u/Fun_Average_3813

I work for a DTC brand that started testing CTV with a pretty small monthly budget, because the self-serve platforms made it feel approachable compared to traditional TV buying. At first it was great: easy setup, fast creative testing, decent targeting, and enough reporting to justify continuing.

Now that we are about to scale and leadership wants CTV treated like a serious growth channel, which is a problem bc we’re already running into questions around frequency control, overlapping audiences, incrementality, creative fatigue, inventory quality, and whether platform-reported performance is enough to make bigger spend decisions.

For those who have scaled self serve CTV beyond the initial test phase, did it get to a point where it felt limiting or were you able to scale?

We’ve scaled self-serve CTV over the past 9 months and it’s become a meaningful part of our broader acquisition stack alongside paid social, search, display, and retargeting.

At lower spend levels, it felt incredibly efficient: quick launches, reasonable CPMs, solid reach, and enough lift to justify continued investment. But as spend increased and we integrated it more deeply with the rest of the stack, a few challenges became harder to ignore.

Cross-channel frequency management is messy, audience overlap is difficult to quantify cleanly, attribution becomes increasingly modeled, and CTV creative cycles move much slower than the rest of the stack. The channel still appears valuable, but operationally it becomes harder to optimize with confidence as scale increases.

So for folks running multi-channel programs without isolating CTV, how are you resolving this? We're looking into investing in external measurement tools and having secluded KPIs for CTV, but I'm curious if there's a better way to go about it that does not involve moving away from self-serve entirely.

I’m on an in-house growth team at a mid-market SaaS company (~$25M ARR), and we’re in the middle of 2026 planning. Historically, our budget has been pretty straightforward: heavy on paid search (high intent, easy to justify), and paid social (Meta + LinkedIn for pipeline), and basically zero on CTV.

Now leadership is pushing us to “diversify” and start carving out budget for CTV - not just a test, but something meaningful. The argument is that search is getting more expensive/saturated, paid social performance is less predictable, and CTV could help us drive more top-of-funnel demand and brand lift.

The problem is we’re stuck on how to actually split budget without killing efficiency: Search still drives our most measurable pipeline, paid social is hit-or-miss but important for scaling, and CTV feels promising, but hard to attribute and justify at our size.

For other mid-market teams Is CTV becoming a permanent line item, or still an experimental bucket? And what signals are you using to justify shifting spend away from channels with clearer attribution?