Key Takeaways
- Attain beat its internal cost-per-acquisition goal by 16.7% after it activated lookalike segments on tvScientific by Pinterest’s CTV platform.
- Phased budget increases, paired with continuous shifts toward top-performing audiences, let Attain raise CTV spend and install volume without losing cost efficiency.
Scaling a paid channel usually comes with a tax. You spend more, you reach more people and your cost per acquisition creeps up. Attain refused to accept that trade-off. By pairing precision audience targeting with a disciplined, phased budget strategy, the company grew its connected TV (CTV) investment and improved acquisition efficiency at the same time.
Attain wanted to expand its CTV advertising to acquire new users. The catch? Growth couldn’t come at the expense of cost efficiency.
As the company prepared to increase investment and reach new households, it faced a familiar dilemma. Broad audience targeting offered more reach, but it also opened the door to wasted impressions and declining performance. Every dollar spent on the wrong household chipped away at the economics of the channel.
What Attain Needed To Grow Acquisition While Staying On CPA Target
Attain needed a sharper way to find prospects who looked like its existing high-value users. It also needed every campaign to keep hitting its internal cost-per-acquisition (CPA) benchmarks.
The real challenge came down to three requirements: Deliver incremental reach beyond the current audience; Maintain efficiency against established CPA targets; and Build confidence to keep increasing investment over time
Why Attain Chose tvScientific By Pinterest For Performance-Driven CTV
Attain is a consumer data and technology company that connects permissioned purchase data with advertising measurement, audience targeting and optimization.
Through its portfolio of consumer apps, Attain builds direct relationships with millions of consumers. Those users get financial tools and shopping rewards in exchange for permissioned data. Attain then puts that data to work for brands, agencies and advertising platforms, helping them understand consumer behavior, reach relevant audiences and measure marketing performance against verified purchase outcomes.
To solve its scaling problem, Attain turned to tvScientific by Pinterest. tvScientific by Pinterest is a performance advertising platform built to make CTV measurable and accessible to advertisers of all sizes. Its platform combines AI-powered optimization, audience targeting and measurement capabilities to help brands reach relevant consumers and drive real business outcomes.
The Strategy: Lookalikes, Retargeting, Layered Audiences And Phased Budget Growth
The core idea: connect television advertising directly to performance metrics. Instead of judging CTV on reach and awareness alone, advertisers optimize campaigns toward measurable results, including customer acquisition and return on ad spend.
For a data-driven company like Attain, that performance-first approach was the right fit. Attain and tvScientific built a targeted CTV acquisition strategy around four connected moves.
Lookalike Segments Powered by a Household Graph. Using tvScientific’s proprietary household graph, Attain activated Lookalike Segments directly within the platform. These segments identified and reached new households that resembled Attain’s existing high-value users.
Retargeting to Stay in Front of Warm Prospects. Attain layered retargeting on top of its lookalike prospecting. This kept the brand in front of households that had already shown interest, reinforcing the path to conversion.
Layered Audiences for Diversified Reach. The team added more audience layers, including Pinterest finance interest audiences and demographic cohorts. Rather than betting on a single targeting method, Attain engaged prospects through multiple audience approaches. That diversification spread risk and surfaced new pockets of performance.
A Phased Investment Strategy. Here’s where discipline paid off as Attain didn’t flip a switch and raise spending across the board. Instead, the team scaled budgets gradually while tracking CPA performance and acquisition volume at every step.
Creative and budget allocations shifted continuously toward the audiences generating the strongest results. Winners got more fuel. Underperformers got less. By combining household-level audience intelligence with ongoing optimization, Attain pursued growth while keeping tight control over acquisition costs.
The Results
Attain launched Lookalike Segments on Aug. 3, 2026. The performance gains followed quickly, and they held up as investment grew. According to tvScientific by Pinterest internal data from the United States in the third quarter of 2026, Attain achieved:
- 7% better CPA than its internal acquisition goal, proving the audience strategy could outperform established efficiency targets
- 12% better CPA than the overall campaign average, showing how well Lookalike Segments performed relative to broader campaign activity
- Increased investment and install volume, confirming Attain could scale acquisition while maintaining efficiency
“Lookalike Segments delivered better CPA versus our internal goal, which helped us scale with confidence,” said Scott Whittemore, growth analytics manager at Attain.
That confidence is the real win. Attain didn’t sacrifice performance to reach new customers. It expanded its CTV acquisition efforts and kept its cost discipline intact.
