How one app is putting performance at the center of its CTV strategy

As streaming gives advertisers more precise ways to reach audiences, test messages and connect exposure to business results, CTV is becoming a practical performance channel for brands that are willing to bring more rigor to audience strategy, creative testing and measurement. 

Mistplay takes an audience-first approach on CTV

Demand-side platform operators see this shift every day as advertisers ask CTV to work harder across the full campaign lifecycle, from audience discovery and activation to optimization and measurement. 

That work starts with having a sharp understanding of where valuable audiences spend time. For some brands, it may mean reaching viewers in premium streaming environments. For others, it may mean testing free ad-supported television (FAST) networks, mobile-adjacent viewing behaviors or more specific audience segments that traditional TV cannot isolate.

During a Tinuiti Live panel earlier this year, mobile gaming loyalty app Mistplay offered an example of how advertisers are putting that approach into practice. Mistplay identified mobile gamers who also watched meaningful amounts of streaming content, then leveraged CTV to reach those users beyond the bottom-funnel channels where many app marketers concentrate spend.

“Starting audience-first, we were able to work with Tinuiti and Nexxen to find an opportunity to reach these users outside of bottom-funnel performance digital channels like Facebook or Google,” said Noa Gutterman, svp of marketing at Mistplay. “We started pretty small, with some FAST networks, Tubi, Roku and Hulu. We’ve been able to scale it up. CTV now represents about 25% to 30% of our total media mix every month.”

Speaking at the same panel, Pete Harrison, independent media consultant at Running Start Marketing, said he sees the same thing happening across B2B and B2C clients. The value of CTV, he said, increasingly comes down to its ability to target audiences more precisely, test across more inventory and evaluate performance with the same discipline marketers expect from digital channels.

“The B2B answer is the B2C answer: it’s all about targeting,” he said. “You can zero in on an audience, even if it’s relatively small. You’ll just spend less money, but you want to put your dollars against that audience. That’s a big advantage of CTV.”

Creative becomes part of the test

Creative is also an important part of the CTV performance model. Marketers have often assumed that CTV requires expensive, high-production creative before they can test the channel. But the better starting point is whether creative can be tested, compared and optimized against real performance signals.

Gutterman underscored that point when discussing Mistplay’s creative approach. “On quality, there is no direct correlation between how much you spent on the spot and how well it does,” she said. “That can be frustrating. A company and brand team might roll out new brand spots to replace existing creative, but the right way to do that is to roll the new spots into an A/B test against the existing creative.”

The most useful creative standard for performance CTV is whether an ad helps marketers learn which messages, formats and audience pairings drive results, not whether the ad looks expensive. As targeting becomes more precise, creative can become more precise as well, allowing advertisers to adapt messages to the audience, context and environment.

Measurement closes the loop

Once creative and audience strategies are more tailored, measurement can help marketers identify which combinations are driving results. Because customer journeys span platforms and devices, that requires more than any single platform’s reporting. Marketers need a view of performance that allows them to compare audiences, inventory and channels on a consistent basis, according to Harrison.

“Some clients are in too much of a rush to get to incrementality and don’t ground the attribution and measurement first,” Harrison said. “Tinuiti and Nexxen do a good job being transparent and allowing you to take all the CTV matches and back out all your other paid channels, and that direct attribution is a good starting point because it gives you a sense of how incremental it is. You can also take a data platform like Nexxen and do ghost bidding and lift analysis on a network-by-network basis.”

The value of CTV measurement also depends on whether performance data is transparent and actionable, Harrison said. “Transparency on data and measurement, I’d probably put at the top of the list,” he said. “Access to a lot of inventory and targeting at low rates is super important. Don’t walk in the door and force, ‘We want to run on Netflix and Prime, and that’s it.’ Run 10 or 20 options and see what the best outcomes are. Run across all the devices.”

The goal is to establish a practical framework that helps teams make better budget decisions, according to Harrison. With data access and partner transparency in place, it becomes easier for advertisers to evaluate CTV across networks, audiences and inventory sources.

The next step is structuring the test in a way that gives CTV enough time to perform. Brands don’t have to approach CTV with a traditional TV mindset, but they do need to give the channel enough time and structure to generate useful performance signals, Harrison said.

“It is not a good idea to run a two- or four-week test because you will not have time to optimize the media,” he said. “It is much better to spend less and run it longer so you have weekly cycles to optimize results.”

That is where CTV’s performance opportunity becomes clearest. The channel works best when marketers treat each campaign as a structured learning cycle: define the audience, test the creative, read the signals and refine the investment.

Partner insights from Nexxen