By Alistair Goodman, Co-Founder, Emodo
Pinterest’s recent acquisition of TVScientific marked a turning point. It was the clearest sign yet that the future of CTV won’t rely on premium inventory, but will belong to those who deliver provable, repeatable performance outcomes. When a major discovery platform decides that CTV must behave more like Search and Social, it confirms what many in the industry have sensed: CTV is entering its Outcomes Era.
For the last decade, much of the open internet has been fighting the wrong battle in CTV. We optimized supply paths, curated “premium” video, and improved workflow plumbing. Meanwhile, Google and Meta quietly reset expectations. Their AI-optimized ecosystems now deliver 18–22% more conversions because they treat creative, audiences, and inventory as a unified, constantly learning model.
They won not because their placements are superior, but because their performance is.
And that performance gap is becoming existential. Streaming services are pouring billions into content while struggling to translate audience growth into monetization. Programmatic CTV still largely trades on completion rates and basic household targeting. Neither metric answers the main question CFOs are asking: “If we move money into CTV, will it perform as well as it does with Google or Meta?”
Until the answer becomes a confident “yes,” budgets will continue flowing toward walled gardens.
From premium supply to performance-first CTV
The traditional TV mindset of linear budgets, static creative and post-campaign analysis no longer aligns with the allocation of digital budgets. In a world where AI-driven platforms automatically optimize creative assets, audiences, and bid strategies, CTV must evolve from a branding environment into a full-funnel performance channel.
That shift requires several steps:
- AI-optimized creative that adapts based on real-time signals
- Predictive audiences informed by behavioral insights rather than broad household demographics
- Inventory and context intelligence capable of understanding content type, user state and viewing patterns
- Transparent measurement focused on lift, attribution, and real business impact
This mirrors the optimization stacks that turned Search and Social into must-have budget lines.
Pinterest’s move validates what many have discussed behind closed doors: The walls between video, social, and CTV are falling. Platforms win by delivering performance. Formats that can’t prove outcomes shrink.
Why pause ads reveal the future of CTV performance
Pause ads are a microcosm of the broader CTV opportunity.
Buyers tend to like them, but access is limited, activation is often bespoke, and measurement rarely extends beyond QR scans. A pervasive myth is that pause inherently equals attention, and therefore performance.
Viewability, though, does not equal attention, and attention does not equal outcomes.
The real opportunity is to transform pause moments into a high-intent performance surface powered by signals indicating whether the viewer is actually present, dynamic creative variations optimized through ongoing testing, household-level identity graphs enabling cross-device follow-up, and outcome data (scans, visits, purchases) fed back into AI models.
When treated this way, pause ads become a laboratory for what AI-driven, context-aware, outcome-optimized CTV can achieve at scale.
They offer a preview of a world where creative is fluid, audiences are predictive, and optimization happens continuously.
Transparent, Auditable AI: The New Industry Requirement
AI will define the future of CTV, but not in the black-box form that once dominated digital advertising. Marketers want the intelligence of machine learning and explicit visibility into which signals drove the decisions. The next generation of CTV solutions must support privacy-safe, household-level attribution; deep integrations with MMM, MTA, and incrementality systems; clear supply-path transparency and compliance; predictive modeling that consistently outperforms demographic targeting; and real-time creative and bidding decisions guided by measurable outcomes.
These capabilities are now technologically feasible, and increasingly demanded.
Why this moment is an inflection point
Three converging forces make this the biggest opportunity yet for CTV:
- Performance accountability is now absolute. Eighty-five percent of CTV buys are already programmatic. Consolidation is accelerating. Every dollar must justify itself. Performance has become table stakes.
- AI has reset marketer expectations. Search and Social have conditioned advertisers to expect nonstop creative testing, automated optimization, and performance lift.
- Publishers need innovation they can’t build alone. Fragmented integrations, static formats, and slow update cycles limit the value of even the best content. Publishers need scalable performance innovation.
Pinterest saw these forces clearly. Others will follow. The main question now: Who will adapt quickly enough to lead in the Outcomes Era?
