This email is going to give you some insanely valuable data. Give me a few minutes, and it might just change your Q4.

Okay, friends, every now and again, I get handed a report that changes my perspective on how I should be approaching advertising. This is one of those days.

And because I’m a man of the people, I want you to have this data too, because I think it can transform the way you approach your business, especially as we all operate through Black Friday and the rest of Q4/Q5.

There’s a concept in marketing I’ve been really passionate about for the last 10 years. It can be hard to isolate and measure, but I believe it’s a major reason why brands are ultimately able to scale through digital marketing.

It’s called “The Halo Effect,” and it’s the lift you see across various channels from the advertising or activities you take on others.

For example, when you run an ad on CTV you might be surprised to see an increase in sales from direct traffic, organic search, Amazon or even physical retail. That’s because someone sees your ad on CTV at some point in the customer journey, remembers your brand name or what you sell and then later when they’re ready to buy, they type in your domain or search for you on Google or Amazon or they buy it in store when they see it on the shelf. The channel that captures the purchase gets the credit but we know that CTV played a huge role in getting the customer there.

I think a lot more brands and operators need to take this concept seriously. Investing in top-of-funnel brand marketing and awareness makes your lower-funnel channels perform better. If you’re only measuring where people bought without thinking about the entire customer journey and what made them want to buy in the first place or what made them remember your brand in order to search for you on Google or Amazon or recognize your logo in store, you’re making budget decisions with a large part of the customer journey/story being ignored.

So when I saw this report from Paramount, a lot of it clicked for me. There are findings that line up with everything I believe about the halo effect and omnichannel marketing alongside some other really useful data about how brands can approach CTV more effectively.

If you want the full report, click here. If you want my commentary on the numbers, keep reading.

Okay, let’s get into it!

What’s in This Report?

Paramount surveyed 165 advertisers on the state of advertising and CTV and before you assume this is a bunch of massive companies with unlimited TV budgets, 79% of respondents reported annual revenue below $5 million and 69% spent less than $100,000 a year on digital advertising. So we’re talking about businesses where the founder or operator has to be thoughtful about where their next dollar goes. I think this is super relevant to the folks reading this email. I know we have lots of brands doing 8 and 9 figures of revenue here but I also know there's a lot of readers at five million or below, so I want you to pay close attention to these stats.

The Halo Effect is Real:

In my opinion, this is the most important stat in the entire report. Among advertisers who reported cross-channel lift from CTV, 55% saw improved paid social performance and improved paid search performance.

There it is! The halo effect in action. Can you imagine that the easiest way to boost your performance on Meta or Google is simply starting a CTV campaign? I bet you hadn’t thought of this but it’s true.

After working with a bunch of brands to do this, I think the best way to boost MER across channels is to add more meaningful marketing channels. If you are on Meta, Google, and TikTok today, try adding CTV and looking for an overall channel lift across everything else you’re running (including direct traffic, organic search, Amazon, and in-store). I’m seeing this happen every month with brands I work with and I don’t want you to sleep on it. The best part is you don't really have to change anything about your creative, targeting, or budgets on paid social or paid search to make this work. Just launch CTV, and many of the brands I’m working with, and the ones in this report are seeing omnichannel performance improve.

As an example, just imagine you sell backpacks and luggage. The first touchpoint is someone scrolling past your Instagram ad while they’re in bed and they hardly notice it. Maybe they see the logo and the colors and the product, and they think about it for three or four seconds, but then they move on. Then a few nights later they see your CTV ad on a 65-inch TV while they're watching a show on Paramount showing how easily the bag fits under an airplane seat and how quickly they can get their laptop out at security. This time, the brand and the product register. They have much higher brand recall, and they remember your URL and what your product does. Then the following week, they remember that they’ll be traveling to see their family for the holidays and now might be a good time to upgrade their bag. They remember your brand, search for it, and buy it after clicking on a Google ad.

In this scenario, Google takes all of the credit for this sale. But IG and CTV paired together is what actually made them become aware, remember, search and buy. This is why marketing attribution is so difficult and nuanced, and why I've found that omnichannel marketing and leaning into/trusting the halo effect is so crucial for brands to do.

Get New Reach and New Customers

Another stat I want to point out is that of those surveyed, 68% said CTV helped them reach audiences they couldn’t reach through social or search. I think this is happening for 2 reasons. 1 brand recall is way higher on CTV so even if they saw your ad on social, they don’t remember it, and 2 there is a legitimate new audience on CTV that isn’t as tapped into social.

The report says 84% of Paramount viewers use social monthly, while 16% fall outside that measured social audience so you are reaching net new people.

