8 CTV Advertising Examples: What Ran, Where, and What It Delivered

Search for CTV advertising examples and the same few campaigns keep circulating, usually with the year stripped out and the source three blog posts back. One of the most widely republished results on the topic is from 2018; another describes a brand relaunch that ran across five media channels, only one of which was streaming.

The eight campaigns below ran between 2024 and 2026 on Roku, The Trade Desk, Samsung, Disney, Hulu, and Reddit, and every one of them names its brand. Each entry sets out what ran, where it ran, who it targeted, what it delivered, and which company published the number, with a link to the original. The budgets range from a furniture retailer's small trial to a global technology brand buying programmatically across two streamers, and where a figure comes from the platform that sold the media, the entry says so.

TL;DR: Key takeaways

• Self-serve platforms changed who can buy TV. Four of the eight campaigns ran through interfaces a two-person marketing team can operate, with no agency, no insertion order, and no upfront commitment. A regional dealer group and a wellness startup now buy the same inventory as national advertisers.
• Audience logic decides performance more than budget size does. The strongest results came from campaigns built on first-party data, retail-media signals, or purchase-intent segments, with past customers suppressed. The weakest CTV buying still starts from available inventory and works backward.
• Interactive formats moved from experiment to line item. Shoppable overlays, pause units, and remote-activated calls to action carried real revenue in five of these campaigns, and agencies now plan them as a fixed share of CTV budgets instead of a quarterly experiment.
• Cost per outcome separates the eight from the field. Cost per unique household, cost per completed view, and cost per page view appear in almost every one. Impression counts and completion rates appear as context, never as the result.

What is CTV advertising?

Connected TV advertising delivers video ads to internet-connected television devices—smart TVs, streaming sticks, and consoles—instead of routing them through broadcast or cable. What separates the two for an advertiser is the buying model. Linear sells demographics against fixed time slots, while CTV opens up household-level addressability, programmatic execution, and reporting tied to outcomes.

Viewing has followed the hardware. Streaming took 48.6% of total US TV watch-time in May 2026, per Nielsen's Gauge, though anyone citing a Gauge number this year should know that Nielsen is recalibrating the report against new universe estimates for the coming season, and the post-recalibration shares are expected to read differently.

OTT sits alongside CTV as a description of content delivery, where CTV describes the ad execution.

💡 AI Digital's guide to CTV advertising covers buying models and measurement frameworks in full, and the OTT vs CTV breakdown covers where the two diverge.

How we verified these results

Every figure on this page was traced back to the organization that produced it: the streaming platform, the DSP, the agency, or the trade publication that reported it first. Each entry names its source and links to it, and where a campaign year has been published it appears alongside the result. Where a platform has never published one, the entry says so.

That standard has visible consequences. Platform-reported figures are labeled as such, since a streaming service publishing its own client's results has an obvious interest in the outcome and readers deserve to weigh the number accordingly. Roku accounts for four of the eight campaigns here, a concentration that comes down to disclosure practice: the company publishes considerably more first-party client case studies than anyone else in the market.

Applying the same standard also removed two campaigns that appear on almost every competing list. Volvo's 35% sales lift from interactive CTV traces to a September 2018 Marketing Dive report of an Innovid study, and it now circulates with its date detached. Subway's 33% sales figure comes from the August 2021 results of the "Eat Fresh Refresh" relaunch, which ran across television, digital, social, in-store, and print, and no source attributes that number to connected TV specifically. Accurate in their original contexts, both have since been recycled into claims their sources never made.

What makes a successful CTV ad campaign?

Across wildly different budgets, high-performing connected TV campaigns tend to be assembled the same way, with four components carrying most of the weight.

