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🚨 CTV Is Eating the Funnel: Why Brand vs. Performance No Longer Matters
— or how your living room became the QVC deathmatch nobody asked for.
You thought you were watching a cooking show. You were actually halfway through a conversion funnel disguised as entertainment.
Welcome to Connected TV in 2025, where the old-school marketing funnel has been flattened like your grandma’s kugel after a power outage. Awareness? Consideration? Conversion? Cute. Roku and Samsung just shoved them into a single screen, gave them matching jerseys, and called it performance branding. Or brandformance. Or whatever buzzword sounds like it came out of a late-stage VC pitch deck.
This isn’t storytelling with a soft sell. It’s storytelling with a knife.
🟣 Roku: The Checkout Button Disguised as a Remote
Peter Hamilton isn’t just playing 4D chess. He’s flipping the board. Roku’s entire CTV strategy reads like someone merged Meta’s Ads Manager with a Best Buy circular and force-fed it to your home screen.
Roku’s shoppable play is no longer an experiment—it’s the main dish. You see a toaster in the background of a cooking segment? It’s in your cart. You linger on a yoga ad? Congratulations, you just bought a mat, leggings, and a lifetime of retargeting.
They’ve turned the remote into a checkout trigger. One wrong click and you’re the proud owner of a weighted blanket and a subscription to artisanal pickles.
And the data? Oh, the data. Roku knows more about your binge habits than your therapist does about your childhood trauma.
🖥️ Samsung: The TV That Knows You’re Sad and Shows You Soup Ads
Samsung is doing something sneakier. No QR codes screaming for attention. No QVC revival aesthetics.
Instead, Samsung is quietly mining everything you watch, from HDMI inputs to that Netflix docuseries about serial killers you pretend you don’t like. Thanks to ACR, your TV knows what’s on screen even when it’s not from Samsung.
Watching a romcom? Here comes a fertility ad. Tuning into Law & Order? Say hello to five insurance brands and a personal injury lawyer with unnervingly good hair.
Samsung isn’t playing at shoppable. It’s going full Minority Report—with your viewing habits as the predictor.
📉 Why Marketers Can’t Afford to Pick a Side
Still separating “brand” and “performance”? That’s adorable.
Here’s the hard truth:
Brand ads without action? You’re burning money.
Performance ads without soul? You’re a pop-up with delusions of grandeur.
CTV demands both — simultaneously.
📌 The funnel is gone. In its place is a flat, aggressive pitch deck that loads in 4K and knows when you last watched a Marvel movie.
We’re living in a world where every impression is expected to do something—drive a click, a cart, a conversion, a sneeze. And if it doesn’t, there’s another screen ready to take its place.
⚠️ The Inevitable Burnout: CTV’s Existential Threat
Let’s state the obvious: this works. For now.
But the over-optimization disease is real.
📺 Too many "buy now" moments, and your couch becomes a sales floor.
💀 Too many conversion-first creatives, and brand equity starts to rot.
📉 Too many metrics, and the CPMs crash harder than a crypto startup.
CTV is on the cusp of becoming the new banner ad: ignored, hated, blocked.
🎯 Who’s Winning?
🛍️ DTC brands are loving it. They finally got TV to behave like search ads.
🧠 Retail media addicts are eating up closed-loop attribution like it’s Thanksgiving dinner.
💡 Hybrid storytellers who can sell without screaming are the new Mad Men.
The rest? Screaming into Slack threads about “brand lift” while their competitors rack up conversions.
🔮 Bottom Line: The Funnel’s Flat, and Your TV’s the Cash Register
CTV didn’t just kill the funnel. It buried it behind a UI tile and put a QR code on the tombstone.
This is the moment. Either evolve and embrace the collapse—or get steamrolled by a TV that sells more socks than your Shopify storefront.
The ads are unskippable.
The data is endless.
The viewer is… kind of tired, but still buying.
