The CTV measurement debate has shifted: It's about operability now, not credibility

The conversation around CTV measurement has evolved. The channel now offers sophisticated cross-device measurement and incrementality testing that can rival walled gardens. Yet as brands plan to increase CTV spend this year, CTV is still treated with more skepticism than its measurement capabilities warrant, experts told The Current.

The challenge is not the credibility of data, but how difficult it can be to act on. “The issue today is not capability. It is operability,” said Alicia Gehring, senior vice president of media strategy at agency White64.

“Compared to the near-real-time optimization available in social environments, CTV can feel paradoxically closed, despite its openness in data sources,” Gehring explained. “This friction is frequently misinterpreted as distrust. In reality, marketers trust data when they can understand and operationalize it.”

“Complexity, not credibility, is the barrier,” she said.

That complexity gap, however, may be closing. CTV’s lack of closed-loop measurement has been a challenge from day one, but it may have been a blessing in disguise. As more walled gardens, including TikTok, turn toward cross-platform measurement, they are confronting challenges that CTV has been solving all along.

“Social platforms are ... acknowledging that attribution cannot stop at the platform boundary,” said Gehring.

“Being a second mover has enabled [CTV] to quickly develop, based on those learnings,” said Alex Yip, director of product strategy at measurement firm Appsflyer. “They’ve quickly built similar connectors with existing measurement solutions, developed their own Conversion APIs for measurement and campaign optimization and off-site pixels to deploy cookies for targeting and conversion measurement.”

Many expect 2026 to mark a new phase for CTV, focused on proving incrementality. The infrastructure is now in place for CTV to go head-to-head with walled gardens when it comes to measurement sophistication.

“Whether a brand uses audience-based or geo-based approaches to measure incrementality, the effort to show CTV’s impact above and beyond that of other investments [...] will help show CTV’s true value and drive more adoption from brands,” said Harry Browne, vice president of TV, audio and display innovation at ad agency Tinuiti.

CTV measurement will evolve from disconnected signals into a far more unified and actionable approach, said Dave Constantino, senior vice president of business development at Attain.

“The real breakthrough is connecting upper funnel lift directly to verified purchase behavior, so marketers can see not just whether awareness or consideration moved, but how that translated into real revenue. [...] CTV measurement will shift from “did it work?” to “how did it drive outcomes, and what would have happened without it?” he added.

Time to conversion is also expected to become a more prominent metric of success. “Reducing that time for brands that have three or four purchases a year will [...] speed up the lifetime value,” said Dan Larkman, CEO and founder at Keynes. “Those are the things that are really going to make a difference.”

Experts expect incrementality testing to become a core focus. “If a winning combination is CTV then search — search is winning all of the last-touch attribution. This would be a key candidate to run incrementality testing and then reclassify “CTV then search” as attributed to CTV,” according to Yip.

Ultimately, CTV will shed its legacy label as an upper-funnel channel and become a “full-funnel growth engine,” said Gehring. “The real differentiator will no longer be the platform. It will be the marketer’s ability to evaluate performance through a uniform, cross-digital lens. At long last, the ecosystem is learning to speak the same language.”