1. Creative built for the screen and the remote. Short-form video designed for TV consistently outperforms repurposed linear spots, and the addition of a remote-activated action changes what the format can do. A clear opening, one explicit call to action, and messaging aligned to funnel stage produce more downstream response than a longer brand film.
2. Data beyond age and gender. Household-level signals, purchase intent, category browsing, and location proximity give CTV the addressability that linear cannot match. Suppressing recent purchasers is as valuable as adding prospects.
3. Inventory selection and supply quality. Premium, brand-safe environments with high completion rates make sure creative is actually consumed, and programmatic execution lets advertisers control supply paths, bid dynamics, and waste. Inventory strategy operates as a performance lever, not a procurement detail. Fraud and low-quality supply distort results before any of this can be measured, which is covered in AI Digital's guide to CTV ad fraud.
4. Outcome measurement. Linking exposure to conversions, site visits, applications, or revenue, then optimizing mid-flight against those signals, is what separates a scalable CTV program from a one-off test.

Investment is moving toward all four. Seventy percent of US advertisers plan to raise connected TV budgets by an average of 17% in 2026, according to a Premion study reported by eMarketer, with most of that money reallocated from linear TV, display, search, and social. The IAB's 2026 Outlook Study, based on a survey of 205 buy-side executives, projects CTV ad spend growth of 13.8% for the year against a 1.7% decline for linear.

1. fatty15—shoppable CTV for a DTC wellness brand

Platform: Roku Ads Manager with Shopify integration. Published: July 2025, by Roku

fatty15 sells a C15:0 fatty acid supplement into one of the most crowded categories in direct-to-consumer retail, where influencer posts, social ads, and podcast reads compete for the same buyer. The brand wanted a channel that could carry a product explanation and a purchase in the same unit, and it needed to do that with a marketing team small enough that platform complexity was a disqualifier.

What ran: existing video creative uploaded to Roku Ads Manager, no new assets produced, running against wellness-focused streaming audiences. Roku's Shopify integration added shoppable overlays, letting viewers explore the product or buy it with the remote without leaving the show. The team defined site visits and conversions as KPIs up front, tracked results in flight, and retargeted viewers who had already seen the spot.

What it delivered: more than 97,000 page views at a cost per page view of $0.41, and a 120% return on ad spend. Cost per unique household reached came in at $0.03. More than one in four cart additions converted to a purchase, at an average order value of $134.

"In our marketing mix, we want activations that are easier to manage because we just don't have the people or the time to waste on cumbersome platforms," said John Gareau, Chief Revenue Officer at Seraphina Therapeutics, fatty15's parent company.

Why it worked: the campaign removed the gap between seeing the product and buying it. For a considered health purchase that usually needs explanation, compressing discovery and checkout into one screen did more than a longer awareness flight would have.

2. HP—identity-based targeting across two streamers

Platform: The Trade Desk, running on Disney and Hulu. Published: 2024, by The Trade Desk

HP faced the problem every large advertiser hit as third-party cookies degraded: reaching known customers and prospects across screens without the identifier the previous decade's targeting had been built on.

What ran: HP onboarded its own first-party data and activated it through Unified ID 2.0, an email-based identifier, using The Trade Desk's demand-side platform to buy programmatically across Disney and Hulu inventory. Identity Alliance gave the team a unified view of customers across channels and devices, which made household-level targeting more accurate and frequency management more precise.

What it delivered: the campaign reached 8% of an estimated 12.5 million targeted households at an average frequency of 5.7 exposures per household, producing a cost per unique household of $0.16—23% below HP's previous campaign, which had used programmatic guaranteed and private marketplace buying. HP's North America Head of Programmatic, Caitlin Nardi, said the approach increased unique audience reach, improved cost efficacy, and sharpened how the team measured conversions and sales.

Worth reading that number carefully: the 8% describes the share of the target universe the campaign reached, and several published summaries recast it as an 8% increase in reach, which inverts what the case study actually says.

Why it worked: the gain came from frequency control, not from buying more scale. Deduplicating households across two streamers stopped HP paying repeatedly to reach the same living room, and the cost per household fell as a direct result. 

💡 The mechanics of impression-level buying that make this possible are covered in AI Digital's guide to real-time bidding.

3. Chapman Automotive Group—hyperlocal TV for 25 dealerships

Platform: Roku Ads Manager. Published: May 2026, by Roku

Chapman has operated in Arizona since 1966 and runs 25 dealer locations across Phoenix, Tucson, and Yuma. For most individual stores, linear TV never cleared the math.

