While often seen as an upper-funnel tool, CTV is a powerful engine for new customer acquisition. It reaches untapped audiences that are saturated on social platforms. For example, hair care brand Lola V saw a 53% increase in new customers year-over-year from their Roku campaign.

When brands hit a point of diminishing returns on search and social media, TV becomes a critical next step. It provides incremental reach to new audiences, builds brand legitimacy, and can accelerate the path to purchase for customers discovered on other channels.

Digitally native brands reliant on paid social and search inevitably reach an inflection point where the cost to acquire the next customer surpasses their lifetime value. This 'holy crap moment' forces a strategic diversification of their media plan, often leading them to programmatic advertising to find new growth avenues.

Tushy actively measures the cross-channel impact of its advertising, discovering that top-of-funnel channels like Linear TV drive a greater sales lift on Amazon than digital channels like Meta. This is attributed to the demographic overlap between Linear TV viewers and typical Amazon Prime shoppers.

Marketers entering TV often focus on precise, performance-based targeting that generates initial results. The biggest challenge is convincing them to scale by shifting to a brand-building mindset, which involves using TV's broad reach to attract entirely new audiences who haven't heard of them yet.

Instead of treating all channels equally, identify which customer segments (e.g., brand advertisers) are best served by which channels (e.g., TV screens). Shifting demand accordingly can unlock massive growth by optimizing the entire portfolio and increasing customer ROI.

When costs on paid social and search platforms rise, instead of bidding higher for the same saturated audience, use TV to generate new demand. This top-of-funnel lift improves the efficiency of lower-funnel channels by increasing branded search, direct traffic, and conversion rates.

Turning on TV advertising significantly improved Jones Road's Meta campaigns. The new audience influx from TV boosted overall efficiency and increased the new visitor rate, providing a fresh signal to Meta's algorithm and making paid social convert better without changing the existing strategy.

Brands growing to the $50-100M range often get stuck over-investing in the same digital channels, leading to diminishing returns. Escaping this "doom loop" requires expanding into upper-funnel, brand-building channels like TV to create new, sustainable demand.