goal is less transactional than that.

For top-of-funnel campaigns where improved brand favorability and awareness are the true indicators of success, brand lift studies offer necessary insight into how well your campaigns are performing.

What’s more, there’s no reason to limit yourself. We partner with brands and agencies to customize our attribution suite based on the touchpoints and KPIs that matter most to their business.

Want better insight into how your audience is progressing through the funnel? Contact us today to learn more.