"For a single dealer with a focused budget, traditional TV never made financial sense," said Chapman's SEM Manager, Brad Axmear. "The CPMs were too high and the audience too broad. You'd be paying for reach that had nothing to do with your market or your buyer."

What ran: a two-tier always-on structure. A corporate Tier 2 campaign built the Chapman name around cultural moments such as football season and the holidays, with creative refreshed a few times a year. A local Tier 3 campaign turned over monthly, reflecting the vehicles actually on each lot and the co-op requirements attached to them. Targeting used first- and third-party data to segment shoppers by new, pre-owned, or general vehicle interest. Roku's pricing let Chapman move from restrictive ZIP-code targeting to broader DMA targeting, which Axmear frames as reach over repetition: a wider net delivers more unique impressions at the same cost without fatiguing a small audience.

What it delivered: more than 45.5 million impressions at a $7.36 effective CPM, reaching over 1.7 million unique households at $0.19 per unique reach. The team runs both campaign tiers without an agency.

Why it worked: the tier split let one buy serve two jobs that usually compete for the same budget. Brand familiarity accrued at the group level while inventory-specific offers ran underneath it, and household-level targeting kept both inside the trade area. 

💡 For campaigns tying streaming exposure to showroom visits, see AI Digital's guides to footfall attribution and geotargeted advertising.

4. Mini USA—sequenced messaging across three marketing tiers

Platform: Samsung Ads. Reported: March 2026, by Marketing Dive from Samsung's NewFronts presentation

Automotive marketing runs on three tiers that rarely coordinate: national brand advertising, regional campaigns, and dealer-level offers. Mini USA used Samsung's AI planning tools to sequence addressable messaging across all three so they stopped competing with each other.

What ran: a campaign that ordered exposures across national, regional, and local automotive tiers, so a household saw brand messaging and dealer-specific messaging in a deliberate order instead of whichever landed first.

What it delivered: a 300% increase in brand favorability and a 200% increase in brand recommendation intent, with participating dealers seeing a 35% conversion lift for new and used vehicles.

Samsung presented these results at its own NewFronts, Marketing Dive reported them without independent verification, and no campaign year has been published, so they belong in the platform-reported column.

Why it worked: sequencing addressed coordination, not reach. Tiered automotive advertising tends to duplicate exposure across all three levels, inflating frequency without adding message value, and putting the exposures in a deliberate order converted that duplication into a story a household could follow. 

💡The same logic applied across screens is covered in AI Digital's guide to multi-touch attribution.

5. Freeway Insurance—local targeting at national volume

Platform: Roku Ads Manager Published: July 2025, by Roku

Freeway Insurance has sold affordable auto insurance since 1987 and operates in 32 states. Competing against legacy national carriers while linear impressions thinned, the company moved budget into streaming, where it needed state-level control without giving up scale.

What ran: streaming video through Roku Ads Manager, with age and income segments defined using Roku's audience insights and geotargeting concentrated on priority markets such as Florida. Freeway has been spending continuously since September 2024. Roku's pixel let the brand define its own KPIs and track when streaming exposure produced website conversions, and real-time reporting on which audiences and regions responded best fed back into subsequent flights.

What it delivered: 215 million impressions, 2.2 million page views on Freeway's website, and 336,000 new leads in the auto vertical.

"The option to create local campaigns and invest more money in specific states is a huge win for us and a reason we'll be including Roku Ads Manager on future marketing campaigns," said Alejandra Morales, media director at Confie, Freeway's parent company.

Why it worked: the campaign treated geography as a budget allocation decision, not a targeting filter. Because state-level performance was visible in flight, Freeway could concentrate spend where conversion rates justified it, which is closer to how paid search budgets are managed than to how television has traditionally been bought. 

💡 The comparison between the two buying models is set out in AI Digital's breakdown of CTV vs linear TV.

6. Zales—turning the pause screen into a storefront

Platform: Wunderkind pause ads. Reported: January 2026, by AdExchanger

Pause advertising exploits a behavior that streaming created and linear never had. Magna and DirecTV research cited in the same report found that 91% of viewers pause either constantly or occasionally while streaming, 92% stay paused for longer than 30 seconds, and more than a third do not leave the room when they do.

