Connected TV is already the most powerful format in advertising—and it’s about to become even more important.
That might sound counterintuitive. AI is reshaping every corner of digital advertising, and CTV has already gone through its “honeymoon phase” of rampant growth. But as the ecosystem becomes mediated by agents, the channels that shape consumer preference before agents will gain outsized importance.
That’s where CTV wins.
AI Is Compressing the Consumer Journey
Agentic commerce isn't a distant concept. It’s already emerging.
Consumers are delegating more decisions to AI: discovering products, comparing options, summarizing reviews, even completing purchases. What used to be a multi-step journey—search, click, browse, evaluate—is collapsing into a single interaction.
That has a direct impact on the mechanics of digital advertising. Fewer searches. Fewer clicks. Fewer pages viewed. Fewer opportunities to insert an ad into the process.
Search won’t disappear, but it is becoming abstracted. Display won’t vanish, but it is losing surface area. Commerce media isn’t going away, but it’s becoming more concentrated, with fewer, more decisive moments instead of a long trail of signals.
Performance marketing, as it stands today, is built on volume of impressions, clicks, and signals. That foundation is starting to erode. Not overnight. Not uniformly. But directionally, the trend is clear.
Influence Moves Upstream (and Becomes More Valuable)
As decision-making shifts to agents, the most valuable moment moves earlier in the journey, before the handoff.
Agents don’t watch TV. They don’t experience creative. They don’t build brand preference.
Humans do.
CTV remains one of the few scaled environments where brands can shape perception, create intent, and influence decisions before they’re delegated. While other channels face shrinking interaction surfaces, CTV retains (and expands) its leverage.
CTV Is Stuck in an Outdated Role
Despite its capabilities, CTV is largely treated as a branding channel. That no longer holds.
As agent-driven behaviors reshape the advertising landscape, influence and conversion need to be connected, and CTV is one of the few channels that can bridge that gap at scale.
CTV has always had the ingredients of a performance channel: high-quality inventory, deterministic signals in logged-in environments, strong targeting, and the ability to connect exposure to outcomes. But still, advertisers have largely kept it in a branding box.
That is a structural mismatch.
Performance teams have spent years optimizing within environments built around clicks and direct response signals. CTV, while it has performance levers, doesn’t look or behave the same way, so it’s often held at arm’s length by performance teams.
The result is a split that no longer makes sense. As clicks and impressions become less reliable proxies for performance, advertisers can't afford to isolate CTV upstream while expecting downstream channels to drive outcomes alone.
As agent-driven behaviors reshape the advertising landscape, influence and conversion need to be connected, and CTV is one of the few channels that can bridge that gap at scale. It’s time for marketers to rethink and reprioritize CTV’s overall role within the broader marketing mix.
What Advertisers Should Do Now
The shift to an agent-driven digital ecosystem is already underway. Waiting for it to fully materialize before adjusting strategy will put brands behind. There are a few practical moves advertisers should be making now.
- Reallocate a portion of performance budgets into CTV, not just brand budgets. If CTV is going to carry more of the load for driving outcomes, it needs to be funded accordingly. That means moving dollars out of lower-yield impression environments, not just adding incremental spend on top.
- Hold CTV accountable to outcomes. Stop briefing CTV purely around reach and frequency. Define what success looks like in terms of business outcomes, whether that’s conversion lift, site engagement, or downstream revenue, and hold campaigns accountable to it.
- Build creative that drives action, not just recall. CTV creative needs to do more than tell a story. It should create urgency, reinforce differentiation, and make the next step clear. That might mean rethinking pacing, messaging, and how calls to action are incorporated into the experience.
- Integrate CTV into the performance loop. Don’t treat CTV as a standalone input. Use first-party data and signals from CTV exposure to inform targeting, sequencing, and optimization elsewhere. The goal is to turn CTV into a demand engine that other channels can capture more efficiently.
- Reevaluate reliance on click-based signals. If your strategy depends heavily on large volumes of clicks and impressions, it’s worth modeling what happens as those decline. Identify where CTV can take on a greater role in influencing those outcomes earlier in the process. This is where view-through conversions will be impacted the most.
The Next Phase for CTV
As AI agents take over execution, advertising’s role shifts from capturing interactions to shaping decisions. That makes channels built around human attention more valuable, not less.
CTV’s next phase will belong to advertisers that stop treating it as a premium awareness channel and start using it as a strategic bridge between influence and action. In a world where agents may increasingly control the final mile of discovery, comparison, and purchase, brands must win earlier, with humans, in moments where attention still has depth. CTV gives advertisers that opportunity.
