- Follow ROI, not legacy allocation
- Redefine channel taxonomy for smarter optimisation
- Optimise for long-term value, not short-term metrics
- Align spend with real audience behaviour
- Move beyond programmatic convenience to strategic deployment
Say a marketing medium consistently delivered 30% higher ROI than almost everything else in your media mix, you would surely prioritise it, wouldn’t you? Yet Connected TV (CTV) receives just 7% of total media budgets, despite delivering a knockout punch on returns.
According to analytics firm Analytic Partners, that is exactly where CTV stands today – and this blind spot is costing brands.
The question worth asking is why, because CTV is not new anymore, and the evidence is strong. Audiences have already made the move, with viewers across income groups moving away from Pay TV to streaming and switching between apps as easily as they used to change channels.
Yet proportionately, brand budgets simply have not yet followed suit, and understanding that requires being honest about where the industry is getting it wrong.
Part of the answer is that brands don’t know where to place CTV. It has never had a clear home in the South African media landscape, sitting uncomfortably between digital and broadcast, and treated as an extension of one or the other rather than as a channel that deserves its own strategic weight.
Digital teams see it as expensive video. TV buyers see it as a niche add-on. The result? A channel that gets chronically underweighted in plans that should have it at the front-and-centre.
In reality, there are now two ways to buy television audiences – ‘mass TV’, dominated by linear, and ‘targeted TV’, the space created by CTV – but most planning frameworks have not caught up to this shift.
The industry is caught in a loop of its own making
The deeper problem is one the industry has created for itself. Brands optimise for short-term clicks and conversions because those metrics are immediate and easy to justify to a CFO. This pushes budgets further toward performance formats, which causes advertising effectiveness to plateau, which makes the case for brand building even harder to make.
In a recent study by global media network dentsu, digital video’s impact on purchasing decisions was found to last up to three years, while short-term performance effects fade within three months. Brands chasing clicks are leaving literally years of value on the table.
In other words, we are systematically over-investing in what is easiest to measure, not what is most effective.
CTV sits right at the intersection of this problem, and it is also the solution most planners are overlooking. It delivers the scale and attention of television with the targeting and measurability of digital, yet it is still being evaluated through an outdated lens.
Many planners either see it as a premium ‘nice-to-have’ or a programmatic afterthought, which they can automate and then forget about. Neither approach fully leverages what the channel is actually capable of.
This is where the gap between audience behaviour and media investment becomes commercially significant. Streaming is no longer a niche or purely affluent behaviour – it is increasingly where broad, and often harder-to-reach, audiences are spending time. Yet budgets still skew toward channels optimised for reach, not attention.
Don’t just blindly buy CTV – plan for it
There is a further issue in how CTV is being bought. Programmatic buying has made the channel more accessible, but ease of access and strategic effectiveness are not the same thing.
Just throwing something against the wall and seeing what sticks does not maketh a media strategy. When CTV is reduced to a purely programmatic execution, the contextual placement, the premium inventory and the role it plays across the broader media mix all get lost. Brands end up in CTV environments without really capitalising on them.
That is a significant missed opportunity, because CTV offers exactly what marketers say they want: the ability to build awareness and consideration, strengthen brand recall, and improve downstream performance across search and conversion.
The old adage that TV builds brands and digital drives clicks is no longer a true representation because in reality, CTV does both. It holds attention in a way most digital environments cannot, while still influencing the lower funnel in measurable ways.
Most brands are investing in it at a fraction of what the returns justify, and until planning structures catch up with where audiences actually are, that gap is going to keep costing them.
Leslie Adams is a seasoned media executive with a career spanning print, broadcasting, cinema and digital platforms. He has held senior commercial roles across leading media brands, including CNBC Africa and Forbes Africa, Ster-Kinekor and now, Reach Africa. In 2021, he joined Reach Africa as sales director. Reach Africa is a leading specialist in Connected TV (CTV), Advertising Video on Demand (AVOD), and Free Ad-Supported TV (FAST) monetisation, helping brands engage high-value audiences while enabling content owners to maximise revenue across the continent.
