Social has become the gold standard for a reason: it gives marketers a way to connect precise targeting, creative variations, and performance feedback in one fast-moving loop.

CTV hasn’t always had that same advantage. While it offers brands premium environments and high-impact storytelling, for many marketing teams, CTV still operates a lot like traditional TV.

That gap is getting harder to defend. Audiences don’t experience media in silos. Today, they scroll, stream, search, and shop in one connected journey. Modern marketers need creative operations to match that reality.

The opportunity now is clear: make CTV as precise, agile, and performance-driven as social.

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Marketers Know CTV Can Work Harder

Marketers know CTV is valuable, but are questioning whether their current tools and workflows are helping efforts reach their full potential.

Forrester Consulting research commissioned by Smartly in 2026 found overwhelming interest in bringing social-grade creative efficacy to CTV. Marketers want the ability to create ads that capture attention, drive engagement, and cause conversions with the same cadence they expect from social.

The data also points to an important shift in how marketers think about performance. CTV success is no longer just about where ads run or who they reach. Creative speed and variation are now just as critical.

In fact, 95% of marketers agree that the variety and speed of creative variations in a CTV campaign have a greater impact on performance outcomes than audience targeting alone. That’s where the next wave of CTV performance will come from.

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CTV Has a Creative Cycle Problem

Marketers know exactly where the biggest barriers to better CTV performance are. The top challenges with producing and optimizing CTV include:

• Not having the right tools — Only 52% of respondents cite being “Very satisfied” with their tools for testing CTV ads, with 40% indicating not havinghe proper tools is one of their organization’s top challenges with producing and optimizing CTV ads.
• Creative cycles that are significantly slower than social — Just 5% of respondents take less than one day to produce a new creative variant for CTV, compared to 12% for social media.

That should sound familiar to any team that has tried to adapt a big TV spot into a modern, cross-channel campaign.

The problem usually starts with production. CTV creative often moves through heavier workflows with more rigid approval structures and longer production cycles. By the time an asset is ready, teams have fewer opportunities for testing and adapting.

Social works differently because it’s built around variation at its core. One idea is designed to become dozens of executions. Teams can test various aspects with a creative system designed to learn. CTV needs that same muscle.

That doesn’t mean CTV needs to copy social creative outright. They’re two separate environments with vastly different pacing and context. It means bringing the creative discipline of social into CTV with more versions, faster testing, and smarter optimization.

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The Cost Myth is Starting to Break

One of the most persistent myths around CTV is that scaling creative is simply too costly. Traditional TV production has conditioned marketers to think of video creative as expensive. If every variation requires a new shoot and a long approval process, creative scale feels impossible.

But that’s not the only model anymore. With the right tools, teams can create more variations without starting from scratch every time. A single concept can quickly become a system of creative assets.

Marketers already know strong creative drives stronger performance. They’re asking for the infrastructure to make creative work harder and the confidence before spend goes live.

That’s why preflight intelligence and credible incrementality testing stand out as two of the top capabilities giving marketers confidence in bringing social-grade creative to CTV.

Preflight intelligence helps teams understand what’s likely to work before a campaign launches. Meanwhile, credible incrementality testing helps them understand what actually worked after it runs. Together, they reduce the guesswork on both sides of the campaign.

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Measurement Must Catch Up to Creative Ambition

Marketers also see CTV’s influence beyond the streaming screen. CTV can drive downstream performance across other channels.

Half of respondents said a stronger halo effect from CTV on branded search is a key benefit of bringing social-grade creative to CTV. However, the challenge lies in proving it with enough clarity to make better decisions as 62% report an inability to measure the halo effect of CTV on search and social.

If teams can’t see creative-level performance, they can’t confidently decide which variations deserve more investment. Similarly, if they can’t measure incrementality, they’re left debating whether performance would have happened anyway.

Creative optimization depends on measurement clarity. Without it, teams are stuck making decisions based on incomplete signals. That’s why CTV needs a connected system for planning, creating, activating, and measuring creative performance.

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AI’s Role in CTV

Unsurprisingly, marketers are looking at AI as part of the answer. Applying agentic AI to CTV workflows is a significant opportunity for modern marketers. But AI only creates value when it has a clear role. For CTV, that role shouldn’t be “make more stuff” for the sake of volume. Instead, AI should help teams make smarter decisions across the entire CTV workflow.

AI shouldn’t replace the creative judgment of a human marketer. Instead, it should remove the bottlenecks that keep good creative from reaching its full potential.

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The Future Of CTV Is Connected

The strongest signal in the research may be what marketers say they need most to make social-grade creative work on TV: a single platform that optimizes social and CTV creative. Fifty-six percent of respondents feel having a single platform that optimizes social and CTV creative is the determinant of how well social-grade creative performs on CTV.

If audiences move fluidly between social and streaming, marketing teams cannot afford disconnected workflows. Creative insights from social should inform CTV, just as CTV learnings should inform social. Measurement should be comparable enough for teams to understand what’s working and how to improve.

Right now, fragmentation makes everything harder than it should be. A single platform creates a different operating model by giving teams one place to connect creative, media, and measurement across channels. That’s how CTV starts to move (and perform) more like social.

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CTV’s Creative Upgrade is Already Underway

CTV is entering a new phase. The first phase was about reach. The next was about targeting and activation. The latest opportunity is creative performance.

Marketers need better ways to make ads perform. They need faster creative cycles, stronger predictive intelligence, and measurement that can prove impact across the funnel.

But most importantly, marketers need a workflow that treats CTV like the digital performance channel it has become. The old way was to produce one polished spot, launch it, and hope it carried the campaign for months. The new way is to build creative systems that learn.

Social has proved the results of faster, smarter creative. Now CTV has the chance to do the same, with the scale and storytelling power of the biggest screen in the home. And that’s how CTV becomes one of the most performance-ready channels in the media mix.

Download the full Forrester Consulting thought leadership paper, CTV Needs A Creative Upgrade: Lessons From Social Media’s Playbook, to see what marketers need next and how social-grade creative can help CTV reach its full potential.

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