CTV is no longer sitting quietly in the awareness column of the media plan. The channel has scaled, measurement has caught up, and the question that used to matter most, "does it add reach?", has been replaced by something sharper: how much of that reach is genuinely new.
Michal Schwartz, YouAppi's Director of Growth, joined John Koetsier on Growth Masterminds to talk through what that looks like from someone who has run CTV from both sides of the table. One number from the conversation hints at why it matters: 20% of the users a CTV retargeting campaign reached were not being reached by the mobile campaign running alongside it.
The rest is worth unpacking.
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Two things pushed CTV out of the awareness column. Measurement caught up, giving advertisers cross-device attribution that ties a TV exposure to a downstream mobile install. And the audience moved: streaming captured 47.5 percent of total US television viewing in December 2025, the largest share Nielsen's The Gauge has ever recorded, while US CTV ad spending is projected to reach $37.95 billion in 2026, up 14.5 percent year over year.
That changed what advertisers expect from the channel. CTV is increasingly evaluated against ROAS, CPA, and installs, not reach alone. Michal expects ad formats to diversify in the same direction, moving toward the interactive variety mobile already offers.
For retargeters, that matters even more: more formats mean more ways to sequence a message across screens for an audience already identified through first-party signals.
Michal ran CTV from the advertiser side before moving to the platform side at YouAppi. Her answer on whether CTV can outperform mobile is a qualified yes. The clearest performance differentiation shows up in the cross-device journey from big screen to mobile install, distinct from OTT inventory, where streaming apps appear directly on phones and tablets. For retargeting, CTV adds reach beyond the mobile ecosystem, and the incrementality is where that value becomes visible.
Results still vary sharply by category and market, which is exactly where a blanket CTV strategy breaks down.
The stakes behind that variance are rising. Median Day 1 retention across mobile games has slipped to approximately 22 percent, lower than the year before per GameAnalytics' 2026 benchmarks report. As retention compresses, every incremental audience segment becomes more valuable, and finding users mobile genuinely was not reaching carries more weight than it did when CTV was framed only as brand awareness.
For teams building out a CTV strategy without an in-house measurement framework yet, the YouAppi, Kochava, and Jampp CTV Growth Guide walks through how to structure incrementality testing before scaling spend.
The assumption that CTV creative needs a dedicated production has largely been disproven. Standard mobile UA creative is often effective on CTV, and Michal's recommendations focus less on production value and more on a short list of requirements the format demands:
When a client does not have the resources to adapt creative in-house, YouAppi's creative studio handles the reformatting rather than asking the advertiser to solve for a format they were not built to produce.
QR codes look like the evident bridge from TV screen to mobile install, and Michal has seen them work. Her guidance is to treat them as a variable to test, not a default to include. When they are in the ad, she recommends keeping the code visible throughout, pairing it with a direct "Scan Now," and letting the voiceover reinforce the action rather than relying on the visual alone.
The attribution mechanics also matter. Most CTV attribution runs on view-through logic, but a QR code is credited on a click basis, since the MMP's click-tracking link sits behind it. That is part of why QR creative does not automatically outperform non-QR creative, and why she recommends A/B testing the two.
The default assumption is that CTV means the US market. Michal's experience points somewhere more nuanced. The US carries the most inventory and the most competition for it, which does not always translate into the best performance for a given title. Titles that struggled in the US have outperformed in Mexico and Brazil, and LATAM, Europe, and Japan all show growing CTV supply, each requiring its own approach.
The 20% figure Michal shared is not a static number. It asks whether a CTV plan is finding new audience or simply re-displaying the same one on a bigger screen. That answer only shows up when incrementality is built into the measurement plan from the start.
For retargeters specifically, that shift opens up new territory. More formats and cleaner cross-device measurement mean more ways to sequence a message across screens for an audience already identified through first-party signals. The 20% is one example of how that expanded reach plays out in practice, and it is the shape of the opportunity worth designing for. If CTV retargeting is on your roadmap for the next quarter, our team can walk through how the setup performs inside an active campaign.
Watch the full episode on YouTube or read the full write-up by Singular.