But like I said above, I think that these channels work best together. You should view them in combination, not necessarily in isolation, as you're building out your marketing stack for the rest of 2026 and 2027.

The Money is Moving, But Why?

The next stats I found super interesting are how advertisers in this cohort, i.e. mostly small and medium-sized businesses, are allocating their dollars. In the survey, 54% of advertisers increased their CTV budget in 2026 and their two biggest reasons were reaching audiences they couldn’t reach through social or search and seeing results they wanted to scale.

CTV was also the only measured channel expected to gain budget share in the second half of the year, moving from 25% to 28% and overtaking social, which was planned at 26%. This was pretty surprising to me, but makes sense with needing to generate the maximum quality of impressions for Q4 and Q5 and I think showing an ad on a 65-inch screen is just better bang for your buck than getting a quick 1 second impression on paid social as someone's scrolling by.

Another thing that I thought was interesting is that the goals for CTV advertisers are also changing. The brands saying that cross-channel lift was their primary CTV objective grew from 4% to 10% between 2025 and 2026, while retargeting grew from 3% to 8% so more advertisers are thinking about what happens after someone sees the ad and how that exposure connects to the rest of their marketing strategy.

You Already Have What You Need For CTV

The other thing I'm super passionate about is that every single brand reading this who runs Meta ads already has what they need to get started on CTV. And the data supports this from the report. Among top performers, 56% created new TV assets, but 35% repurposed existing social creative as one of their production approaches. So yes, brands are investing in TV-specific creative, but there’s also a practical starting point sitting in the ad account you already use.

IMO, you should start by finding the demonstration or explanation ad in Meta that is working today and repurpose it for TV. So if you sell a cleaning product and your strongest creative shows a stain disappearing from a sofa, start there. Adapt it for someone watching on TV with clear branding and a benefit they can understand without reading tiny captions. Run this and see what happens.

Paramount Ads Manager’s campaign data also found that campaigns mixing 15 and 30-second ads had a 51% higher site visit rate than campaigns running only 30-second ads. That’s site visit rate, not sales, but it's worth mixing up your concepts, offers, and lengths when you're setting up a campaign.

You can use the longer version to explain the product, then build shorter versions around the moments people are most likely to remember. Think of it like telling a friend about a restaurant you love. The first time you tell a story about the food, it’s more detailed and you talk about the atmosphere, the food, the service and why you loved it, and the next time, you just say “that pasta place I told you about” and it brings back the whole story and the memory in their head.

Get Started Before BFCM

Another thing I'd like to point out is that it's time to get started now. From the report, Paramount said that advertisers planning at least three months ahead reported hitting their goals at a higher rate than later planners (51% versus 35%). They were also more likely to report cross-channel lift, 36% versus 20%, and more confident in their Q4 media mix, 90% versus 50%.

Obviously you can’t go back in time and start three months ago, but you can stop waiting for everything to be perfect before getting the basics ready today. Give yourself time to check measurement, evaluate the message, and fix the landing page before you’re depending on the campaign to deliver holiday revenue.

And please install and verify your pixel before launch. Advertisers with a pixel installed reported higher goal achievement than those without one, 46% versus 36%, and were more than twice as likely to report cross-channel lift, 33% versus 16%.

Think Bigger Than One Shopping Weekend

That said, Black Friday is not the only opportunity to use CTV. I think you should be thinking about it as part of your broader, more holistic strategy for the end of this year and all of 2027.

From the report, I read that among top performers, 56% planned to increase CTV spending around winter holidays, 50% around fall TV programming, and 38% around fall sports, compared with 31% around Black Friday/Cyber Monday.

The holidays and Q4 are when people are watching games, settling into shows, planning trips, and thinking about gifts before your sale starts but all of this will be happening next year as well. There's plenty of opportunities to use CTV in your marketing stack, and the time to get started is now.

More Ads Can Lead to Higher ROAS

The last thing I’ll leave you with is that Paramount Ads Manager reported 5.3x higher ROAS among advertisers running two or more campaigns compared with just one. That doesn’t mean your second campaign will automatically multiply your returns but it’s a good reason to approach this as a learning process, with the idea that more volume and more shots on goal often helps you find what works, so you can scale it.

If you’re starting now, keep it focused on one hero product and one offer. Run the ads, measure the cross-channel lift and test a few concepts and angles so you can say you legitimately gave this a chance.

Paramount Ads Manager offers targeting, creative, and measurement tools to help put this into practice, and the report has separate playbooks for first-time CTV advertisers and brands already running campaigns.

If you want to go deeper, download the full report here.

All right. That's it for this week. I hope you enjoyed reading this and got some value. There's nothing more important than data, so you should read the full report and share it with your teams!