CTV vs mobile: where connected TV advertising wins

Mobile advertising has one fairly obvious advantage: the advertisement and the install happen on the same device.

Someone sees an ad, taps it, visits the app store, and downloads the app. It is a short journey, and one that mobile growth teams understand very well.

Connected TV advertising asks more of the viewer. They see the advertisement on a television and then need to pick up their phone, scan a QR code, search for the app, or remember the brand later.

That additional step makes it easy to assume that CTV will always be less efficient than mobile.

Michal Schwartz, Head of Growth at YouAppi, says that is not necessarily the case.

Michal has worked on both sides of the equation. At Playtika, she worked in user acquisition and cross-platform growth, running CTV for both brand and performance goals. She then moved to YouAppi, where she works more closely with the product, operations, sales, and creative sides of CTV advertising across multiple app categories.

In this episode of Growth Masterminds, she explains where CTV is delivering results, where it still struggles, and what marketers need to understand before treating it like another standard acquisition channel.

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Can CTV outperform mobile advertising?

Yes, but only in particular campaigns, categories, and markets. Michal is careful not to position CTV as a universal replacement for mobile user acquisition.

Over the past two and a half years, she has seen measurement improve enough for advertisers to evaluate CTV based on performance rather than awareness alone.

In some cases, YouAppi has seen CTV campaigns deliver more competitive CPMs and CPIs than mobile campaigns. CTV can also provide significant additional reach by finding users who are difficult to reach inside mobile apps.

That second part is important.

A competitive CPI is useful. A competitive CPI from users your existing mobile campaigns are not reaching can create an entirely new source of growth.

But Michal repeatedly stresses that results vary. The app category, individual title, market, available supply, creative, and measurement environment all affect whether CTV will perform.

The takeaway is not that CTV is better than mobile. It is that app marketers should no longer assume it cannot compete.

CTV versus OTT: What are we actually measuring?

The terms CTV and OTT are often used interchangeably, but Michal makes an operational distinction during the conversation.

She uses CTV primarily to describe advertising shown on the large television screen. She uses OTT to describe streaming inventory that can also appear on phones and tablets.

That difference affects both the user journey and the measurement.

When a streaming ad appears on a phone and the user installs an app on that same phone, the journey looks more like conventional mobile acquisition.

When the advertisement appears on a television and the install happens on a phone, it becomes a cross-device journey. That is the area Michal says YouAppi is currently most focused on because it has produced some of the clearest performance opportunities.

Which app categories are performing on CTV?

There is no single category that guarantees CTV success.

Even within gaming, Michal sees meaningful differences between genres.

Casual games, social casino, and skill-based games have produced promising results. She points to companies including Playtika, Scopely, and Dream Games as examples of gaming companies actively using CTV advertising.

Role-playing games have been more challenging in her experience.

Outside gaming, YouAppi has seen positive results from:

• Fintech apps
• Rewards apps
• Travel apps

Health apps have been more difficult.

This is a more useful way to look at CTV than making a simple distinction between gaming and non-gaming. The specific product, audience, creative, market, and reason to download all matter.

A category may also work in one country and fail to reach the same efficiency somewhere else. That makes testing by both title and market essential.

What makes effective CTV creative?

One of Michal’s biggest lessons from her time at Playtika is that CTV creative does not always need to resemble an expensive traditional television commercial.

When she first started working with CTV, the assumption was that television required major productions, large budgets, and recognizable celebrities.

That assumption has changed.

Mobile video creative can be adapted for CTV, provided that it is properly rebuilt for the larger screen. It should not simply be placed vertically in the middle of a television.

Michal recommends several practical requirements:

Use a 16:9 landscape format

CTV creative needs to fit the television screen. Vertical mobile video should be reformatted rather than dropped unchanged into a landscape frame.

Prepare 15-second and 30-second versions

These are the primary formats Michal recommends clients have available for CTV inventory.

Include a voiceover

Television is generally an audio-on environment. The voiceover should explain the product, the offer, and what the viewer should do next.

Add subtitles

Audio may be lowered, muted, or missed. Subtitles ensure that the advertisement can still communicate its message.

Make it obvious that there is an app to download

For some non-gaming products, viewers may not immediately understand that they are looking at an app advertisement.

Michal recommends showing app store logos or a search bar toward the end of the creative so the next step is unmistakable.

Use a clear call-to-action

A QR code alone is not enough. The voiceover and on-screen text should tell people to scan it, search for the app, or claim a specific promotion.

The viewer also needs a reason to act now.

These recommendations align with a broader lesson from other CTV advertising strategies: the format may be video, but the buying environment, user journey, creative requirements, and measurement are different from mobile.

Why the US is not always the best place to start

CTV is most commonly associated with the US, but Michal says app marketers should not automatically make it their first or only market.

The US has significant inventory and reach, but it also has intense competition.

YouAppi has worked with titles that struggled to compete efficiently in the US but performed much better in markets such as Mexico and Brazil.

This is one of the advantages of having access to global supply. Instead of forcing a campaign to work in the most crowded market, marketers can look for countries where the audience, inventory, and economics are a better match.

CTV supply is also becoming more international. Michal points to streaming platforms and publishers expanding their availability beyond the US, creating more opportunities across LATAM, Europe, and Japan.

Each market still requires a different approach.