What ran: a pause ad campaign for the jewelry retailer with an interactive QR component, placed to appear when viewers paused their content.

What it delivered: a 276% increase in QR code scans during the campaign, which Wunderkind's VP and Head of Sales, Adam Gendelman, said led to a significant increase in attributable sales. The percentage is Wunderkind's own reported figure.

Why it worked: a viewer who has paused has already stopped watching and reached for a phone, so scanning a code costs almost nothing in attention. Second-screening, long treated as the behavior draining attention away from television, becomes the thing that captures it.

Agencies now plan for the category instead of testing it. Crossmedia's group director of integrated investment, Ashley Silver, told Digiday that her clients currently allocate 10 to 15% of CTV spending to interactive or shoppable formats, with Planet Fitness among those investing above that level for promotional campaigns.

7. Blu Dot—full-funnel CTV for a considered purchase

Platform: Roku Ads Manager with Shopify integration. Published: March 2026, by Roku

Furniture sits at the opposite end of the purchase spectrum from impulse retail. Buyers research, compare, and deliberate for weeks. When Blu Dot began testing CTV in 2024, return on ad spend was the metric that would decide whether streaming earned a place in the mix.

What ran: a small trial first, then a scaled full-funnel program timed to the brand's annual sale. Awareness ads built consideration, retargeting converted high-intent site visitors, sale-specific messaging created urgency, and Action Ads added the interactive layer. Targeting covered HGTV viewers, renters, affluent homeowners, and home-improvement shoppers, with past purchasers excluded entirely to keep the focus on new customers. Roku's Shopify integration linked big-screen ad views to purchases completed on phones and laptops, so the campaign launched in days.

What it delivered: the trial reached more than 211,000 households and produced 8,486 page-view conversions, hitting 1,010% ROAS within four weeks. Blu Dot then increased investment tenfold for the sale. Purchase conversions rose from nine a day to 50, page-view conversions passed 50,000, and the 11-week second phase reached 2,308% ROAS—91% higher than the brand's other CTV partners, at lower CPMs. The campaign became always-on.

Why it worked: the team changed the campaign while it was running. On Roku's recommendation, Blu Dot removed age and income constraints in the first week of the sale to widen reach, then moved budget toward custom audiences and retargeting where intent was strongest. Paid Media Strategist Claire Folkestad credited the Shopify connection for making conversion tracking straightforward enough to act on quickly. Optimizing mid-flight, instead of waiting on a post-campaign report, is what turned a test into a permanent channel.

8. Reddit and The Running Man—a first interactive unit

Platform: Reddit, built by its KarmaLab creative unit. Reported: November 2025, by Digiday

This last entry carries no performance figure. It earns its place on what it reveals about where interactive formats come from before they reach the rest of the market.

What ran: Reddit's first interactive ad unit, built for a campaign promoting the Edgar Wright film The Running Man. The company built it as a bespoke execution for a priority advertiser, with no self-serve version behind it.

What it delivered: a working format and a template. Reddit's executives expect the appeal to extend past the entertainment category.

"We're focusing on building more bespoke and custom experiences with our priority and premier advertisers, and then picking up learnings from those builds to inform templates which we'll eventually productize and make programmatically available for all advertisers," said Andy Schneider, head of scale and innovation at KarmaLab.

Why it belongs here: the pipeline for interactive formats starts at exactly this point. Custom builds for large advertisers become templates, templates become programmatic products, and a format that began as a one-off execution ends up within reach of an advertiser spending a few thousand dollars a month. Canvas Worldwide's VP of national digital investment, Vicky Choi, told Digiday that the agency scaled interactive formats from 10% of partner spend to 30% during 2025 alone, and expects to scale further by expanding its partner list. Amazon, Disney, Tubi, and Samsung all released dedicated interactive formats over the same period.

What these eight campaigns have in common

Across eight brands, five platforms, and budgets separated by orders of magnitude, the same four decisions recur.

Audience logic comes before inventory

Every campaign here started from a defined audience and worked outward. 

