Proving CTV Performance in an Outcomes-First World

The industry's favorite word in 2026 isn't AI. It's outcomes. And for good reason. Between macroeconomic pressure, tightening budgets, and C-suite executives who want to see every marketing dollar tied directly to revenue, the days of leading with impressions and reach are numbered.

In this webinar, we brought together three seasoned practitioners to work through what proving CTV performance actually looks like today:

• Chris Bruderle, VP of Industry Insights & Content Strategy at IAB

• Sam Bloom, Head of Partnerships at PMG

• Zach Cochran, Owner of Co/Efficient Media

Over the course of an hour, the conversation stayed practical, grounded in real campaign examples, and refreshingly direct about what's working and what isn't.

Watch the full webinar chat below:

Why Outcomes Became the Only Metric That Matters

Chris Bruderle opened with the macro context. Post-pandemic inflation, aggressive rate hikes, tariff uncertainty, geopolitical headwinds — CFOs and CEOs have absorbed all of it, and the pressure has flowed straight down to CMOs.

When every dollar has to work, "we hit our impressions goal" stops being a satisfying answer. At the same time, digital advertising has matured into a natively measurable channel. Brands now have the tools to connect spend to outcomes. So the expectation is there, and the excuse not to measure isn't.

How Brands Are Redefining Success

Zach Cochran described what he's seeing shift in real time. Attribution is table stakes now. Offline and online attribution, ROAS, cost per acquisition (CPA),  these are no longer ambitious goals. They're the baseline ask. What used to define success in CTV (completion rates, cost per completed view) barely comes up anymore.

What brands want to see is the halo effect: how a CTV campaign moves branded search volume, drives direct traffic, lowers CPA across performance channels, or generates foot traffic. Those downstream signals are increasingly how clients judge whether a campaign worked.

Sam Bloom reinforced the point from an agency perspective. The first question any campaign should answer, before anything else, is "what does the cash register look like?"

For some brands, a purchase happens 180 days after a first impression. For others, it happens the same day. The measurement architecture has to match the sales cycle, not the other way around. Starting with media as the solution, he noted, is a mistake. Start with the business outcome, then build backwards.

The Measurement Stack: What Advertisers Are Actually Using

IAB research showed that the top business outcomes advertisers are chasing through CTV are store visits, online and in-store sales, and lead generation. Measuring those outcomes across fragmented environments, multiple DSPs, direct publisher deals, and social buys creates a real challenge.

What most advanced advertisers are doing:

1. Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) as the primary source of truth

2. Supplemented by first-party analytics and third-party measurement providers

3. Sprinkling in retailer or partner data (second-party data)

They're normalizing as much as they can into a single measurement platform, then taking action from there.

As Zach Cochran put it, establish the measurement framework before the campaign launches. Use the DSP to optimize media. Use a third-party tool to judge success. And get explicit with clients about the difference. When a CMO discovers a discrepancy between platform reporting and third-party results and no one warned them, trust disappears fast. When it's explained up front, transparency actually builds confidence.

Making It Work Without Fortune 500 Infrastructure

Not every brand has the budget or data infrastructure for a full MMM build. The conversation got into what smaller and regional advertisers can do right now.

Geo holdout tests as one of the most reliable and underutilized tools available. Running CTV in a specific market, holding another constant, then comparing results. No expensive tech required. Incrementality platforms have also become more accessible, with options priced for small and mid-sized businesses. First-party data, even if modest, goes further than most brands realize.

Zach described a campaign he's running right now: retail sales in Target with exposed and control stores. He's using AI tools to analyze the sales data, build out reporting dashboards, and identify incremental lift. He assigns 30-40% of the observed lift to the campaign, which he described as a realistic, conservative attribution approach that clients find credible because it's honest.

Major broadcasters and streaming publishers have been actively democratizing access, building self-serve ad platforms, and bundling measurement tools into those products. AI is also enabling faster, cheaper MMM work that was previously only viable for large brands.

Identity, Clean Rooms, and the Cross-Platform Picture

For advertisers running across multiple environments, identity resolution has become critical. Chris walked through how identity spines like UID2 and LiveRamp ATS enable consistent audience signals across the open web and CTV. Clean rooms let publishers and advertisers bring first-party data together in a privacy-safe environment, creating a path to tie actual sales data back to CTV exposure.

Amazon was called out specifically for having a closed-loop advantage through its device graph and Amazon Marketing Cloud. But Sam also highlighted platforms like Innovid for consistent video ad serving across multiple publishers, and Attain plugged into Clearline as a way to see daily sales lift, average order value, and other transaction signals across QSR clients. The underlying principle is the same regardless of tool: understand what moves the cash register, then connect the measurement pipes accordingly.

Incrementality, Attribution, and the Education Gap

There's a language problem in performance marketing. Incrementality and attribution are used interchangeably, but they mean different things.

Sam broke them each down individually:

• Measurement is the business outcome itself (sales, order frequency, whatever the KPI is).

• Attribution is the process of understanding which channels contributed to that outcome.

• Incrementality is the cost to acquire net-new customers, which tends to get more expensive as brands push into new markets, even when campaigns are working.

Winning on CPA doesn't always mean winning the business. A brand can hit its cost per acquisition target while losing market share. Sam called this a "doom loop," over-indexing on retention and remarketing at the expense of prospecting, which looks efficient in the short term, but quietly strangles growth.

IAB data supported this: customer acquisition as the top media investment goal dropped 10 percentage points from August to January, while driving repeat purchases doubled as a stated goal.

The panel agreed that in a tough economy, the instinct is understandable. But the brands that come out ahead tend to be the ones that continue prospecting while everyone else is pulling back.

Brand Building Still Matters

The session closed with a question that's worth sitting with: Has the pendulum swung too far toward outcomes?

Nike didn't become Nike because of a great search campaign. Yeti didn't build a lifestyle brand through CPA optimization. Brand investment is what makes performance marketing work better over time.

The panel agreed: outcomes and brand are not competing priorities. When the brand means something, every other channel performs more efficiently.

The best direct-to-consumer brands of the last decade figured this out early. They created content that made you want to be part of what they were doing, then made it frictionless to buy. That combination, upper and lower funnel working together, is still the model worth chasing.

Watch the full webinar to hear the complete conversation,  including live Q&A on CTV reporting best practices, managing impatient executives, and how to structure the attribution conversation before a campaign launches. Watch it now, then talk to a Strategus expert about what proven performance could look like for your campaigns.

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