Japan, for example, can have expensive CPMs and less inventory available through the open market. Advertisers may need to create specific deals rather than relying entirely on standard programmatic buying.

Europe presents a different challenge: privacy.

How privacy changes CTV measurement in Europe

CTV-to-mobile attribution often relies on an IP address to associate a television exposure with activity on a mobile device.

That becomes more difficult in markets with stricter privacy requirements.

Michal says YouAppi can access CTV supply in markets such as Germany, the UK, France, and Italy, but advertisers need to understand that not all traffic will be trackable.

As a result, she recommends treating European CTV campaigns as less purely performance-driven and evaluating them using a wider set of signals.

Those can include:

• Incrementality testing
• Brand lift
• Search lift
• Surveys
• Organic acquisition trends

This does not mean that CTV cannot work in Europe. It means that CPI alone may not provide a complete account of its impact.

Marketers need a measurement approach that reflects what can and cannot be observed in each market.

Why CTV is fundamentally a cross-device channel

The most important CTV journey in this conversation starts on the largest screen in the home and ends on one of the smallest.

The advertisement appears on television. The viewer then reaches for a mobile device, scans a QR code, searches for the app, and installs.

That makes cross-device attribution central to understanding CTV performance.

Marketers need to connect the television exposure with the downstream install or conversion while distinguishing CTV from mobile, tablet, and organic activity.

Michal credits mobile measurement partners with helping make performance-focused CTV campaigns possible, but she also says education remains a major challenge.

Advertisers need to understand:

• How the attribution window works
• Where CTV ends and mobile begins
• How organic installs are treated
• Which activity can be matched
• How to compare CTV with existing acquisition channels
• How to allocate budgets when journeys overlap

Singular’s CTV attribution and measurement brings CTV activity into the same measurement framework as mobile, web, PC, and console, helping growth teams compare CTV with the rest of their marketing rather than treating it as an isolated media plan.

For a deeper walkthrough of how marketers can start, measure, and scale CTV campaigns, watch the on-demand webinar, CTV that performs: How to drive installs, ROAS, and real growth. It covers targeting, creative, measurement, incrementality, and the wider cross-channel effect of CTV.

CTV retargeting is opening another opportunity

CTV is generally discussed as a user acquisition or awareness channel.

Michal says YouAppi is also seeing growing interest in CTV retargeting.

The idea is straightforward: instead of trying to re-engage an existing user only through their phone, marketers can reach them through the television as well.

The interesting part is that this is not always the same audience.

In one internal YouAppi analysis, Michal says approximately 20% of the users reached through a television retargeting campaign had not been reached through mobile.

That figure should not be treated as a universal CTV benchmark. It is one analysis from YouAppi. But it illustrates the opportunity.

CTV retargeting can extend a campaign beyond the mobile inventory where advertisers may already be repeatedly competing for the same users.

It gives marketers another screen, another moment, and potentially another segment of an existing audience.

What comes next for connected TV advertising?

Michal expects CTV to begin looking more like mobile advertising.

Today, most CTV advertising relies on a relatively small number of standard video formats. Mobile offers a much wider range of formats, including native ads, interstitials, rewarded video, and interactive creative.

She expects CTV platforms to develop more dedicated and interactive formats over time rather than continuing to use similar video units across every environment.

The buying side will also continue evolving.

More companies across gaming, ecommerce, retail, and other app categories are beginning to understand that programmatic advertising makes television accessible without requiring traditional television-sized budgets.

Michal believes CTV will increasingly become a regular line in growth marketing plans rather than a separate brand experiment.

There are still challenges. Measurement needs to improve. Marketers need more education. Buying inventory varies significantly between countries and platforms. And teams still need a better understanding of how CTV, mobile, and organic acquisition interact.

But those are signs of a channel that is maturing, not one that is standing still.

The bigger shift is that connected TV is no longer being judged only by how many people saw an advertisement.

It is increasingly being asked to drive installs, conversions, retargeting, and measurable growth.

CTV advertising FAQs

Can connected TV advertising outperform mobile user acquisition?

In some campaigns, yes. Michal has seen CTV deliver more competitive CPMs and CPIs than mobile while also reaching users mobile campaigns missed. Performance varies by app, category, country, creative, and available inventory.

Which app categories work best on CTV?

YouAppi has seen encouraging results from casual games, social casino, skill-based games, fintech, rewards, and travel. RPG and health apps have been more challenging in Michal’s experience.

Can mobile creative be used for CTV advertising?

Mobile video can be adapted for CTV, but it should be reformatted into a 16:9 landscape layout. Michal also recommends 15-second and 30-second versions, voiceover, subtitles, app store branding, and a clear call-to-action.

How are CTV app installs measured?

When an advertisement appears on a television and the install happens on a phone, marketers need cross-device attribution to associate the exposure with the downstream action. Privacy regulations and the available matching signals can affect how much activity is measurable.

Can CTV be used for retargeting?

Yes. Michal says more YouAppi clients are testing CTV retargeting. In one internal analysis, 20% of the users reached on television had not been reached through mobile retargeting.

Does CTV only work in the US?

No. YouAppi has seen opportunities in Mexico, Brazil, Europe, and Japan. However, inventory, competition, pricing, privacy regulations, and buying methods vary significantly between markets.