Where CTV Fits in the Media Mix
CTV is becoming more measurable, but the bigger shift may be how that measurement influences media allocation. New Lifesight research suggests CTV can affect search, social and second-screen behavior.
Connected TV has steadily moved beyond its traditional role as an upper-funnel awareness channel. As marketers gain more ways to connect CTV exposure with digital activity and business outcomes, the question is increasingly not simply whether CTV works, but where it belongs within the broader media mix.
That question is particularly relevant for multi-location brands. National and regional CTV campaigns can create demand across a brand’s footprint, while search, social and local media capture consumers closer to individual locations. Measuring those channels separately can make it difficult to understand which media actually influenced the customer and, ultimately, where the next advertising dollar should go.
New research from unified measurement platform Lifesight explores that issue in The State of CTV Measurement 2026: Navigating the Full-Funnel of CTV. Among its findings, the report says CTV exposure was associated with a 22.3% lift in paid-search conversion rates and an 8.5% increase in paid-social conversions, suggesting television’s impact can surface downstream in channels that ultimately receive the conversion credit.
Creating Demand Versus Capturing It
For Rajeev Nair, Co-Founder and CPO at Lifesight, that distinction exposes a weakness in how marketers frequently evaluate media. “Marketers often overvalue the channels that capture demand while undervaluing the channels that create it,” Nair told Street Fight. As a result, he said, last-click conversion rates and direct-response ROAS can become the definitive measures of a channel’s value, particularly for paid search.
For a multi-location brand, the distinction is important. A CTV campaign might introduce a consumer to a restaurant chain, retailer, fitness brand or home-services company, but the eventual conversion could begin days later with a branded search, social interaction or search for a nearby location.
If measurement gives the final interaction all the credit, the channel that created the initial demand can appear less productive than the channel that captured it. That doesn’t mean search deserves less investment. It means evaluating search, social, CTV and local media independently can provide an incomplete picture of how the channels work together.
CTV’s Place in the Multi-Location Media Mix
The shift increasingly positions CTV somewhere between traditional brand advertising and performance marketing. For multi-location brands, the customer journey might move from CTV exposure to search or social activity, then to local discovery and eventually an individual store, restaurant or service location.
That has implications for agencies making media-allocation decisions. If CTV is evaluated primarily against direct-response conversions while paid search receives credit for last-click activity, budget can naturally migrate toward the channel closest to the transaction even when another channel helped create the demand.
The opposite assumption is equally problematic. Marketers shouldn’t automatically credit CTV with every downstream increase in branded search or social conversion simply because someone was exposed to an ad. The more useful question is whether adding CTV produced business outcomes that otherwise would not have occurred.
That shifts CTV measurement from an attribution exercise toward a media-allocation tool, helping brands and agencies determine not just what happened, but where additional investment is most likely to produce incremental results.
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Second Screens Create New Signals
Changing consumer behavior is also narrowing the distance between television exposure and measurable digital activity. Lifesight’s report found that 31% of viewers have used a second screen to shop through a QR code or shopping link during a show.
Nair said those interactions currently provide some of CTV’s clearest attribution signals because they establish a relatively direct connection between television exposure and subsequent mobile action. Visual search could eventually strengthen that connection further as technologies such as Google Lens make content appearing on a screen another starting point for product discovery, search and commerce.
For multi-location brands, the opportunity isn’t limited to ecommerce. A restaurant offer, retail product, fitness promotion or home-service message encountered on CTV can initiate a digital interaction that eventually ends at a physical location. The television screen becomes less isolated from the rest of the customer journey as viewing, mobile activity, search and local conversion increasingly intersect.
Multi-Location Brands Have a Testing Advantage
Proving that influence doesn’t necessarily require a sophisticated measurement operation. In fact, the distributed footprints that make multi-location marketing complicated can provide brands and agencies with a useful testing advantage.
Nair recommends geo-testing as a practical starting point for regional retailers, franchises and other distributed brands. Marketers can identify comparable markets, expose one group to CTV while maintaining another as a holdout, and compare the resulting business outcomes.
“The minimum is a reliable view of business outcomes, basic attribution to understand the data you already have and a way to run simple incrementality tests,” Nair said.
For a restaurant chain, those outcomes might include transactions, sales or visits across comparable markets. A retailer could examine store revenue or new customers, while a home-services franchise could compare leads, appointments or revenue across similar service areas. That moves the analysis beyond whether people exposed to CTV converted andpresents a more consequential question about CTV and incremental business activity.
Incrementality Matters More Than Someone Else’s ROAS
Lifesight’s report includes case studies showing incremental returns from CTV, but Nair cautions marketers against turning an individual advertiser’s results into an industry benchmark.
“I wouldn’t treat a 3x incremental ROAS as a benchmark that another advertiser should expect to reproduce,” he told Street Fight. “The goal isn’t to replicate someone else’s ROAS. It’s to understand the role CTV plays in your own media mix and where it delivers incremental value.”
For multi-location brands, that means identifying markets and audiences where CTV reaches consumers other channels aren’t reaching and determining when additional investment begins to lose efficiency.
That information is ultimately more useful for budget allocation than a generalized ROAS benchmark. A brand doesn’t need to prove that CTV produces the same return as another advertiser. It needs to determine whether moving another dollar into, or out of, CTV improves the performance of its own media mix.
Don’t Replace One Black Box With Another
As measurement becomes more sophisticated, marketers face another risk: replacing opaque platform attribution with equally opaque measurement models.
“No marketer should replace one black box with another,” Nair told Street Fight. He argues that marketers should apply the same scrutiny to measurement providers that they apply to advertising platforms, including understanding assumptions, methodologies and limitations.
That includes Lifesight’s own findings. Nair said the question marketers should ask about figures such as the report’s 22.3% paid-search and 8.5% paid-social lift is whether CTV actually caused those increases. Independent validation and controlled testing remain important before translating correlation into budget decisions.
For agencies, that creates an important role. Measurement isn’t simply about producing more sophisticated dashboards; it is about giving clients enough evidence to make better investment decisions across channels and markets.
Measurement Should Decide What Happens Next
CTV’s evolution creates a larger challenge for multi-location media planning. Brand, performance and local advertising can no longer be evaluated as completely separate activities when consumers move among television, search, social, mobile and physical locations.
Multi-location brands don’t necessarily need to begin with a complex unified measurement platform. They need reliable business outcomes, enough attribution to understand existing activity, and controlled tests capable of determining whether changes in media investment actually change those outcomes. More sophisticated modeling can follow as media volume and complexity increase.
“We’d rather see three well-designed geo-tests produce actionable learning than a dashboard full of metrics that no one can validate,” Nair said. “The value of measurement isn’t in how much it tells you, but in whether it helps you decide what to do next.”
That may be where CTV measurement increasingly fits within the advertising ecosystem. The objective isn’t simply to prove that CTV deserves credit. It’s to determine what incremental demand CTV creates, how that demand moves through other channels and locations, and whether the next media dollar should go there.
