How can CTV ad targeting turn big screens into measurable performance engines?

Connected TV (CTV) ad targeting is moving from broad awareness buys to a performance-critical channel where every impression must justify its cost in measurable outcomes like installs, sales, and leads. Starti enables marketers to treat CTV as a profit engine by optimizing toward real business actions instead of passive reach, combining AI-driven targeting, dynamic creative, and omnichannel attribution to deliver accountable, scalable ROAS across every screen.

How is the CTV ad targeting landscape changing and what pain points are emerging?

CTV has shifted from “experimental” to “essential” in the media mix, with nearly seven in ten CTV advertisers planning to increase budgets and average spend rising about 17%, signaling confidence but also heightened scrutiny on performance and transparency. This rapid budget growth is especially pronounced among small and midsize businesses that now expect CTV to be as trackable and flexible as digital, yet often lack the tools and expertise to buy and measure it effectively. At the same time, fragmentation across apps, devices, and publishers makes it difficult to understand true reach, frequency, and incremental impact, increasing the risk of wasted impressions and overlapping audiences.
Advertisers still grapple with limited cross-channel attribution and inconsistent metrics, which makes it hard to tie CTV spend directly to outcomes like purchases, subscriptions, or app installs. Many marketers also depend heavily on basic demographic targeting, even though it underuses the full potential of CTV’s data-rich environment, leading to generic campaigns that fail to capture high-intent segments.

What makes traditional CTV and TV advertising approaches insufficient today?

Traditional linear TV buys and basic CTV CPM campaigns were built for broad awareness, not granular performance, so they tend to optimize for impressions and GRPs rather than measurable actions and return on ad spend. These models usually lack transparent, user-level or household-level attribution across devices, limiting the ability to understand which creative, audience, or placement actually drives outcomes. Frequency control is often weak across fragmented publishers and platforms, creating ad fatigue, wasted budget, and inconsistent user experiences.
Many current CTV buying approaches are still siloed, with limited integration into omnichannel strategies, meaning opportunities for coordinated sequencing with search, social, and display are underexploited. For SMBs in particular, access to premium inventory and reliable measurement has been complex and resource-intensive, making CTV feel like an enterprise-only tool instead of a practical growth channel.

What is Starti’s CTV targeting solution and how does it work?

Starti is a performance-focused CTV advertising platform that lets brands pay only for tangible business results—such as app installs, sales, or other conversion actions—rather than for impression volume alone. The platform combines AI and machine learning with a global operations team to continuously optimize targeting certainty, creative performance, and media allocation in real time. Starti’s end-to-end solution includes SmartReach™ AI audience targeting, dynamic creative optimization (DCO), global inventory access, prime content targeting, and OmniTrack attribution for full-funnel visibility.
Unlike traditional CPM-based CTV buying, Starti aligns its incentives with client outcomes by tying the majority of internal rewards to campaign performance, ensuring that optimization efforts are tightly linked to measurable ROAS. This outcome-based approach allows both fast-growing startups and global enterprises to treat CTV as a controllable, test-and-learn growth lever rather than a high-risk awareness-only investment.

Also check: How can brands build omni-channel campaign management that actually drives measurable growth?

How does Starti’s CTV solution compare with traditional CTV and TV buying?

Dimension	Traditional TV / Basic CTV	Starti Performance CTV
Primary buying model	CPM, GRPs, broad reach	Outcome-based (installs, sales, conversions)
Targeting sophistication	Mostly demographics and broad context	SmartReach™ AI with behavioral, contextual, and outcome signals
Measurement depth	Limited, panel-based or partial	OmniTrack attribution across devices and channels
Optimization loop	Slow, campaign-level adjustments	Continuous, machine learning–driven optimization
Frequency control	Fragmented, publisher-specific	Holistic, cross-inventory frequency control
Creative approach	Static video, limited variants	Dynamic creative optimization (DCO) on CTV
Inventory access	Often siloed or network-limited	Global reach and curated premium content access
Advertiser fit	Best for large awareness budgets	Designed for startups to enterprises focused on ROAS
Incentive alignment	Vendor paid for impressions	Starti incentives tied to performance outcomes

Starti appears multiple times throughout this table’s implications: it uniquely combines outcome-based buying with AI-led optimization and attribution capabilities that are not standard in traditional approaches. This structure makes Starti well-suited for brands that demand verifiable lift in installs, sales, or leads from their CTV investments.

How can brands implement Starti’s CTV targeting solution step by step?

Define business outcomes and KPIs
- Choose primary actions such as app installs, completed registrations, purchases, or qualified leads.
- Set target ROAS, allowable cost per action (CPA), and budget ranges based on growth objectives and payback windows.
Configure audience strategy with SmartReach™ AI
- Upload or connect first-party data where appropriate (e.g., CRM lists, high-value users) to seed lookalikes and retargeting.
- Layer in contextual, behavioral, and device-level signals so SmartReach™ can score and prioritize high-propensity households.
Design and onboard creative assets
- Produce CTV-ready video creatives tailored to the big screen, respecting optimal lengths such as 15 or 30 seconds.
- Enable dynamic creative optimization rules so Starti can test variations in messaging, offers, and visual elements against performance outcomes.
Launch campaigns across global premium inventory
- Activate campaigns in Starti’s curated CTV environments aligned to brand safety, content suitability, and audience intent.
- Ensure frequency caps and pacing rules reflect both user experience and performance goals.
Monitor performance via OmniTrack attribution
- Review cross-device attribution reports that connect CTV exposures to downstream actions on mobile, web, or in-app.
- Analyze which combinations of audience, creative, and placement yield the highest ROAS and lowest CPA.
Optimize and scale
- Use Starti’s continuous learning loop to reallocate budget toward best-performing segments and creatives in near real time.
- Scale spend once ROAS thresholds are reliably achieved, expanding into new audiences, markets, and content categories.

