Past Sessions

• Event: MAU Vegas 25
• Date: Thursday, May 22, 2025
• Speaker: Peter Hamilton, Head of Ad Innovation, Roku
• Estimated read time: 6 to 8 minutes

Quick Read Summary

Connected TV is becoming a performance surface, not just a brand channel.

For senior app growth teams, that changes the job from buying reach to designing measurable behavior, with native interaction, durable identity signals, and incrementality proof.

The opportunity is bigger than inventory expansion. The TV home screen is now a scaled decision moment, a place where tens of millions of viewers browse, choose, and settle into a mindset that is unusually receptive to education and persuasion.

The trap is treating CTV like mobile with a bigger screen. Viewers do not want a second device handoff, they want a clean experience that stays native to the television, which makes the remote control the real conversion interface.

When you combine remote native engagement, household level identity, and lift based measurement, connected TV advertising starts to look less like a compromise, and more like the next serious playground for CTV performance marketing.

The TV home screen is a scaled decision moment

If you are still thinking about television as something that only lives inside content, you are missing the highest intent minute of the experience, the choice of what to watch. Streaming platforms have built a home screen that functions like a new kind of storefront, with display and video placements that sit upstream of content, and in front of a massive daily audience.

Roku frames this page as a true home screen, with scale that is hard to ignore, and Hamilton put a number on it, roughly 50 million people a day look at that screen. For mobile leaders, this should ring familiar. A surface with that kind of daily traffic is not a niche channel, it is a primary interface where attention can be won before a user has committed to anything else.

Practical implication: treat the home screen as its own campaign layer, not an afterthought. Build a dedicated test plan for home screen placements, separate creative, separate frequency assumptions, separate success metrics, because the user intent is different from in stream viewing.

Upper funnel is not the opposite of performance

Performance marketing teams often inherit an unhelpful mental model, if a channel is good at storytelling, it must be bad at conversion. CTV breaks that assumption because the job of storytelling is often the job of conversion, especially for apps that require trust, understanding, or habit change.

Hamilton described streaming as a moment where viewers are ready to relax and be entertained, not rush to complete a task. That mindset matters because education is not fluff, it is the first step of direct response.

“Upper funnel is also direct response.” Peter Hamilton, Head of Ad Innovation, Roku

The interpretation is straightforward. If your app relies on explaining a new behavior, a subscription value exchange, or a multi step setup, CTV is well suited to prime demand, reduce friction, and move a user into consideration in a way that mobile placements sometimes cannot.

Practical implication: write CTV creative like a conversion asset, not a brand anthem. Make the problem explicit, show the payoff, then give the viewer a native next step that does not require them to leave the television experience.

The remote is the conversion interface, not the QR code

The industry spent years betting on a simple idea, show a QR code, move the user to the phone, close the loop there. It sounds elegant, and it keeps the mobile team in familiar territory. It also collides with real behavior.

Hamilton’s view is blunt. People are happy to use their phones and happy to watch TV, sometimes at the same time, but they do not want to blend the experiences. When you force a cross device handoff, you inject friction, awkwardness, and a loss of immersion, which is the opposite of what the living room is optimized for.

“They do not want to cross the streams.” Peter Hamilton, Head of Ad Innovation, Roku

Roku’s answer is to treat the remote as a performance tool, a tactile, lean forward input that can create a measurable action without breaking context. That is the foundation for Roku Action Ads, interactive ad units that prompt a viewer to press OK and engage further.

The proof point is the response rate gap. Roku sees about 1 percent of viewers press OK on an ad to go deeper, compared with about 0.04 percent when testing QR codes. That is not a rounding error, it is a different behavior model entirely.

Practical implication: if you want performance outcomes, design for remote native engagement first. Use QR codes only when they are truly additive, and assume they will underperform unless the creative and context are exceptionally aligned.

Light engagement can lift conversions even when it is not completed

A common concern with interactive CTV is that even if users click, they may not finish. The lesson from Roku’s experience is that the click itself can matter, even when the path is not fully completed.

Hamilton notes that even when a viewer does not continue beyond the first remote interaction, overall conversions and purchases still increase relative to a plain video unit. In other words, the interaction is not only a direct response mechanic, it is also a signal that changes downstream behavior.

