As mobile attribution becomes noisier and data permissions tighten, connected TV (CTV) has quietly become one of the most discussed channels in Indian media planning conversations. Over the past two years, CTV has moved from being an experimental add-on to a more deliberate line item in video budgets, driven by rapid smart TV adoption, platform investment, and a growing sense among marketers that it offers a calmer, more controllable environment than mobile.
Industry estimates suggest India ended 2025 with over 35 million smart TV households, with CTV ad spends among the fastest-growing segments of digital video. While still a fraction of total video budgets, CTV is increasingly absorbing money from both linear TV and mobile video, especially as attribution on handheld screens becomes harder to defend. It is in this context that CTV is being positioned as privacy-safe, measurable, and even performance-friendly.
But as more money flows in, a quieter question is starting to surface inside brand and agency rooms. Is CTV actually as measurable as marketers believe, or does it simply feel that way because expectations are different?
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Most marketers buying CTV today are careful not to oversell what it delivers.
That framing is echoed on the brand side. Prasun Kumar, Chief Marketing Officer at Magicbricks, says CTV has the structural ingredients to support performance, but execution maturity is still uneven. “CTV unquestionably has the potential to bridge branding and performance, but measurable outcomes haven’t fully caught up yet,” he says. “The gap today is less about ambition and more about ecosystem maturity.”
Kumar points out that while CTV is connected by design, television consumption remains largely passive. “That limits immediacy of action and makes it harder to drive lower-funnel outcomes in a predictable way,” he adds. For now, CTV remains closer to brand-led impact than deterministic performance.
Where CTV does earn greater confidence is in measurement relative to linear television. Reach, frequency, viewability and video completion are far more transparent, and marketers increasingly layer third-party verification and incrementality studies onto CTV buys. “From a measurement standpoint, CTV is already a meaningful step forward compared to traditional TV,” Kumar says. “But confidence is still evolving when it comes to attribution and true incrementality.”
“At scale, CTV in India is still evolving and currently operates as a hybrid medium rather than a pure direct-response channel,” says Rajeev Jain, Senior Vice President, Corporate Marketing, DS Group. “Despite this, most CTV spend today is still justified by premium reach, higher attention, and incremental impact versus linear TV and mobile video. As a result, CTV is best viewed today as a performance assist channel, bridging brand and conversion, rather than a last-click driver.”
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That distinction between measurement confidence and attribution confidence is where the CTV narrative becomes more complicated.
On the execution side, agencies and programmatic specialists say CTV measurement works best within tightly defined boundaries. “CTV measurement today is largely exposure-led,” says Russhabh R Thakkar, Founder and CEO of Frodoh. “You can measure reach, frequency and completion well within a platform. But once you try to stitch that exposure to downstream actions across devices, the certainty drops sharply.”
Thakkar notes that deterministic attribution on CTV is typically limited to logged-in users, and even then, match rates vary widely. “Most performance narratives on CTV rely on proxies such as assisted conversions, incrementality studies or correlation models,” he says. “That’s not a flaw in itself, but it’s very different from the way mobile performance has traditionally been sold.”
This gap is also visible when campaigns span multiple CTV platforms and OEM environments. Vedavyas Badri, Senior Vice President at LS Digital, points out that reach and frequency often look clean inside individual platforms, but become harder to reconcile across them. Different methodologies, fragmented app ecosystems and the absence of common standards mean cross-platform reach and frequency are often modelled rather than proven.
In that sense, CTV is not immune to fragmentation. It simply reveals it more slowly.
What makes CTV feel trustworthy is not superior attribution, but the nature of the claims being made. Unlike mobile advertising, where optimisation is constant and attribution promises are aggressive, CTV operates on longer windows and softer expectations. It is evaluated on exposure, attention and assisted impact rather than immediate conversion.
That difference matters.
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“Advertisers are increasingly comfortable with reach, frequency, VCR and viewability on CTV,” says Jain. “At the same time, gaps remain in impressions transparency, fraud risk and frequency capping, as the medium is still evolving.”
The Indian market adds another layer of complexity. Smart TV penetration is growing, but unevenly. The ecosystem spans multiple OEMs, operating systems and streaming apps, each with its own measurement approach. Clean room adoption remains nascent, and standardised cross-platform metrics are still a work in progress.
Yet budgets continue to move.
Part of the reason is psychological as much as technical. In a post-privacy environment, where mobile attribution feels increasingly fragile and contested, CTV offers a sense of stability. Measurement conversations are calmer. Claims are more restrained. Performance is framed as assisted rather than absolute.
“CTV works because expectations are clearer,” says Thakkar. “When a channel doesn’t promise last-click certainty, marketers are less disappointed when they don’t get it.”
None of this suggests that the shift towards CTV is misguided. Big screens deliver attention. Streaming environments feel premium. For brand leaders under pressure to justify spends without overpromising outcomes, that restraint has value.
But it does suggest that CTV’s growing trustworthiness has as much to do with expectation alignment as with measurement superiority.
CTV is not a refuge from messy measurement. It is a channel where the industry has quietly agreed to ask different questions. In a moment when mobile signals are tightening and attribution debates are growing louder, that may be exactly why marketers believe in it.