When CTV makes sense
Zero Fluff Marketing plans and buys connected TV for DTC ecommerce brands, alongside paid social and search. CTV is a reach channel. It introduces your brand to people who are not looking for it yet, and the payoff shows up later in branded search, direct visits and cheaper paid social. That makes it powerful, and it makes it easy to waste.
We recommend CTV when three things are true:
- The capture engine works. Meta, Search and Shopping are profitable, so the demand CTV creates gets caught by you, not a competitor.
- There is budget for a real test. Enough spend in the test regions, for long enough, to measure lift with confidence.
- The creative works without a click. Someone watching on a couch has to remember the brand name later.
If any of those are missing, we will tell you, and put the money somewhere it works harder for now. The longer version: when CTV advertising is worth it for a DTC brand.
Planning it
CTV gets a reach and frequency plan, not just a budget. Audiences are built from your customer data and look-alike signals, inventory is chosen for quality, and frequency is capped so the same household is not hit 20 times. Creative is cut for the TV screen: horizontal, sound on, brand early.
Measuring it honestly
CTV platforms report view-through conversions: someone saw the ad and later bought. Some of those would have bought anyway. So before launch, we design a geo holdout. CTV runs in some regions and not in comparable ones, and we compare new customers, branded search and direct traffic between them. The result is a cost per incremental new customer that can sit next to every other channel in the plan.
Post-purchase surveys add a second read. âI saw you on TVâ is a surprisingly common answer once CTV is running.