This is a useful reframing for app marketers. You already optimize around micro conversions, view content, start trial, add payment method, complete onboarding. Remote engagement can be treated the same way, a measurable indicator of intent that can correlate with later outcomes.

Practical implication: define a two stage measurement model for Roku Action Ads.

• Stage one, remote engagement rate and cost per engaged household
• Stage two, incrementality based lift on your true north outcomes, such as installs, subscriptions, purchases, or in app revenue

This protects you from over optimizing to a shallow click, while still using the click as a leading indicator and a creative diagnostic.

Identity and measurement on TV can be stronger than you think

Mobile performance teams have spent years adapting to weaker identity, more noise, and less deterministic matching. CTV operates under different physical constraints that can actually help measurement.

Hamilton points to device identifiers, household graphs, and the ability to understand which mobile devices are associated with a given television. He also argues that the relative precision can be comparable to mobile app download campaigns, and sometimes better, because televisions are stationary and tend to have more persistent IP behavior.

The interpretation is not that CTV is perfect. It is that the practical measurement stack may be less alien than mobile teams expect. You can build targeting logic, attribution logic, and optimization logic that looks similar to what you already run, especially as platforms invest in device graphs and privacy safe matching.

Practical implication: treat connected TV advertising as an addressable, optimizable environment, then validate the match quality yourself. Ask for clarity on household graph methodology, conversion matching approach, and how outcomes are deduplicated, then calibrate your expectations through holdout based tests.

Incrementality is the price of admission for CTV performance marketing

Attribution in CTV, like attribution everywhere, can mislead if you only look at exposed versus unexposed users. The clean way to answer the performance question is causal, what did this channel add that would not have happened otherwise.

Hamilton argues that the only way to capture the upside of TV’s storytelling effect, and the sales lift driven by it, is incrementality measurement. That aligns with where sophisticated mobile teams are already going. As signals fragment, lift becomes the anchor.

Practical implication: build your CTV measurement plan around holdouts from day one.

• Run household level holdouts where possible
• Use geo testing when household holdouts are not available
• Define a primary success metric that reflects business value, not proxy engagement
• Expect longer observation windows than mobile, because the influence pattern can be delayed

This is how you turn CTV from a hopeful add on into a channel you can scale with confidence.

Self serve buying turns TV into an experimentable channel

Even if measurement is solid, a channel cannot become performance native if the buying process is slow, expensive, and constrained by minimums. That is where self serve buying changes the market structure.

Hamilton describes a world where a marketer can add a credit card, start running TV campaigns, and run as many campaigns as they want, at whatever budget levels they want, informed by whatever conversion data they can provide. He even sketches the operating rhythm that performance teams expect, run 100 campaigns, test 10 creatives across 10 audiences, and use real time reporting to iterate.

That is not how television has traditionally worked. It is how mobile has always worked, and it is why mobile became a machine for performance innovation.

Practical implication: run CTV like a structured experimentation program, not a single campaign.

• Start with a creative matrix, problem framing, proof, offer, call to action prompt
• Start with an audience matrix, broad, lookalike, contextual, retargeting where allowed
• Set clear optimization goals, such as app downloads or purchases, then feed conversion data back into the platform
• Commit to weekly iteration, because the advantage of self serve is speed

Conclusion

CTV is not replacing mobile, it is becoming the next home screen that sits alongside it, with its own interaction model and its own measurement strengths. The teams that win will be the ones who stop forcing mobile habits onto TV, and instead design native performance experiences around the remote, the household graph, and incrementality proof.

Hamilton’s prediction is that in five years the market will look back and wonder why anyone doubted CTV performance. The underlying point is more immediate, the tools are already here, and the window for early mover advantage is open.

Speaker

Peter Hamilton, Head of Ad Innovation, Roku, Peter leads ad innovation at Roku, overseeing product, engineering, and go to market efforts for next generation advertising solutions. Before joining Roku, he served as CEO of TUNE, where he helped pioneer the mobile measurement industry. His work bridges media, technology, and performance marketing, bringing new accountability and interactive capabilities to connected TV.