Key Takeaways
- 95% of decision-makers agree that the variety and speed of CTV creative variations drive performance more than audience targeting alone.
- B2B brands must shift from slow, linear TV production timelines to a modular, social-style creative operating model to prevent wasting budget by scaling media faster than effectiveness.
CTV budgets are climbing fast, and B2B marketers are pouring dollars into a channel that finally promises the reach of television with the accountability of digital. But the money is running ahead of the model.
For years, targeting has been the lever B2B teams pull hardest, on the assumption that reaching the right account is most of the battle. The new Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Smartly tells a different story. A striking 95% of decision-makers agree that the variety and speed of creative variations in a CTV campaign drive performance more than audience targeting alone. Targeting decides who sees the ad. It can’t make the ad worth seeing. That’s the gap most B2B brands haven’t closed.
The obstacles are operational, not creative talent. Only 25% of respondents can produce a new CTV creative variant within two days, compared with 34% for social, and just 5% can turn one around in under a day. Too many teams are scaling media faster than they’re scaling effectiveness, an expensive way to conclude that “CTV didn’t work for us.”
To unpack what separates the brands getting it right from the ones burning budget, we sat down with Oli Marlow-Thomas, Chief Innovation Officer at Smartly. Marlow-Thomas walks us through how to restructure creative workflows for speed and iteration; how to measure CTV’s full-funnel impact, and how to build a unified social and CTV operating model so hard-won learning crosses channels instead of starting from scratch.
B2BMX Insights: How should B2B brands rethink the role of creative quality in CTV, given the finding that variety and speed of creative variations may matter more than audience targeting alone?
Oli Marlow-Thomas: For years, B2B marketers have leaned on targeting as the thing that makes digital work. And targeting matters, but all it does is decide who sees the ad. The research backs that up. In the research, 95% of decision-makers agreed that the variety and speed of creative variations in a CTV campaign have a greater impact on performance outcomes than audience targeting alone. Targeting can’t make the ad worth seeing. That’s the part we’ve under-invested in.
What’s becoming clear is that creative and targeting aren’t two separate levers, they’re one system. The message has to fit the person, the placement, the format, and the moment they’re watching. Get the audience right but the message wrong, and you’ve still wasted the impression.
For B2B that means letting go of the one polished corporate film you show to every account. A CFO, a practitioner, and a head of a business unit are not the same buyer, and a company that’s never heard of you needs a different message than one that’s halfway through evaluating you. The win isn’t more creative for its own sake, it’s more relevant creative, and a way to keep learning which version actually moves people.
B2BMX Insights: If CTV creative cycles are still operating like linear TV, how should B2B marketers restructure their workflows to make CTV more iterative, testable, and responsive?
Marlow-Thomas: The first thing to change is the instinct to treat every CTV asset like a TV shoot, big production, long sign-off, then you launch it and walk away. That model made sense when creative was expensive and scarce. It doesn’t anymore.
Most organizations still can’t turn a new CTV creative variant around inside a couple of days, and they’re refreshing creative maybe once a quarter. Meanwhile the whole point of the channel now is to keep learning and adjusting. The bottleneck isn’t the shoot, it’s everything around it: the approval chains, the linear-era timelines, the fact that measurement was never built for this. For B2B marketers, that creates a particularly important challenge. Only 25% of respondents can produce a new CTV creative variant within two days, compared with 34% for social, and just 5% can do it in less than a day. More than half (51%) also cite the inability to adapt linear TV production timelines, approvals, and measurement to CTV as a major challenge.
So build modularly from the start. One core story, then interchangeable openings, value props, proof points, customer moments, and calls to action you can recombine into real variations. Decide what you’re testing before you produce. Get brand and legal to approve the components and the guardrails once, so every new version isn’t a fresh trip through review. And get creative, media, analytics, and demand gen looking at the same feedback loop, because the moment those teams are handing work back and forth in sequence, you’ve already lost the speed.
The Real Cost of Scaling CTV Media Faster Than Effectiveness
B2BMX Insights: What does the report suggest about the risk of putting more budget into CTV without upgrading creative production, testing, and measurement capabilities?
Marlow-Thomas: You end up scaling your media faster than you scale your effectiveness, which is an expensive mistake.
