Start your engines because Q4 is coming! Okay friends, it's about that time. I know that everyone is having fun and enjoying summer, but Q4 is right around the corner which means the time to start prepping was yesterday.

When you think about your working media dollars and your channel mix to drive the maximum amount of attention and click-through during the Q4 and Q5 holiday sales period, I bet there's one channel that you're not thinking about enough. And that's connected TV.

I want to put some numbers to it so you understand why I think this is such a big opportunity. First of all, did you know that 33.8 billion hours were streamed on Roku devices from October 1st to January 15th last year (Roku Internal Data, 2026)? Or that the number 1 week for streaming hours on Roku in 2025 was the “Cyber 5” aka the 5 day stretch from Thanksgiving Day to Cyber Monday (Roku Internal Data, Q4 2025–Jan 15, 2026)? That is the absolute peak buying period for eCommerce brands which means that if you're not showing up on this channel at that time, you're missing out on some serious attention and revenue potential.

The reality is that holiday streaming is basically a household tradition at this point. During the holidays, families and friends get together and what do they want to do? They want to watch TV and movies together in order to take a break from the busyness and demands of their daily lives. We've all been there, and I'm sure it's something you and your family have done together too. So people sit on the couch, the TV goes on, and it stays on for most of the week.

This is exactly when you want consumers to see your brand. Not on a 5-inch smartphone but on a 65-inch 4K TV. Another reason you want to be here is because consumers actually watch your ads! According to this report, CTV ads complete at 90–98%, vs social video ads which complete at 15–50%. That is a massive difference and it makes a ton of sense to me. When you're watching your favorite show or movie and an unskippable ad comes on for 15, 30, or 60 seconds, you watch it. Unlike when you're scrolling on social media and when an ad pops up that you don't want to watch, you can swipe or scroll away within half a second.

I also tend to think the ads are just better on CTV. When you're producing content for the big screen, brands tend to spend more time on the production, storytelling, and getting a message across that's fun and entertaining to fit the medium. Paid social has a lower threshold to test, so you often see sloppier ads getting cranked out there.

Plus, in case this wasn't obvious, the consumer is extremely ready to buy! Everyone is thinking about Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales and deals. They're all doing their research. They're all paying attention to what promos and ads brands are running, and they've almost all put together a budget with lists of things they might want to buy before the end of the year. Hitting them with an ad on the big screen right at the moment they're most ready to buy is exactly why I think the impressions on CTV are underpriced.

How underpriced you might ask? Well, if you've ever run ads on paid search or paid social during Q4, you know that holiday CPMs on these channels can spike as much as 66% as competition for Black Friday and Cyber Monday attention peaks. Literally every mature brand doing DTC sales is spending money to win the war of attention and convert that consumer into revenue for their business. So if you can get ads on a screen size that is a hundred times the visual real estate of an iPhone for 2-3X less than paid search or paid social, you can capture more hearts and minds before they make that final decision to buy. All of my CMOs, CFOs and finance friends will appreciate just how important this is. So when you're doing your Q4 media planning to find underpriced levers and get more impact for the dollars you already plan to spend, CTV is a great place to look.

Going Live on CTV

Okay, so now you know that you probably want to be running CTV in Q4 but you're thinking, "Nik, I don't have a $100K+ budget to make this work!” Well, I have some very good news for you because the truth is, you don't need a big agency or a big budget anymore to get started on CTV. Roku Ads Manager killed that. It's fully self-serve and you can launch a campaign in minutes with a $500 minimum and you keep full control to adjust as the campaign evolves. If your Black Friday creative is winning, scale it. If it's not, kill it. It's the same approach you'd take to running paid search or paid social, just on the biggest screen in the house.

And the targeting is where it gets really interesting for DTC brands. Because Roku has data from over a hundred million consumers and hundreds of billions of watch hours, you can build super high-intent audiences. You can also upload your own customer lists, and if an email you have on file matches a user with a Roku account, you can target them directly. This isn't spray and pray TV. You can also go hyperlocal and target down to the DMA, ZIP code, or neighborhood level. If you're a brand with retail doors, a restaurant group, or a service business, that means you can use your budget to drive in-store foot traffic and calls in your actual service area instead of impressions three states away. This is super powerful and something Jennifer Aniston's LolaVie did as they ran Roku ads to drive in-store foot traffic to nearby Ulta’s which sold her products.

The OK button is the new add to cart

There's one more big reason why getting started on CTV makes a lot of sense. A few years ago, if you wanted to run TV ads, the best thing you could do was to show a custom URL on the screen with yourbrand.com/tv and hope they remember that or show them a QR code that users would have to pull out their phone to scan in order to get to your website.

Now, Roku's Action Ads collapsed that entire process from awareness to purchase. With Action Ads, Roku gives brands the ability to have a clickable link inside their ad on TV so when a viewer sees your ad, they can press OK on their remote, and they can shop, learn more, or get a text. With Shopify and Roku Pay, they can even check out right on the screen too. That means they don't need their phone and they don’t need to scan a QR code in order to spend money with your brand. You can get direct conversions from CTV without anyone leaving their couch or picking up a second screen.

And the data backs it up. Roku users are 118x more likely to pick up the remote and press OK than to scan a QR code based on the internal data they have from brands running these types of ads. Action Ads also drive a 47% increase in purchase intent and a 31% increase in brand awareness compared to standard Roku video ads.

Basically, the geniuses at Roku figured out how to make CTV a direct response channel where consumers can not only watch but they can buy as they are viewing your ads. I've seen how powerful this is from a handful of brands I've worked with who have been using this and it's completely changed how they approach CTV. After decades of viewers passively watching TV commercials, the consumer's couch has become a new point of sale.

3 final tips if you're going to run CTV in Q4

Because I love writing about tactics and giving you some insights on how to make your campaigns perform, here are a few more tips for you.

1. Put the prompt in the creative. Roku's early findings showed a 20% improvement in response rate when the video includes a direct voiceover telling the viewer to press OK on their remote. Don't assume they know the ad is interactive. Tell them in the ad!

2. Design for what Roku calls “Dwell time.” When you do run an action ad, you want to leave the banner up to click OK for as long as you possibly can. Roku reports a 96% correlation between on-screen dwell time of an action ad pop up and conversions, with the average Action Ad dwell time of 24 seconds. That's nearly double the engagement of a standard 30 second spot.

3. Get in before the Cyber 5. If the biggest streaming weekend of the year is Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, you don't want your first ad going live that week. You want to launch by October, let the closed-loop measurement tell you what's working, and scale into the peak period with proven creative and audiences.

When it comes to Q4 media planning, you need all the tools in your toolkit to make sure that your BFCM and Q4/Q5 go as well as they possibly can. If you want to take advantage of a huge and growing channel with massive reach, a much bigger creative canvas, competitive CPMs, and action ads to drive direct conversions, I recommend giving them a try. Just go here, spend 30 minutes this week, and get your first campaign live.

Okay, that's all for now. I'll see you back here soon. Thanks for reading!

-Nik