Ahead of MediaBrief’s Delhi edition of BreakfastBrief, supported by Affinity Global, we bring you insights from Neha Saxena Acharya, VP & Head of Global Marketing, Affinity Global, and Sonica Sharma, Senior Director of Advertiser Sales, Affinity Global, as they examine the assumptions that continue to shape Connected TV planning. From CTV’s perceived role as a pure awareness medium to questions around measurement, audience reach, purchase intent, and duplication with linear TV, the two leaders unpack six of the industry’s most persistent myths and explore what current research and market evidence reveal instead.
Myth 1: CTV is an awareness channel. Conversion happens elsewhere.
Sonica Sharma: We’ve said before that TV was always a performance channel and that “awareness” was really a comment on our measurement rather than on the medium. I want to push you past that, because it’s a position, not proof. What actually backs it up?
Neha Saxena Acharya: Fair, and the honest answer is that the proof arrived late. Profit Ability 2, the Thinkbox and Ebiquity study of £1.8 billion of UK media investment, found something most performance marketers would not expect. On immediate payback, meaning profit generated within a week of the spend, generic PPC came first at 30.5% of profit volume. Linear television came second, at 20.5%.
Sit with that for a moment. On the fastest, hardest metric in the business, the one performance teams build their year around, television is the runner-up. Not on brand tracking. Not on recall. On money back inside seven days. Immediate payback was never a performance-media monopoly, we just stopped checking whether the big screen was doing it.
Sonica Sharma: And the reason we stopped checking is the interesting part.
Neha Saxena Acharya: It is, because it wasn’t a considered decision. We built our reporting around what we could see, the funnel language followed the reporting, and eventually the language started telling us what to believe. Once “awareness channel” was on the media plan, nobody went looking for anything else. So the real question for anyone reading this isn’t whether CTV can perform. It’s what your current measurement is quietly preventing you from noticing.
Myth 2: If CTV worked lower down the funnel, we’d see the clicks.
Neha Saxena Acharya: You field this one weekly. How do you answer it?
Sonica Sharma: With some sympathy, because it’s an honest description of what a dashboard shows. But it’s the wrong instrument, and the industry’s own research says so more clearly than I could. In IAB’s 2026 Digital Video Ad Spend and Strategy report, buyers who rated CTV as weak on lower-funnel outcomes were asked why. Their top answer, at 39%, was the absence of direct click-through. Second, at 38%, was needing a second device to complete the action.
Read those two answers again. Neither is a criticism of CTV’s performance. They’re both descriptions of what a television is. Nobody has ever clicked a TV, and nobody was ever going to.
Neha Saxena Acharya: So where do you tell a client the value actually sits?
Sonica Sharma: In what the exposure does to the next thing they see. A brand on the big screen builds a quiet credibility, and that makes the same person cheaper to convert on search, on social, or on a notification an hour later. That conversion is real. It just gets recorded somewhere else, under someone else’s name.
Which means the honest way to read a CTV report isn’t to look for what CTV closed. It’s to ask what got cheaper everywhere else while CTV was running, and whether anyone in your organisation is currently measuring that.
Myth 3: There’s no hard evidence that CTV moves favourability and purchase intent.
Sonica Sharma: That’s the argument. Now the harder question. What have we actually proved?
Neha Saxena Acharya: We asked Kantar to test it, and I’d rather say plainly that this is our own research independently validated than have someone discover it later. Kantar assessed 31 mCanvas campaigns across 15 verticals against a norms base of 3,231 CTV campaigns, surveying 10,942 respondents. Against those norms, our campaigns delivered 3.4 times higher brand favourability and 3.3 times higher purchase intent.
Sonica Sharma: And before anyone else asks it, is that India data?
Neha Saxena Acharya: It’s a global study, and again, better said than inferred. What it buys us is a benchmark with real weight behind it, because 3,231 campaigns is a steadier comparison than any single market could offer today. What it doesn’t do is settle the India question on its own, which is exactly why we read it alongside Indian panel data rather than instead of it.
SONICA: The metrics are what I’d point to, though. Favourability and intent. Not awareness, not recall.
Neha Saxena Acharya: That’s the whole argument. Those are consideration metrics, sitting in the precise part of the funnel CTV is assumed to skip, and they moved together, which is what it looks like when someone is warming to a brand rather than simply noticing it exists.
Sonica Sharma: And that’s not a soft outcome if you sell anything considered. In automotive, in financial services, in consumer durables, favourability is the constraint. It’s the reason your last click costs what it costs. If the big screen is moving it, then it belongs in the plan as a lever you’re pulling deliberately, not as a pleasant thing that happens near your television budget.
Myth 4: CTV is a young, digital-native channel. Older audiences are harder to move.
