The smartest performance marketers in the industry are moving their dollars up the funnel and driving more sales as a result. That is what happens when the math finally catches up to the medium. Connected TV (CTV) has crossed the threshold from a brand-awareness experiment to a performance channel, and the top spenders who recognized that shift early are now sitting on a structural advantage over competitors still optimizing at the bottom.
Elle Shnayder Donner, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Skye Consortium, has watched this shift from every vantage point the industry offers. “The shift into CTV is happening because the math is finally working,” Donner states. “And the advertisers who get there first are not just buying media, they are building brands that compound.”
Top of Funnel Is Outperforming Bottom of Funnel
Spend is not increasing across the board. It is shifting. Performance marketers running video at the top of the funnel are generating stronger return on investment (ROI) than those going straight to social retargeting, and the pattern is accelerating, much like how linear TV dollars once moved slowly, then exponentially, into digital. The mechanics are familiar, but the destination is different.
An advertiser who skips the top of the funnel entirely and starts at the bottom builds a transactional product rather than a brand, and transactional products compete on price, not loyalty. The agencies and consultants pushing that approach are optimizing for short-term attribution at the expense of long-term commercial value. The top spenders understand the difference and are investing accordingly.
Your Television Is Now the Internet
The old lines between video and digital no longer exist. A viewer watching premium content on a connected TV can be reached, identified, and retargeted across contextually aligned content on any screen, including social. The industry calls this audience extension. It represents a closed-loop performance capability that did not exist in traditional television and is now available at scale through CTV.
The lift in click-through and sales conversion from this kind of cross-screen sequencing is significant. This is where modern performance marketing thrives, reaching a qualified audience in a high-attention environment, then maintaining that thread across the digital ecosystem until the purchase decision is made. The infrastructure required to execute it properly is what most agencies are still catching up on.
Shoppable CTV Changes the Conversion Equation
CTV is becoming directly transactional. Viewers can now buy from a television screen through interactive, clickable, and attributable experiences, which collapses the distance between awareness and conversion in a way that was previously impossible in the medium. For that capability to deliver real commercial results, agencies need direct access to premium inventory with transparent pricing, no minimums, and flexible execution models.
Skye Consortium was built around exactly that idea. Through the partnership with Kodiak Media Group, the focus is on building demand-side operational capability, not adding another seat at another demand-side platform (DSP), but constructing the demand layer that gives advertisers genuine control over how they participate in the CTV market. The agencies that build that operational foundation now are the ones that will define what performance marketing looks like in the next era of television.
Follow Elle Shnayder Donner on LinkedIn for more insights on CTV strategy, programmatic advertising, and building the media infrastructure that puts advertisers back in the power seat.