• First-party data and CRM onboarding drove HP. 
• Purchase-intent segmentation by vehicle category drove Chapman. 
• Loyalty-adjacent behavioral targeting with past purchasers suppressed drove Blu Dot. 
• Geographic precision aligned to service areas drove Freeway.

In practice that means first-party and retail-media audiences, household-level retargeting and suppression, geo-precision drawn along real business boundaries, and intent layering built from recent search or category browsing. 

Curated supply paths such as AI Digital's Smart Supply let brands activate those audiences only across inventory that supports deterministic measurement, so every impression stays eligible for attribution.

Creative is a performance variable

These campaigns treated creative as something to test and rotate, not a fixed asset delivered at launch. Concise formats with a single explicit call to action, commerce-enabled messaging, localized variants matched to household location, and sequential storytelling across exposures all appear. Blu Dot and Chapman both refreshed creative on a schedule tied to inventory and promotions rather than to a campaign calendar, which only works when someone can see which version is earning its slot.

Supply quality sets the price floor

Cost efficiency in these campaigns originated upstream of the auction, in what got filtered out before any bid went in. AI Digital's Smart Supply work with Tier 2 auto advertisers shows the mechanism: applying supply-side intelligence between the SSPs and the DSP, with AI forecasting KPI probability by DMA and audience segment, removed roughly 50% of unqualified traffic before any bid was placed. That produced eCPMs 40 to 79% below market benchmarks across channels, including a $15.02 eCPM on CTV and live sports inventory.

"Filtering out nearly half of unqualified traffic before it ever reached the DSP wasn't just about efficiency—it was about trust. Advertisers could finally see budgets go toward real, in-market impressions instead of invalid traffic and out-of-market waste," said Shannon Marcangelo, Senior Growth Director at Smart Supply.

The same pre-bid approach produced a 19% increase in video completion rate and a 10% reduction in cost per completed view for an entertainment brand through Index Marketplaces, 74% higher CTR in programmatic video for a technology brand with OpenX, and a CPA reduction of more than 50% for an insurance brand with PubMatic. 

💡 Understanding how those rates compare across formats starts with CPM in TV advertising and the differences between CPM, CPC, and CPA.

Measurement decides whether any of it counts

Household exposure matching, cross-device tracking from TV to phone to laptop, transaction matching, offline attribution, and incrementality testing against control groups are what allow these campaigns to be judged at all. CTV breaks the assumption underneath most attribution setups. A viewer watches a 30-second spot on the living-room television, then searches on a phone or buys on a laptop, and click-based attribution hands the credit to that final touch while zeroing out the exposure that started it.

Incrementality testing puts a number on what that mistake costs. Research from INCRMNTAL covering nearly $2 billion in ad spend across more than 50 brands found that CTV generated ten times more conversions than linear TV while using only 60% of the spend, as reported by New Digital Age. 

💡 AI Digital's guide to CTV measurement covers when to use lift studies versus deterministic attribution, and how marketing attribution models handle exposure that never produces a click.

Budgets have begun to follow that evidence. IAB research reported by The Current found that 36% of marketers increasing CTV investment are funding it from social media spend and 32% from paid search.

What these campaigns suggest for 2026

The eight campaigns on this page share a structure far more than they share a budget. A wellness startup running creative it already owned and a global technology brand activating first-party data through a DSP arrived at comparable efficiency because they made the same decisions about audience, creative, supply, and measurement. What separates these results from the median CTV campaign is execution discipline more than spending power.

Several patterns carry directly into planning. 

• Self-serve platforms have removed the budget floor that kept most advertisers off television for decades, which changes who a local business is competing against for attention in its own market. 
• Interactive formats have graduated into standing budget lines, and the agencies scaling them fastest began two years ago. 
• Measurement then governs everything else, since a campaign nobody can attribute is one nobody can defend, renew, or improve.

AI Digital's Smart Supply applies pre-bid intelligence to the supply side so budgets reach qualified inventory, and Elevate connects delivery to business outcomes in place of proxy media metrics. The results referenced throughout this article, along with the full set of campaign detail behind them, are published in AI Digital's case studies.

To discuss what a measurable CTV program would look like for your accounts, get in touch.