Industry Insights

Your Peak Season Playbook: 5 CTV Takeaways from Paramount Ads Manager and Haus

What does it take to build a winning CTV strategy?

On October 28th, Paramount VP of Marketing Kira Federer walked through the key findings from our latest report, which pairs a full year of Paramount Ads Manager campaign data with survey findings from experienced advertisers to show what works best in CTV. She then sat down with Tarek Benchouia, a marketing measurement expert at Haus, for a deep dive on how advertisers should approach CTV measurement and incrementality.

The takeaway: CTV isn’t a test channel anymore. Over half of the advertisers we surveyed increased their CTV budget this year, and it’s the only channel they plan to meaningfully grow over the rest of the year and into 2027.

Watch the full conversation here:

Short on time? Read on for five takeaways to add to your 2027 plan.

1. Run Year-Round, Then Layer In Your Moments

Advertisers who run both always-on and seasonal campaigns are 87% more likely to meet or exceed their goals compared to those running moment-based campaigns alone.

The reason is simple. An always-on campaign builds your retargeting pools and keeps your brand visible between peaks. So when a big moment arrives, whether it’s the holidays, back-to-school, or a product launch, your seasonal campaign is talking to a warm audience instead of a cold one, and you’re never starting from scratch.

Get the full findings in our report: How SMBs Can Win the Year with CTV

2. Treat Creative Like an Ecosystem

“You are likely much closer to having your TV asset than you may realize.” - Kira

More than half of the top performers we surveyed are building new ads specifically for TV. However, their second most common approach is repurposing existing social video creative. It’s a practical and often overlooked place to start.

Whichever route you take, plan for a mix of video lengths. Campaigns that combine 15-second and 30-second ads drive a 51% higher site visit rate than campaigns running only 30-second ads.

No TV-ready ad yet? Use our creative tools to make one.

3. Install the Pixel Before Your Next Campaign

“A pixel doesn’t change how your campaign performs. What it does is make that performance more visible.” - Kira

Advertisers with a pixel installed on their site are 28% more likely to say they are meeting or exceeding their goals and 106% more likely to see cross-channel lift.

As Kira put it, the pixel shows you what’s working. You can see who visited your site after seeing your ad, build retargeting audiences from that traffic, and optimize toward outcomes further down the funnel, like leads and purchases.

Before your next campaign, install the Paramount Pixel so you can see those results from the moment you launch. Learn how it works.

4. Test CTV Without Relying on Attribution

“CTV is a tide that raises all boats. And really, the best way to prove that is to find a way to measure the change in the water level.” - Tarek

Here’s the challenge with measuring CTV: people watch their TVs, they don’t click on them. Last-touch attribution alone misses part of the picture, which is why Tarek’s team at Haus recommends geotests, a way to measure that change in the water level.

In a geotest, one group of markets sees all of your media, and a control group sees all of your media minus CTV. Because the only difference between the two groups is CTV, you capture its impact on your overall business, including how it interacts with your other channels.

5. Give CTV Time to Show Its Impact

“CTV has the biggest effects in post-treatment windows, pretty much against any channel that we test.” - Tarek

Q4 is a season of delayed impacts, and the delay is especially pronounced on CTV. The common mistake is pulling back in late October or early November because attribution looks soft, right before that impact shows up during gifting season. Haus saw this across hundreds of tests from last year, which is why Tarek’s advice is “measure twice, cut once.”

It’s not just a Q4 lesson, either. The advertisers winning on CTV are running it year-round, and a good test can give you the confidence to invest across every peak period on your calendar.

So how long should you test? It depends on how noisy your data is, how high up the funnel the channel sits, and how long customers take to decide. For CTV, Tarek recommends at least four weeks, and closer to eight for bigger purchases. Keep watching after the test ends, too (that’s the post-treatment window), since CTV’s impact often shows up there.

Think of testing as a roadmap to your final destination. If a channel underperforms, that doesn’t mean it can’t perform. You’ve just found something to optimize and retest.