Published on: September 9, 2026
In his latest column, marketing strategist and industry voice Shubhranshu Singh, looks at how television has evolved into Connected TV, bringing targeting, measurement and interactivity to the living-room screen — and asks whether the creative running through this new medium has evolved with it.
Television is the ultimate survivor, despite a dozen obituaries written for it over the years.
As a medium, it survived the remote control, lived through cable disruption, and survived the streaming wars that were meant to fragment it into irrelevance.
“Now it has quietly done something more interesting than surviving: it has mutated.”
Connected TV is that mutation. The same living-room screen, the same appointment-viewing habit, wired into a circulatory system built for a measurement-hungry decade. By some estimates, CTV’s share of India’s TV and video advertising climbed from roughly 12% in 2024 to nearer 17% this year, led by festive-season investment. Linear remains the larger pool for now, but the direction is unmistakable.
What makes CTV worth admiring is that it kept television’s presence in the home: its scale, its place as the good screen in the house rather than the one in someone’s pocket during a commute. To that it added attribution, household-level targeting, and a skew toward exactly the audience festive advertisers want: homes with a smart television and money to spend this season. A medium built for one-way broadcast acquired the plumbing of performance marketing, minus the smallness of the phone screen. That is a rare trick for any format, and it deserves credit it rarely gets in an industry more excited by the newest thing than the oldest thing reinventing itself.
It makes sense that festive rupees are following the mutation. Categories driving the largest festive tickets, cars, jewellery, real estate, premium appliances, run on a different clock than the gifting-and-togetherness sentiment that carries FMCG and fashion through the same season. A car purchase timed to Dhanteras or the Diwali muhurat is a household treating auspicious timing as licence for a commitment it has been circling for months. That decision rewards a medium that can find the household weighing it and measure whether the message moved the needle. CTV can do both, and budgets are chasing it.
Here is where the enthusiasm merits a second look. Money has moved to the new pipe much faster than the creative running through it. Walk through most festive CTV campaigns in high-consideration categories and you find the same thirty-second emotional film that once ran during a cricket match timeout, now inserted into a Hotstar break.
“The channel changed. The thinking behind what to say on it barely moved.”
It is convenient to blame the medium for a failure that belongs to the planning table. CTV never demanded a festive-sentiment film; someone chose to keep making one and found a shinier place to put it.
That waste is worth fixing rather than shrugging at, because CTV can do things a thirty-second linear slot structurally cannot. It can sequence a story across a household’s viewing week: an opening film establishing why the purchase matters, a later one timed to the muhurat calendar carrying the more rational nudge on financing or availability, right where auspicious timing and financial readiness converge. It can personalise at a household level in ways linear never could, matching message to intent rather than broadcasting one film to everyone with a television. And it supports interactivity a big-ticket buyer can use in the moment, from QR paths into a configurator to shoppable overlays, turning a passive ad break into something closer to a showroom visit. None of this is exotic. Most of it goes unused because the creative brief still reads like it was written for a screen that broadcasts once and disappears.
For considered categories, the creative logic looks different from what agencies have defaulted to. Rather than replaying the sentiment reel that suits gifting categories, the message needs to speak to the commitment itself: why this timing, why this financing, why this is the moment the deliberation ends. That is a materially different creative exercise from cutting a festive film for linear and dropping it into a CTV slot because the CPMs made sense.
None of this argues for caution about the channel. If anything, the case for CTV in festive planning gets stronger once the creative catches up to what the medium can carry. The mutation was the hard part, and it has largely worked: television kept its scale and gained a body built for accountability. The remaining work belongs to the people writing what plays on it. A pipe capable of sequencing, personalisation and interaction is being asked to carry content built for none of those things, costing considered-category brands the exact advantage they moved their budgets to CTV to capture.
“Fix the message, and the medium television found its way into is fully equipped to earn the premium it is already being paid.”
Seasons Greetings and Happy Selling!
Disclaimer: This article was originally written by the author. Views expressed are the author’s own. All rights belong to the original author.
