CTV’s Best Kept Targeting Secret
🤩Using competitor spends to grow your traction, Google and YouTube updates impact ads and audience reach, and more!
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In this newsletter, you’ll find:
🤫 CTV’s Best Kept Targeting Secret
📊 Google and YouTube Both Dropped Platform Updates This Week
🏆 Ad of the Day
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🤫 CTV’s Best Kept Targeting Secret
Your competitor just spent $50,000 on a CTV ad. Their audience is primed, in-market, and thinking about the category. Then nothing happens. The brand that converts that audience isn’t the one that paid for the impression. It’s the one that shows up next.
This is the ACR conquesting play, and most brands don’t know it exists.
Automated Content Recognition is built into 80%+ of smart TVs sold in the last five years. It captures what’s actually playing on screen, including ads. That data flows back to platforms that let you target households exposed to specific competitor commercials. The household saw the ad. You can be next in their feed.
The catch: the window closes fast. Intent decays inside 72 hours.
Five plays that turn ACR into a performance lever:
Build a competitor exposure audience, not a category audience. Don’t target “people who watch cooking shows.”
Target “households exposed to HelloFresh, Blue Apron, or Factor in the last 7 days.” The intent signal is sharper because someone else already paid to qualify them.
Sequence your creative against their pitch. If a competitor leads with price, your follow-up ad leads with quality. If they lead with convenience, you lead with outcome. The ACR data tells you which competitor they saw, match the counter-message to that specific brand, not a generic positioning.
Front-load spend in the 0–72 hour window. Most brands spread budget evenly across a flight. Don’t. Spend 60% of your budget hitting these households within three days of competitor exposure. After day four, the conquest premium is gone and you’re paying CTV CPMs for cold traffic.
Run dayparting against their flight schedule. Competitor ads typically air heaviest in primetime.
Your conquest ads should hit the same households the next morning during news, then evening on weekend dayparts. You’re not competing for the same slot. You’re owning the recall window.
Close the loop with cross-device retargeting. ACR sees the TV. Your DSP sees the phone in the same household.
After CTV exposure, the conquest play continues on mobile and CTV-adjacent inventory for 14 days. Most brands stop at the first impression. The compounding happens in the follow-through.
This is where measurement becomes non-negotiable. You need placement-level visibility into what aired, when, and what it drove, otherwise conquest spend looks identical to brand spend on a dashboard.
Tatari ties every TV impression to actual site visits, signups, and revenue across linear, streaming, and direct publisher inventory, so the conquest signal isn’t buried in noise. You can book your demo here!
The recall window is your real CTV inventory.
Your competitor paid to make a household think about the category. The smartest move isn’t outbidding them. It’s outsmarting them inside the 72 hours their money is still working.
📊 Google and YouTube Both Dropped Platform Updates This Week
Google expanded Demand Gen with new commerce data and view-through optimization while YouTube announced it will limit push notifications for subscribers who have stopped engaging with a channel’s content.
The Breakdown:
Demand Gen Gets Retailer Data - Demand Gen is now integrated into Commerce Media Suite in Google Ads, letting advertisers tap into retailers’ first-party catalog and conversion data to reach high-intent shoppers across YouTube, Discover, and Gmail.
View-Through Conversions Now Optimized - Demand Gen campaigns can now optimize toward conversions that happen after an ad is viewed not just clicked. VTC optimization drives more conversions in less time and aligns with capabilities already available on other ad platforms.
YouTube Is Limiting Push Notifications - YouTube will stop sending push notifications to subscribers who have not engaged with a channel for approximately one month, even if they opted into all notifications. They will still receive updates in their YouTube app inbox just not push alerts.
Why This Is Actually Good for Creators - YouTube testing found fewer people turned off notifications entirely when push alerts were more relevant. Reducing overwhelm keeps more subscribers on the active list long term, which improves overall channel reach compared to mass notification fatigue.
Demand Gen already drives 18% higher conversions from new customers versus the paid media average, the Commerce Media Suite and VTC updates build on that. More Demand Gen announcements are expected at Google Marketing Live. For creators, the notification change only affects truly inactive subscribers, even occasional Shorts views keep someone on the active list.
🏆 Ad of the Day
What Works:
The Hidden Conversion Mechanism
This ad translates skincare into a physical repair metaphor your brain instantly understands. Cracked skin becomes literal broken ground, and Vaseline becomes the material that fixes it. No interpretation needed, the problem and solution click visually.
The tiny workers create a precision illusion, suggesting the product works at a micro-level, fixing details you can’t even see. That elevates perceived effectiveness without scientific explanation.
It turns moisture into active intervention, not passive care.
Convert abstract benefits into a physical visual analogy. When people can “see” the problem being fixed, belief happens instantly.
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