Sonica Sharma: This is the assumption that costs the most money, because almost every CTV plan I see is skewed young on the strength of it.
Neha Saxena Acharya: And the same study inverts it, which surprised our own team. Cut by age, audiences 35 and above delivered 4.5 times brand favourability and 4 times purchase intent, the strongest lower-funnel lift of any cohort we measured. The group most often written off as fixed in its habits moved the furthest on intent.
Sonica Sharma: So, what about the young cohort everyone is buying CTV to reach?
Neha Saxena Acharya: The 18 to 24 group came in at 5 times message association and 3.6 times brand favourability. Their standout number is absorption, not intent. They’re taking the story in while their associations are still forming. The 25 to 34 group sits between the two, at 2.6 times on both.
Put those three cohorts side by side and the sequence is quite clear. CTV plants the story with the youngest audience and closes with the one that already has money to spend.
Sonica Sharma: Which means a lot of plans have the funnel upside down. They’re buying CTV for the cohort where it does upper-funnel work, and under-indexing the cohort where the conversion actually lands. If that describes your plan, it’s worth saying that fixing it costs nothing. It’s a reallocation, not an increase.
Myth 5: CTV in India is a metro, affluent, subscription-paying audience.
Neha Saxena Acharya: Premium but narrow. That’s what I hear most from brand teams. Is it wrong?
Sonica Sharma: Partly right, and the partly is the trap. Kantar’s Media Compass for Q1 2026 does find roughly 60% of CTV viewers in NCCS A, so the premium skew is real. The same report finds one in three CTV viewers now living in rural India.
Neha Saxena Acharya: Those two facts sit oddly together.
Sonica Sharma: They do, and holding both at once is the actual insight. Ormax makes the second half harder to ignore. In its 2025 OTT Audience Report, 75.8 million of India’s CTV audience were in small towns and villages, up from 40.4 million a year earlier. And 67% of India’s CTV audience had no access to paid streaming content at all. They’re watching free.
Neha Saxena Acharya: So a plan built on premium subscription inventory in the top eight cities is buying a real audience, just a partial one.
Sonica Sharma: It’s leaving about a third on the table, and it’s the third growing fastest. When a client tells me CTV is too narrow for a mass brand, I’ve stopped arguing with the premise. I show them where the growth is coming from and let them draw the conclusion, because it’s more persuasive when it’s theirs.
Myth 6: Adding CTV to a television buy means paying twice for the same eyeballs.
Sonica Sharma: This is the objection that actually stops budgets, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a reassurance.
Neha Saxena Acharya: It got one, in India, at the hardest possible scale. JioStar published findings from BARC and Nielsen One Ads deployed across the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2026, and cross-platform duplication stayed under 10% on every participating campaign. On the single property where you’d most expect television and digital to be reaching the same person, they were largely reaching different people.
Kantar’s panel arrives at the same place from another direction. Around 59 million viewers in India watch content exclusively on Connected TV, which is 36% of the total CTV audience. That isn’t overlap with your television plan. It’s an audience your television plan cannot reach at any weight.
Sonica Sharma: And here’s the commercial version, which is simpler. If CTV were duplicating your TV buy, adding it would raise frequency and nothing else. What the measurement shows is that it raises reach. Those are two different line items, and only one of them needs defending in a budget meeting.
The conversation we’re actually having
Neha Saxena Acharya: If there’s one thing I’d want a planner to take away before we sit down together, it’s that almost none of this is a technology problem any more.
Sonica Sharma: The scale question in India is settled. FICCI-EY put CTV advertising revenue at ₹9,900 crore in 2025, up 42%, in the same year linear television revenues fell for a fourth consecutive time. The audience is there and the money is moving.
Neha Saxena Acharya: What hasn’t caught up is accountability, and most of that gap is organisational rather than technical. Two teams, two KPIs, two screens, and a consumer who crosses between them in under a minute. The measurement infrastructure wasn’t built for that person. Neither was the org chart.
Sonica Sharma: Which is a better conversation to have over breakfast than any single number. Not whether CTV works. Whether your organisation is currently set up to notice when it does.
- Neha Saxena Acharya is VP & Head of Global Marketing at Affinity Global, where she drives international brand strategy, GTM and the company’s AI and international growth agenda. A global marketing, communications and business transformation leader with nearly two decades of experience across Asia, Europe and North America. Neha was formerly with PepsiCo, Abbott, Johnson & Johnson and Charles & Keith.
- Sonica Sharma is Senior Director of Revenue and Partnerships at Affinity Global, leading advertiser partnerships for mCanvas across CTV and mobile in India. With over 15 years in media sales spanning Viacom18, BBC and Discovery Networks, she has built revenue across television, radio and factual programming before moving to the connected screen. She works daily with brand and performance teams deciding what role the big screen should play in their conversion plan.