If you put more money behind one or two static assets, you don’t get more performance, you get more reach, more repetition, and more fatigue. And a lot of teams already suspect their CTV creative isn’t delivering what they hoped; they just can’t see clearly enough to know why. The research suggests many advertisers are already running into this problem: 43% say CTV creative is not delivering their desired outcomes, while 40% struggle to analyze and understand ad efficacy. Only 52% are very satisfied with the tools they use to test CTV creative. As AI makes it easier to produce and scale creative variations, the systems to test, judge and improve what you make need to keep up.
The trap for B2B is that the numbers can look like a channel problem when they’re actually an operating-model problem. The brand walks away thinking ‘CTV didn’t work for us,’ when the truth is the creative never got the chance to get better. Budget should follow the capability to improve, not run ahead of it.
B2BMX Insights: For B2B marketers used to long campaign timelines, what would it take to adopt a more social-style creative operating model for CTV?
Marlow-Thomas: To be clear, this isn’t about making your TV ads look like TikToks. It’s about borrowing the operating habits that made social effective: modular production, fast feedback, frequent refreshes, real testing, constant optimization. Social’s advantage is operational as much as creative. Twenty-one percent of respondents rotate social creative multiple times per day, compared with only 9% for CTV, where weekly rotation remains most common. Social campaigns also use substantially more creative variations.
A practical starting point for B2B is to build one strong narrative and then build meaningful variations around the buying committee. The CFO cares about risk and efficiency. The practitioner wants to see how it actually works day to day. The executive sponsor is thinking about growth and competitive edge. Same story, genuinely different emphasis.
The other half of it is the approval model, and this is usually where B2B gets stuck. Brand, legal, and compliance need to shift from signing off every finished asset to signing off templates, components, and guardrails up front. That’s what lets you move quickly without anyone feeling like the brand is off the leash. What you’re really after is controlled agility, the quality and trust a B2B brand depends on, with enough room to test, learn, and react.
B2BMX Insights: How should B2B teams approach personalization in CTV when the report shows current CTV workflows are constrained by limited creative variations and slow turnaround times?
Marlow-Thomas: Start with meaningful segmentation, not personalization for the sake of saying you did it.
A lot of teams look at true one-to-one personalization on CTV and conclude it’s too expensive, and if you’re imagining a separate shoot for every account, they’re right. Cost is a real concern: 58% of respondents agree that scaling personalized CTV creative is too expensive. But that’s the wrong picture. The answer is a modular system where you can flex the things that actually change relevance: the industry, the company size, the region, the buying role, the specific challenge, where they are in the funnel, whether they’re already a customer. The research also points toward the solution, with half saying templated creative would give them greater confidence in applying a social-grade approach to CTV, and 53% citing the quality of AI applied to media and creative processes as an important determinant of success.
AI and automation make producing those variations more cost-effective and faster, but generating them isn’t the finish line. The real value comes from prediction, using what you know about the audience, the context, and past performance to work out which version is most likely to land where. And none of it counts unless you can see whether the tailored version actually improved attention, relevance, or something downstream in the pipeline. Personalization you can’t measure is just extra work.
Why Last-Click Attribution Undervalues CTV in B2B
B2BMX Insights: What are the implications for B2B demand generation teams if they can’t measure creative-level performance insights or the halo effect of CTV on branded search and social?
Marlow-Thomas: They’ll undervalue CTV, and they’ll optimize it against the wrong signals, which is arguably worse. These are among the most widespread measurement gaps identified in the research. Sixty-two percent struggle to measure CTV’s halo effect on search and social, 61% lack creative-level performance insights, and 60% cannot verify its full-funnel impact. Yet half of respondents see a stronger effect on branded search as a key potential benefit of improving CTV creative.
B2B journeys are long and involve a whole committee, and almost nobody watches a CTV ad and immediately converts. The impact often shows up indirectly: more branded search, more direct traffic, better engagement with your social, stronger retargeting response, more activity from the accounts you care about. If you’re only watching last-click, all of that is invisible.
That leaves demand gen with two problems. They can’t give CTV credit for demand it genuinely helped create, so it loses the budget fight to channels that just harvest that demand. And they can’t tell which message or format worked, so they’ve got nothing to feed the next round of creative. When CTV creative is effective, it can influence everything downstream, from search and social to retargeting and sales. Judge it on direct response alone and you miss the entire reason it’s valuable.
B2BMX Insights: How should B2B marketers evaluate their current MarTech and AdTech stack in light of the report’s finding that fragmented tools are a major barrier to CTV optimization?
