Industry Insights
How DTC Brands Can Use CTV Advertising to Drive Summer Sales
Summer is one of the most competitive seasons on the calendar for DTC brands. Shoppers are spending, categories like apparel, home goods, beauty, and outdoor gear are peaking, and the brands that show up with the right message at the right time earn a real advantage.
The challenge: most DTC brands are fighting for the same real estate on social and search, watching CPMs climb while attention competes with infinite scroll. There's a better way to build summer sales momentum, and more DTC brands are finding it on the big screen.
Here's how CTV advertising for DTC brands works, and how to put it to work for summer.
Why DTC Brands Are Shifting to CTV
Social media has been the default channel for DTC advertising for years. But Meta and TikTok CPMs keep rising, creative fatigue is real, and privacy changes have made targeting less reliable than it used to be.
Meanwhile, viewers are spending more time on streaming TV than ever. US adults now average 2 hours and 35 minutes of TV viewing per day, compared to 1 hour and 31 minutes on social. And CTV reaches more than 71% of US households in 2026.
That attention gap matters. CTV ads are full-screen, non-skippable, and watched in a lean-back environment, meaning your brand gets the full viewing window rather than a fleeting scroll. The result: CTV drives 80% brand recognition compared to 60% for social ads.
The infrastructure has also caught up. As DTC growth expert Nik Sharma put it in our recent webinar with Paramount's Emily Huo:
"3 years ago, I would say absolutely not to any CTV company... But today you've got infrastructure that lets you run CTV like a real performance channel. You've got pixel-based attribution, self-serve buying. So you're not just buying a time slot anymore. You're buying the audience."
For DTC brands that have treated streaming ads as a "test eventually" line item, summer 2026 is the time to revisit that.
| Advertising Channel | Social Media | CTV |
| Avg. Daily Viewing (US Adults) | 1 hour 31 minutes | 2 hours 35 minutes |
| Brand Recognition | 60% | 80% |
| Ad Format | In-feed & skippable | Full-screen & non-skippable |
| Viewing Environment | Lean-forward, infinite scrolling | Lean-back, full screen attention |
| Targeting | Highly granular—behavioral, interest, and custom audiences, geographic + demographic (age/gender/HHI) | Highly granular—behavioral, interest, and custom audiences, geographic + demographic (age/gender/HHI) |
Connecting Your Shopify Store (And More) with Proven CTV Results
One of the most practical reasons DTC and ecommerce brands are warming to CTV: you can now connect your store directly to your streaming campaigns and measure what happens next.
With the Paramount Ads Manager Pixel, you can install a single tag on your site and start tracking the full downstream impact of your CTV ads: site visits, leads, and purchases. The Pixel also powers retargeting and lookalike audiences, which means every viewer who comes to your site becomes an asset for your next campaign.
For DTC brands running their stores through platforms like Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, BigCommerce, and Weebly, this makes the setup feel familiar. You're already running pixel-based tracking through Meta and Google. Paramount Ads Manager brings the same logic to the big screen, so you can see how your streaming campaigns contribute to site traffic and conversions alongside your other channels.
Once the Pixel is live, your data starts working for you immediately: building retargeting pools, informing audience expansion, and giving you the reporting you need to optimize spend.
Advanced Audience Targeting (& Retargeting) on the Big Screen
Standard CTV targeting gets your ads in front of the right demo. But for DTC brands, the real power comes from targeting audiences who already know you.
With Paramount Ads Manager, you can build campaigns around the people most likely to buy:
Retargeting lets you reconnect with shoppers who visited your site but didn't convert, showing up on the biggest screen in their home while they're watching Paramount+ originals, live sports, or reality programming. During beta testing, advertisers using retargeting saw a 30%+ improvement in site visit performance by reconnecting with audiences already familiar with their brand on TV.
Ecommerce brand Midwest Photo ran an A/B test comparing a standard CTV campaign to one with retargeting enabled. The retargeting campaign drove approximately 41% higher site visit rate and ~29% more efficient spend. That's what building awareness first, then converting it, looks like in practice.
Interests & Behaviors targeting lets you get hyper-specific with the net-new audiences you’re looking to reach. By leveraging this tool in Paramount Ads Manager, you can reach streaming viewers based on real-world behaviors and content engagement that align with your category, like audiences interested in fashion, home goods, fitness, or outdoor activities.
For DTC brands running always-on summer campaigns, combining these approaches means your spend is focused on viewers who are already in the consideration window, not starting from scratch with every impression.
4 Ways to Drive Summer Sales with Streaming
1. Align with high-attention summer moments
Summer on Paramount is stacked. The FIFA World Cup coverage on CBS Sports, UFC fight nights on Paramount+, the WNBA season, and a full calendar of premium originals, movies, and reality programming all drive major viewing spikes. These are moments when audiences are leaning in, not scrolling.
Running CTV campaigns around high-attention moments builds brand familiarity when viewers are most engaged, and that familiarity pays off when shoppers are ready to buy.
2. Build awareness before the big shopping moments
Summer gives us tons of peak viewing opportunities like Prime Day, July 4th, back-to-school, and the lead-up to fall. The DTC brands that win these moments are typically the ones that started building audience recognition a few weeks before, not the day the sale went live.
CTV is the right channel for that pre-window. Run awareness campaigns in the lead-up, collect Pixel data, and enter the high-intent period with warm audiences already in your funnel.
Infographic: Where CTV Advertising Fits in the Modern Marketing Funnel >
3. Sequential creative for product launches
Instead of showing the same ad on repeat, sequential messaging guides viewers through a series of ads that build understanding and trust over time. For a summer product launch, that might look like:
- Ad 1: Brand awareness and category context
- Ad 2: Product feature or benefit highlight
- Ad 3: Offer that drives urgency and provides a direct call to action
This approach supports your full funnel and reduces the creative fatigue that comes from running a single spot throughout a campaign.
4. Measuring ecommerce outcomes
One of the biggest shifts in CTV advertising for ecommerce is the ability to connect exposure to outcomes that actually matter for DTC businesses. With the Paramount Ads Manager Pixel installed and your dashboard running, you can track site visit rate and cost per site visit from CTV exposure, purchases tied to ad exposure across devices, and more.
And CTV doesn't just drive its own results. It makes your other channels work harder. Research from our CTV vs. Social report found that paid search conversion rates increase by 22.3% when supported by CTV exposure, and paid social conversion rates improve by 8.5%.
Our Better Together webinar with one of our agency partners also found that running CTV and social in tandem drove 60% greater reach, 14% higher click-through rates, and a 313% lift in lead form completions for one agency partner.
Those are just a few examples of the full funnel working the way it's supposed to when CTV is added into the mix.
Get Started with Paramount Ads Manager
Streaming ads for online stores used to require agency partnerships, large minimums, and manual buying. Paramount Ads Manager is self-serve, with no minimums and no agency required, and you can get your brand on TV the same day you sign up.
With Paramount Ads Manager, you can:
- Launch a CTV campaign across Paramount+, CBS, CBS Sports, Pluto TV, and more
- Install the Paramount Ads Manager Pixel to track site visits, leads, and purchases
- Retarget site visitors and build lookalike audiences on the big screen
- Align campaigns with summer's biggest viewing moments
- Get TV-ready creative through our free Creative Plus service
Summer shoppers are already on the couch. Time to show up where they're watching.
