The New Pipeline Screen: How CTV Quietly Cracked the B2B Lead Problem
CTV isn’t just for brand awareness anymore — it’s driving pipeline, even for SMB marketers.
For years, connected TV was the flashy cousin of digital — great for awareness, impossible to measure. But something just flipped.
SMB marketers are now reporting more pipeline impact from CTV than from display, social, or even search.
In a time where LLM is eating digital real estate, dissolving discovery and generally throwing a cat amongst the pigeons, the B2B solution may be on the biggest paid media channels ever - TV.
2026 might be the year the screen that built brand marketing finally becomes B2B’s best performance channel.
Summary: Local advertisers are reporting higher lead volumes from streaming TV buys on Amazon DSP and DV360 than from digital out-of-home or audio. It sounds niche — but it might signal the return of television as the most effective performance channel in modern B2B.
TV Never Died — It Just Got Data
For most of marketing history, television was the unreachable dream. The real ‘I’ve made it’ medium when a business owner or their clients see the vendor on the silver screen. It stood for gravitas and premium but got a little left behind as the digital revolution drove new attribution and performance expectations. It largely remained the reserve of those with very large brand budgets
Big budgets, big agencies, zero attribution. You bought reach and hoped for halo.
Then programmatic arrived and changed everything — mostly for worse.
We traded narrative for noise. Clicks for craft. Data for depth.
Now, the pendulum is swinging back.
Connected TV (CTV) has merged television’s emotional gravity with the targeting precision of programmatic.
And quietly, it’s working.
💡 The Reddit Spark
“Running local SMB campaigns — streaming TV via Amazon DSP & DV360 is driving actual leads. DOOH and audio can’t compete.”
— r/programmatic, November 2025
This offhand comment reveals a macro shift.
Streaming TV — once considered “brand fluff” — is out-performing established digital formats on conversion.
It’s not a fluke; it’s what happens when:
Data overlays meet sight, sound, and motion - the impact of TV will outmatch passive formats
Targeting granularity reaches postcode or even polygon level
CPMs flatten while attention metrics rise
CTV has become performance TV — and small-to-mid B2B teams are sneaking in while the giants are still treating it like branding.
What’s Changed
Cost & Access – You no longer need Sky budgets or Nielsen panels. With DSP access (Amazon, DV360, Adform, etc.), CTV CPMs can mirror LinkedIn video costs but with triple the attention.
Targeting Precision – You can target by firmographic signals, office postcode polygons, or contextual moments (e.g. “business finance content” on smart TVs).
Attribution Capability – CTV view-through and visit-lift can now be matched to IP-resolved company visits or CRM accounts. It’s not perfect — but it’s more provable than display has typically been in B2B.
Creative Advantage – 15-second emotional storytelling beats the scroll-stopping clickbait of programmatic banners or trying to win attention in LinkedIns increasingly “social” B2B feed (full of job and attention seekers)
For B2B and SMBs, It’s an Opening
B2B marketers have been stuck in a dead zone:
Google Discovery and LinkedIn reach have collapsed under algorithm changes.
Retargeting audiences shrank post-cookie.
CPMs rose while intent dropped.
Premium contextual placements on the open web are getting eroded by decisions being made in LLM layers - impenetrable with ads
CTV is a clean slate.
It’s non-click dependent, high-attention, and low-waste — everything performance marketing has forgotten how to be.
Imagine running:
A 15-second spot to CFOs in Manchester, cross-referenced with firmographic segments
Retargeting those exposed companies with display and LinkedIn nurture
Tracking uplift in analytics, FunnelFuel, or your CDP via IP and visit signatures
That’s pipeline-driven, not vanity-driven marketing.
The New CTV Metrics Stack
Forget CTRs. They’ve had a good run — but they were built for banners, not for decision-makers watching a 15-second story between episodes of Succession.
CTV runs on a different logic. It’s about attention, movement, and memory.
Here’s what the smartest B2B marketers are watching now:
1. Attention Rate
How many viewers actually watched your ad through to the end — and for how long did their attention hold?
In CTV, completion is the new click. The more time spent watching, the higher the odds your message actually lands.
2. Visit Lift
When exposed accounts suddenly start appearing in your analytics, that’s visit lift.
It’s your signal that brand exposure turned into curiosity — the first micro-conversion in a long sales cycle.
3. High-Value Action Assists (HVA-A)
This is where television earns its place in the pipeline.
Track which form fills, demo requests, or pricing-page visits happened after a CTV impression.
It’s not last-click — it’s the quiet assist that starts revenue.
High value actions are very powerful and they decompose conversion intent - but we must resist chasing them to last click, or otherwise what’s left of retargeting alongside wider stat padding tactics will obscure the true value
That’s why at FunnelFuel I’m designing multi touch models alongside HVA’s to really track pipeline impact - perfect for leveraging the value of CTV and appreciating the lift it can bring
4. Frequency vs Fatigue
More impressions aren’t better impressions.
Monitor how often your target accounts see the ad before results plateau or dip.
Smart CTV buying finds the emotional sweet spot between awareness and annoyance.
The forum needs some brand imposed safeguards and guardrails. A busy ITDM who is in the throes of decision making make be negatively tipped over the edge by your ad interrupting his or her movie on a Friday night. Injecting your business amongst huge B2B brands on a Sunday afternoon F1 race could be a huge win - like any format, tv can’t be abused
5. Completion vs Scroll
In mobile, people scroll. In CTV, they watch — or they don’t.
Comparing completion rates across screens helps you quantify quality of attention, not just volume.
Together, these metrics form your new north star.
They replace empty reach with measurable resonance — the kind of data that finally lets B2B marketers prove what television was always meant to do: move minds, and move pipeline.
For Paid Members — Turning Metrics into Action
If you’re a B2B Stack member (paid reader of this Substack) you’ll find the next layer inside the portal later this week:
The CTV Metrics Framework PDF — a full breakdown of how to instrument each of the five metrics using Matomo, IPFlow, or FunnelFuel Analytics.
The CTV ROI Calculator (Replit Tool) — plug in your CPM, completion rate, and account size to get an instant pipeline ROI estimate versus DOOH, display, and LinkedIn video.
Access instantly when you upgrade to a paid membership.
You’ll also unlock our full Signals Toolkit — the same models we use internally to connect attention data to pipeline attribution.