Key takeaways from TripleLift & Digiday webinar on building a CTV plan for 2027
Reach isn’t CTV’s problem. CTV now reaches nearly 90% of households, about 245 million viewers. The harder problem is what happens before a campaign ever runs: audience, creative, and measurement teams still plan in silos, and when results disappoint, everyone points fingers at someone else.
That’s the conversation TripleLift hosted with Digiday, bringing together Olivia Arty, Senior Sales Manager, Ad Tech, Cint; Joey Marcus, Director of Media Partnerships, iSpot; and Toby Katcher, who leads video investment at CMI Media Group. Asked to sum up CTV in 2027 in one word, the panel said “fragmented,” “mandatory,” and “essential.” The rest of the hour covered how to get there.
Here’s what stood out.
1. Great parts don’t make a great campaign unless they’re connected.
Katcher said the biggest breakdown is that the three disciplines are “still planned in silos.” Teams build sharp niche audiences, then the creative doesn’t reflect what they know about that audience, or the measurement plan gets written after the campaign is already live. In healthcare, where CMI reaches patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals, the cost of that gap is clear: “We risk delivering the right message to the wrong audience, or the wrong message to the right audience.” His conclusion: “Having great audience data, great creative and great measurement independently doesn’t necessarily create a great campaign. The value comes from connecting all [three].”
2. Pick your north star before you spend a dollar.
For Marcus, the most common planning mistake is starting without a measurement plan. “You don’t have the KPIs ready to go. You don’t know what your north star is,” he said. “If you don’t have that set when you’re beginning, how are you going to optimize throughout the life of the campaign?” With a clear order of priorities, teams can adjust on the fly. If reach is overdelivering but lift is the goal, everyone knows what to shift.
The opposite problem is real too. Asked during Q&A for the number one reason CTV campaigns underperform, Katcher answered: “Too much optimization.” When KPIs change mid-flight, especially after much of the budget is spent, the original plan can’t deliver what it projected. His advice is to understand why the client wants the change, find a way to make it without rebuilding the whole plan, and be upfront about the trade-offs, because “sometimes those KPIs are in some ways indirectly correlated.”
3. Demographics are a 2D version of the viewer.
Arty described how far targeting has moved from the linear playbook of buying a broad demo like women 18 to 34 “and calling it a day.” Today buyers can use purchase behavior, CRM data, thematic targeting and survey-based data. “Your demographic profile is just kind of a 2D version of yourself,” she said. It “says nothing about whether I’m trying to plan a trip, looking to buy new running shoes, or wanting to switch [coffee brands].”
The proof came from a casual dining campaign Cint measured with TripleLift. The biggest lift wasn’t in any age or gender group. It was among people who eat at competitor restaurants and people who rarely dine out at all.
Katcher added that precision shouldn’t mean making the audience as small as possible, which just drives up CPMs and frequency without improving results. With state privacy laws narrowing how pharma brands can target, CMI has built audiences from behavioral and contextual signals that match the quality of some third-party pharma segments. “Precision isn’t about building that small zone,” he said. “It’s about finding the most relevant audience.”
4. Data gets you in the room. Creative decides whether anyone cares.
Arty called out a common contradiction: brands pay for CTV targeting to find the right person, “but then [show] the same spot to everyone.” In the casual dining campaign, a limited-time offer drove an 11% lift in purchase intent among rare diners, while loyal customers needed a different message entirely. “Data gets you in front of the right person,” she said, “but the creative decides whether they care or not.”
Marcus noted that two ads on the exact same media plan “could have drastically different results,” yet most optimization effort still goes into audiences and placements. If brands have creative variations ready, creative becomes one more lever they can pull mid-campaign. Katcher pointed to what works, including humor, nostalgia and even self-deprecation. One of CMI’s current spots plays on how hard drug names are to pronounce. He also made the case for testing messaging, calls to action and formats, not just different cuts of the same commercial.
TripleLift’s approach moves brands “from being interrupted in the show to being a part of it,” with formats that feel native to the viewing experience. Katcher sees practical value in those enhanced units for pharma: more room for regulatory and FDA-required information, and calls to action that stay on screen long enough to remember a URL or snap a photo, instead of trying to memorize a 1-800 number.
5. AI belongs in measurement, but it can’t fix a shaky foundation.
Asked where the industry is overpromising on CTV measurement, Arty’s answer was AI. She was clear that it belongs in the toolkit: it surfaces top-performing segments and takes manual work off people’s plates. But it isn’t solving CTV’s core problems. “It’s not deduplicating reach across apps. It’s not fixing frequency, so the same household doesn’t see the same ad 11 times across four different apps,” she said. “If the foundation underneath is still shaky, you’re going to get a really confident answer that’s probably wrong.”
Speed, on the other hand, is already within reach. Arty said brands should see how a campaign is performing within the first few days of launch. Then they need to act on what they learn instead of measuring “for measurement’s sake.”
6. Some CTV myths need to go.
To close, each panelist shared one CTV myth they’d retire.
Katcher: that CTV is just digital TV. Moving linear dollars to streaming doesn’t make a campaign more effective on its own. “The opportunity isn’t to just buy TV differently; it’s to make video work smarter.”
Marcus: that CTV is additive by default. “Publishers are selling it that way. Buyers might assume it, but no one’s really doing the checking.” No publisher is 100% incremental, but “if you’re able to still be 25% incremental on top of the size of a broadcast network, that’s going to be a huge value gain.”
Arty: that CTV only drives awareness. With interactive formats and a second screen in nearly every viewer’s hand, it can move people down the funnel too.
The throughline
Before your next campaign, make sure your audience, creative, and measurement teams are aligned. Whether it’s CMI finding hard-to-reach patient audiences, iSpot proving incrementality against linear, or Cint showing which message moves which viewer, each panelist landed in the same place.
CTV works best when the people who define the audience, build the creative, and measure the results plan together from the start.
