By Piper Stull-Lane, Head of Product Marketing at tvScientific
Marketers today work with more data than ever, yet many still struggle to understand whether their advertising is creating real value. Every channel presents its own dashboards and metrics, but these often fail to answer the most important question for a business: Is advertising creating new value, or simply claiming credit for demand that already exists?
CTV is now in a position to help answer that question. Viewers stay with CTV ads and watch with intention. With stronger optimization systems, household-level signals, and clearer ways to understand outcomes, CTV is becoming one of the most reliable channels for showing whether advertising is earning its budget.
This clarity is becoming more important as marketers face growing pressure to prove impact. Leadership teams want confidence that their investments are producing results, not just activity. As this pressure rises, many marketers are beginning to look for a more dependable way to measure true performance. This is where incrementality comes in. Incrementality shows what portion of conversions are actually influenced by advertising and what portion would have occurred naturally. It brings essential context at a time when impressions and click-based metrics often create a misleading picture.
The challenge is not a lack of data. The challenge is that many teams still operate CTV the same way they ran traditional TV. Budgets are fixed in advance. Targeting is narrow. Pacing adjustments happen after the fact instead of while campaigns are live. Reporting arrives too late to inform meaningful decisions. These habits limit the potential of a channel that can learn and adjust quickly.
There is also confusion about what attribution can and cannot reveal. A last-touch report may look clear, but it only reflects one moment in a customer journey. When a strong CTV campaign is running, other channels often appear to improve because CTV lifts results across the marketing mix. Search, organic traffic, and social may seem stronger than usual, even when CTV is the true driver. Without incrementality, it is easy to assume that lower-funnel activity is responsible for growth when it is only capturing demand created elsewhere.
Modern incrementality models help close this gap. They do not rely on user-level tracking or long experiments. They simply measure whether CTV is generating new demand. This gives marketers a more accurate view of what works and how different elements of a campaign contribute to business outcomes. It also creates a more stable foundation for optimization because decisions are based on meaningful results.
When incrementality is combined with broad learning, real-time bidding, frequent creative updates, and precise household-level measurement, CTV becomes a full performance system. The goal is not to over-target or rely on quick signals. The goal is to let the system learn from a wide range of inputs and respond to what matters. Start broad. Adjust based on evidence. Refresh creative often. Measure outcomes with clear standards. Then separate the value that CTV creates from the value other channels receive.
Many marketers struggle with this approach because their organizations are divided into separate teams. Audience insights sit in one place. Creative insights sit in another. Measurement sits somewhere else. These divisions slow down decision-making. Even strong platforms cannot help if insights do not reach the people who need them. When teams connect these signals and work from a shared understanding of performance, CTV begins to function as a coordinated part of the business rather than a standalone channel.
The shift is already underway. More marketers are prioritizing incrementality because they want a simple way to understand whether CTV is generating new outcomes and how those outcomes influence the rest of their advertising. They want transparency, accountability, and a reliable way to defend their budgets.
The future of CTV will reward marketers who embrace this direction. As AI improves optimization, and as measurement becomes more accurate, the strongest systems will be the ones that connect all signals. Optimization, measurement, creative insights, and incrementality will work together in a single loop. Marketers who lean into this will have a clearer view of what their advertising is worth and how to grow it.
In a crowded and competitive media environment, incrementality is becoming a practical way to understand performance — and for marketers prove CTV’s value.