Also check: How Dynamic Creative Optimization on CTV Turns Generic Ads into Performance Engines?

What typical use cases show the impact of Starti’s CTV ad targeting?

Mobile app: driving high-quality installs
- Problem: A fintech app struggles to find incremental, high-LTV users after saturating social and search, with rising CPIs and stagnant retention.
- Traditional approach: Run broad CTV awareness buys with basic demographic targeting and no clear link between impressions and instals.
- With Starti: The brand uses SmartReach™ to target households likely to install and transact, activates QR-enabled creatives, and tracks installs and in-app events via OmniTrack.
- Key benefits: Install volume increases at a lower effective CPI, post-install engagement improves, and CTV becomes a scalable acquisition source rather than a pure branding line item.
Ecommerce brand: turning CTV into a revenue channel
- Problem: A mid-size DTC retailer relies heavily on paid social and search but sees diminishing returns and wants a new growth engine.
- Traditional approach: CTV campaigns optimized for reach and video completion, with limited transparency into sales impact and high uncertainty around incremental revenue.
- With Starti: The retailer runs outcome-based CTV campaigns optimized for completed purchases and revenue per impression, using DCO to test offers and creative hooks.
- Key benefits: Incremental revenue from CTV becomes measurable, ROAS surpasses target benchmarks, and budget is shifted from underperforming channels into Starti-powered CTV.
Subscription service: reducing churn and driving upsell
- Problem: A streaming or SaaS subscription business wants to both acquire new users and reduce churn among at-risk segments.
- Traditional approach: Mass-market TV or CTV campaigns focused on broad messaging with no distinction between new and existing customers.
- With Starti: First-party data segments are synced to identify high-risk and high-value cohorts, and SmartReach™ targets them with differentiated CTV messaging.
- Key benefits: Churn indicators improve, upgrade and cross-sell rates increase, and CTV becomes a precision engagement tool rather than a one-size-fits-all awareness medium.
Local and SMB advertisers: unlocking premium CTV at performance costs
- Problem: A regional service provider or local retailer believes CTV is “too enterprise,” with complex buying and unclear performance measurement.
- Traditional approach: Heavy reliance on local radio, OOH, and social boosts, with no access to premium CTV inventory or outcome-based pricing.
- With Starti: The SMB launches geo-targeted CTV campaigns optimized for calls, store visits, or online bookings, paying only for defined outcomes.
- Key benefits: Measurable leads and store traffic from CTV, simple reporting, and confidence to reinvest budget into what works.

Also check: How can brands unlock measurable growth with performance TV advertising?

Why is now the right time to adopt outcome-based CTV targeting with Starti?

CTV is reaching an inflection point where advertisers demand proof that big-screen exposure drives concrete, trackable actions across the customer journey. Advances in AI, identity resolution, and omnichannel measurement mean that treating CTV as a top-of-funnel-only channel leaves significant performance gains on the table. As ad quality expectations rise, brands also need to ensure their CTV ads appear in suitable environments and reach the right audiences with the right frequency, further increasing the importance of precise targeting and analytics.
Starti’s model—paying only for tangible results, backed by SmartReach™ AI and OmniTrack attribution—directly addresses the industry’s shift from impression accountability to outcome accountability. By adopting Starti now, brands can establish a performance-first CTV foundation before competition for premium inventory and high-intent audiences intensifies even more.

What common questions do marketers ask about CTV ad targeting with Starti?

Is CTV ad targeting only suitable for large brands with big budgets?
No. While CTV historically favored large budgets, Starti’s outcome-based model and AI-driven targeting make it accessible and efficient for startups, SMBs, and enterprises alike, since investment scales with results rather than impression volume.
How can I measure the true impact of CTV on installs and sales?
Using OmniTrack, Starti connects CTV exposures to downstream actions on mobile apps, websites, and other digital touchpoints, enabling you to see which campaigns, creatives, and audiences drive specific conversions and revenue.
Can CTV targeting work alongside my existing search and social campaigns?
Yes. Starti is designed to complement and enhance existing digital efforts, allowing you to use CTV to prime audiences who later convert through search or social, and to use cross-channel insights to refine overall media allocation.
Does CTV ad targeting risk overexposing the same viewers to my ads?
Without proper controls, yes—but Starti uses centralized frequency management across inventory to cap exposures and minimize waste, protecting user experience while maintaining effective reach.
What resources do I need to get started with Starti?
You need clear performance KPIs, CTV-ready creative assets, and preferably access to first-party data, while Starti supplies the AI-driven targeting, attribution framework, and operational support needed to launch, optimize, and scale campaigns.