In the dynamic world of mobile user acquisition, change remains the only constant. As the industry faces new waves of transformation driven by market saturation, AI, and increasingly complex attribution challenges, success will belong to those who adapt.

More than ever, marketers need to explore new alternatives, including memorable and impactful advertising that goes beyond simply driving clicks to the App Store or Google Play.

The answer? The biggest creative canvas right in the living room of your target audience: Connected TV (CTV). At the most recent Smadex CTV Live! event held in London, experts from King, Rovio, Google, AppsFlyer, Tubi, LG Ad Solutions and Index Exchange laid out the strategic blueprint for app and game developers to successfully enter and navigate the era of Performance CTV.

Couldn’t make it? Continue reading to learn from the expert panelists.

Our first panel featured Luis de la Camara, VP of Global Marketing at Rovio; Jack MacVine, Media Manager at King; and Adam Smart, Global Director of Product at AppsFlyer, who analyzed and addressed the hesitations that prevent mobile-native marketers from adopting CTV as an always-on performance channel. 

Panelists openly discussed how the conventional app mindset during the past decade has been conditioned for instant feedback loops: a user clicks a mobile ad, the user installs the app, and the MMP attributes the event in milliseconds. Mission accomplished. Whilst that user journey is straightforward, savvy game or app marketers know that mobile attribution is nuanced. 

CTV requires view-through-attribution (VTA) which means reevaluating measurement and attribution. It introduces complexity and perceived barriers which can easily be resolved.

Creative Friction:  There is no longer the need to spend six-figure budgets and months of production time on television creatives. The combination of AI creative and the repurposing of high-quality creative assets can work well on CTV.  In addition, by testing persistent QR codes, audio cues, and iOS/Android app store search badges, marketers can efficiently bridge the gap to drive mobile conversion.

The Attribution Leap: The likely primary obstacle to performance marketers’ hesitation is perceived opacity between a CTV ad view in the living room and a mobile app install hours later. MMPs can accurately measure and attribute CTV via IP and timestamp matching. The question is how much “value” you should place on a CTV campaign. For growth marketers accustomed to last-click attribution, CTV requires a recalibration.

The panelists shared their insights on how the CTV opportunity is increasingly driven by sheer necessity. In a landscape where user acquisition costs continue to rise. CTV offers a golden opportunity, providing app marketers access to vast, untapped, and highly engaged audiences in a truly premium environment – the Big Screen in people’s homes.

Performance CTV does not operate in a silo. In addition to driving direct performance, it also serves as a macro catalyst that supercharges the conversion rates and efficiency of all your existing mobile advertising efforts. It has a “halo” effect.

The relationship between large-scale television advertising and subsequent search engine behavior is well-documented, highly predictable, and incredibly powerful. Assuming your app or game resonates with the viewer, when an immersive, high-impact ad is shown on the big screen, it can trigger a viewer into action – within hours. Apps that consistently invest in CTV  see sustained spikes in search volume, which results in higher conversion rates. 

Social media platforms are increasingly reliant on broad algorithmic targeting and machine learning to find relevant users, meaning marketers have less manual control over audience selection. When CTV is introduced into the media mix, it acts as a powerful primer for these audiences, making the social algorithms substantially more effective and efficient.

A 30-second high-impact CTV ad establishes an app’s value proposition, brand and elicits trust; a user later sees a social ad for the same app. The TV exposure reduces the cognitive load, triggering higher conversion. Data shows that CTV-exposed audiences deliver higher conversion rates and better retention. The big screen builds the narrative and establishes trust; the small screen closes the transaction. The two screens work in tandem. That’s the power of advertising!

Mobile Ad Networks and DSPs are extremely efficient at acquiring users at scale. However, they operate inside a closed loop of mobile-to-mobile inventory. CTV offers the opportunity to access highly valuable users in a lean-back environment on their biggest home screen.

Advanced DSPs like Smadex position themselves as a performance engine – not just another CTV platform – using large-scale data processing, AI-driven prediction models, and cross-device intelligence to drive measurable app growth.

Our second panel, moderated by Mike Brooks, CTV Advisor at Smadex, featured Cadi Jones, SVP at Index Exchange; Paul Gubbins, CTV Sales Lead at Google; Ross Appleton, General Manager at Tubi; and Ryan Afshar, VP, Publishers and Platforms at LG Ad Solutions, unpacked the strategies to seamlessly transition from the micro-tactics of performance acquisition to the macro-economics of a global media strategy, focusing on the realities of the European landscape.

The panelists explained how, for programmatic acquisition leads scaling globally, treating Europe as a single media market is an operational pitfall. Unlike the unified language and data infrastructure of North America, the European CTV ecosystem demands localized precision:

• Traditional Broadcasters: Legacy, public broadcaster platforms still hold deep cultural loyalty and capture massive streaming market share. Navigating these localized inventory paths is complex.. For an app marketer looking to scale their app globally, balancing budgets between local broadcasters and global platform scale can be daunting.
• Localization: Deploying unlocalized English creatives across the DACH region or Southern Europe can heavily damage engagement metrics. Successful European campaigns require extensive adaptation: localized voice-overs, culturally relevant creatives, and a deep understanding of regional humor, pacing, and visual preferences.

• Configure your MMP to accept probabilistic and IP-based view-through attribution signals from all major CTV hardware platforms and operating systems.
• Establish rigorous baseline metrics for daily organic search volumes and historical social media CPAs.
• Ensure all data collection methodologies are GDPR-compliant and use content-based frameworks.

• Creative assets must be meticulously reformatted for 16:9 4K displays, ensuring high-resolution textures for games and clear, legible UI representations for applications.
• CTAs must be perfectly optimized for the dual-screen reality of the modern living room. Integrating subtle audio cues and clear on-screen textual directives encouraging users to search the app are equally vital to driving search volume. For the European deployment, this phase must include rigorous, culturally sensitive language localization to ensure deep resonance across borders.

• Partner with an advanced performance DSP like Smadex, which runs deep-learning Deep Neural Network (DNN) architectures trained on CTV and Mobile signals to optimize conversion.

• CTV should not be managed in isolation but integrated into the broader mobile ad ecosystem. When a CTV campaign launches, teams must measure its standalone performance via their MMP but also monitor its impact (the “halo effect”) on other paid channels, search, ASA and also organic downloads.

As traditional mobile user acquisition channels face diminishing returns, Connected TV offers a scalable opportunity for performance marketers. Performance marketers who successfully navigate the synergy between their established mobile acquisition channels and the big screen stand to secure a growth advantage – whilst also benefiting by building an app or game brand that has longevity. Think Candy Crush Saga or Angry Birds!

Ready to turn the living room into your ultimate growth engine? Stay tuned and don’t miss the next CTV Live! event.