The ad industry is pouring billions into CTV, lured by the promise of digital precision on the living room screen. But frustration is mounting. Too many advertisers treat CTV like the web, chasing one-to-one targeting. The fix, one expert argued, involves looking not to the future of digital, but to the foundational principles of traditional television.
We spoke with David Nyurenberg, SVP of Digital at InterMedia Advertising. Drawing on years of experience at the forefront of performance media, he made the case that the industry’s obsession with digital-style metrics for CTV is fundamentally flawed and that a hybrid mindset is the only path forward.
The TV mindset: "We can't think of CTV differently from linear TV," Nyurenberg warned. "We've always thought of linear TV as an awareness channel. Yes, it'll drive performance, but it was considered to be a high-reach awareness channel. That still applies on CTV. The household mechanics and the psychological dynamics are still the same."
Too many brands, Nyurenberg argued, are stuck in a “death loop,” chasing platform-reported direct response numbers that don’t reflect real growth. They end up paying to acquire the same customers they would have gotten anyway, while failing to bring new audiences into the funnel. The way out, he said, is to stop treating CTV like a pure digital channel.
The hybrid model: "We need to think of CTV as a combo of linear and digital," he continued. "We can't apply just straight digital thinking to it, because we'll just end up with the same problems that we currently have."
The first mistake advertisers make is assuming CTV offers the same one-to-one targeting as online display. The reality, Nyurenberg asserted, is that it's a household-level medium, and ignoring this fact not only leaves the majority of the potential audience on the table, it also creates a costly bidding war for a fraction of the inventory.
The addressability myth: "We're not as addressable as we like to think. Maybe 20% to 40% of people are actually addressable, and if you target only that segment, you sacrifice the other 60% of the audience. In CTV, where inventory is already limited compared to the open web, you shrink your impression pool and end up bidding against other advertisers for the same users, which drives up CPMs."
After establishing CTV as a household medium, the challenge becomes identifying the right households. Nyurenberg argued that looking at raw lead data is misleading and that true customer profiles only emerge when analyzing those who actually convert into paying customers.
Leads vs. customers: For one B2C financial services company, the leads looked scattered with no clear profile, making targeting difficult. "There wasn't really a targeted profile. But when it came to the actual closed leads, a very clear demographic audience emerged: people who were suburban, family-focused, and affluent. These were people who lived in larger, four-bedroom, single-family homes with household incomes of $125k+ and in the 40-50 age demographic."
The geo-targeting playbook: "In the last election," he noted, "one of the reasons the Trump campaign did so well with minorities is because they had a geo-targeting strategy. It was audience-based targeting that was simply layering on zip codes, which is how I advocate buying." He applies this by creating multiple targeting groups: one for zip codes where customers are already concentrated, another for "lookalike" zip codes with similar demographics, and a third focused on high-lifetime-value areas.
Of course, the primary obstacle for many advertisers is cost. The massive price discrepancy between cheap linear TV and expensive CTV creates a "sticker shock" that pushes brands toward flawed, low-cost strategies in a desperate search for efficiency. This pressure to lower costs leads to a dangerous consequence: the pursuit of cheap, misleading metrics through a tactic Nyurenberg called "IP bombing." It's the CTV equivalent of the notorious "cookie bombing," designed to generate illusory performance.
The dirty secret: "The dirty secret of performance CTV, especially when chasing that race to the bottom, is it's all IP bombing. It’s a similar concept to cookie bombing from display and online video. In CTV, you deliver as many impressions as possible, try to hit as many IP addresses as possible, and then hopefully some of those IP addresses will convert regardless of whether or not the ads drove them. Then you'll look good on performance."
Brands who break free from this cycle do so by courageously pivoting away from pure direct-response metrics and embracing CTV's true role as an awareness-driving channel. Nyurenberg used the example of an ecommerce platform which moved away from a myopic focus on CPA after realizing its third-party attribution numbers didn't match its own business results. The solution was to value incremental reach, even if it meant buying more expensive media.
"When they started doing that, the direct response numbers didn't look so great, but on the back end, their own business numbers started looking better. It was a move away from strictly optimizing towards a direct response number to valuing incremental reach, which is what TV is about," said Nyurenberg. "You have the direct response numbers as well, and you manage both in sync with each other. That produced better results on the back end, even though the direct response performance didn't look as strong."