Marlow-Thomas: Judge the stack by the workflow it lets you run, not the number of logos in it. The fragmentation is not theoretical. Fifty-nine percent of respondents say the CTV ecosystem is too fragmented, while 61% lack a single source of truth for performance. Forty percent also cite inadequate tools as a leading barrier to producing and optimizing CTV ads.
The question I’d ask is: can a team get from an insight to a produced asset, through approval, into activation, and back out as measurement and optimization, without exporting spreadsheets, rebuilding creative, and arguing about whose definition of ‘performance’ is right? That round trip is where most of the time and money leaks out.
So look at whether creative and its metadata actually move cleanly between systems. Whether you can even see performance at the creative level. Whether social and CTV can share naming and measurement so they’re comparable. And whether an insight can trigger a real change to the creative or the media, or whether it just sits in a dashboard. Most advertisers are already juggling several platforms to run a campaign, bolting on one more disconnected tool doesn’t fix a fragmentation problem, it deepens it. The goal is fewer seams and a closed loop between creative, media, and data.
B2BMX Insights: What does the report imply about the importance of having a single platform or unified workflow for managing social and CTV creative together?
Marlow-Thomas: The point of unifying isn’t tidiness, it’s that you get to learn across channels instead of starting from scratch in each one.
Social is a firehose of feedback about messages, visuals, offers, and what audiences respond to. If your CTV work lives in a completely separate world, none of that hard-won learning ever crosses over. A shared workflow lets you spot the ideas that are already winning in social, adapt the strongest ones for the screen, and then see how CTV lifts the rest of your mix.
Demand for this type of convergence is already high. Ninety-nine percent of respondents are interested in bringing social-grade creative effectiveness to CTV, and 75% say they are actively doing so. Fifty-six percent identify a single platform that optimizes both social and CTV creative as an important enabler, while 54% want comparable KPIs across the two channels.
That said, unified doesn’t mean identical. CTV is a lean-back moment, it rewards clear storytelling, memorable brand cues, and a message you grasp without leaning in. So the right setup lets you carry the learning across while still designing properly for each environment. You’re transferring insight, not copy-pasting assets.
How to Build the Internal Case for CTV Investment
B2BMX Insights: How can B2B brands justify heavier CTV investment internally if they still lack incrementality testing, comparable KPIs, or a single source of truth for performance?
Marlow-Thomas: Make measurement part of the plan going in, not something you scramble to assemble after the campaign’s already run.
Start with a real hypothesis: if CTV is working, what should we actually see move? Incremental reach into our priority accounts, more branded search, more direct traffic, stronger engagement from buying committees, better response in our lower-funnel campaigns, more pipeline. Write it down before you spend.
Then, wherever you can, set up exposed-versus-control groups, run geo or audience-based tests, and pair the fast leading indicators with the slower commercial ones that finance actually cares about. Things like credible incrementality testing, media mix modeling, and pre-flight creative intelligence are what turn a nervous budget request into a confident one. The internal case gets much easier when you’re asking leadership to fund a repeatable capability, not just more impressions. Buy the learning infrastructure alongside the media. The research is clear about what would improve confidence: 54% point to credible incrementality testing, 51% to media mix modeling, and half to preflight creative intelligence.
B2BMX Insights: What does this research mean for full-funnel B2B measurement, especially for brands that expect CTV to influence awareness, branded search, consideration, and pipeline creation?
Marlow-Thomas: It means you have to measure CTV as part of a connected demand system, not as a standalone impression channel. Most organizations do not yet have this connected view. Sixty percent cannot verify the full-funnel impact of CTV, 62% cannot measure its halo effect on search and social, and 52% cannot demonstrate incrementality. More than half say comparable KPIs across social and CTV would help them assess performance more effectively.
Good CTV creative generates demand, shapes consideration, and quietly makes the bottom of the funnel more efficient, but you’ll only ever see that if you’re looking beyond direct response. The value lives in brand discovery, cross-channel influence, and full-funnel lift, and last-click attribution is blind to all of it.
For B2B, I’d think in layers. At the top: incremental reach, attention, awareness, recall and branded search. In the middle: site engagement, content consumption, account activity and consideration. At the bottom: pipeline, conversion, deal velocity and contract value. No single number tells that story. What you want is a consistent set of signals showing how creative exposure changes buyer behavior and, ultimately, revenue.
