Connected TV Digital Advertising Is Quietly Reshaping How India Watches — and How Brands Win

The numbers coming out of the Indian streaming market right now are genuinely striking: somewhere in the ballpark of 50 million connected TV households are expected to be active by 2025, which means the living room screen — once written off as a passive, reach-only medium — has become one of the most targetable advertising surfaces in the country. Most brands, frankly speaking, are still treating CTV the way they treated desktop display in 2012: as an afterthought to their main media plan, booked at the last minute with vague targeting parameters. That is a significant missed opportunity, and one we have spent considerable time helping our clients avoid.

Why Connected TV Is Not Just Another Digital Channel

What a lot of people miss is that connected TV sits at a genuinely unusual intersection of two things that rarely coexist in advertising: the emotional weight of a large-format screen and the precision of programmatic targeting. Television, in its traditional form, gave you scale and brand-building impact; digital gave you data and accountability. CTV, at its best, gives you both — which is why we have seen media budgets shift toward it with unusual speed over the last two years, particularly among mid-sized brands that previously could not afford meaningful television presence.

The FICCI-EY Media and Entertainment Report has consistently flagged the growth of streaming and connected TV as one of the defining structural shifts in Indian media consumption, noting that OTT video consumption on television screens — as opposed to mobile — has grown substantially as smart TV penetration accelerates across Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities. What this means practically is that a brand running a CTV campaign is not necessarily reaching a mobile-first, on-the-go audience; they are reaching households gathered around a shared screen, which changes the creative brief, the frequency strategy, and the targeting logic entirely. We always tell our clients to think of CTV as "digital with living room intent" — the viewer has actively chosen to sit down, which is a very different attention environment from a pre-roll on a phone.

On top of that, the inventory quality on CTV is meaningfully different from most digital placements. Because connected TV content is typically long-form — series, films, live sports — ad breaks tend to be structured more like traditional television, with non-skippable formats that command genuine attention. Our experience shows that completion rates on CTV pre-roll and mid-roll formats regularly exceed 85 to 90 percent, which is a number that tends to surprise clients who are accustomed to the 30 to 40 percent completion rates they see on YouTube or social video placements.

How Does Connected TV Advertising Actually Work in India?

The mechanics are worth understanding clearly, because there is a fair amount of confusion in the market about what CTV advertising actually involves versus what traditional OTT advertising on mobile involves. At its core, CTV advertising means delivering video ads to audiences watching streaming content on internet-connected television screens — this includes smart TVs running apps like JioCinema, Disney+ Hotstar, SonyLIV, and ZEE5, as well as devices like Amazon Fire Stick, Apple TV, Chromecast, and gaming consoles that connect a regular TV to streaming services.

The buying mechanism can work in two broad ways, which are worth distinguishing. The first is direct inventory buying through the streaming platform itself — you negotiate with JioCinema or Hotstar directly for specific content packages, premium placements around live events like IPL, or branded content integrations; this is typically a fixed-cost model with guaranteed impressions and tends to suit larger budgets with brand-safety requirements. The second is programmatic CTV buying, where inventory is purchased through demand-side platforms (DSPs) that access CTV supply through ad exchanges; this allows for audience-based targeting, frequency capping, and dynamic creative optimization, which makes it significantly more flexible for performance-oriented campaigns.

At SmartAds, we have found that the most effective CTV strategies for Indian brands typically combine both approaches — using premium direct buys to anchor brand presence around high-viewership content, while using programmatic layers to extend reach among specific audience segments at more efficient CPMs. A consumer electronics client we worked with in Bengaluru ran exactly this kind of hybrid campaign ahead of a new product launch; the direct buy on a major cricket streaming property gave them the mass reach and brand credibility they needed, while the programmatic layer allowed them to retarget users who had visited their website but not yet converted, achieving a cost-per-view that worked out to roughly ₹1.8, which was substantially below what they had been paying for comparable reach on social video.

What Are the Targeting Capabilities That Make CTV Different?

This is where CTV genuinely earns its premium over traditional television, and frankly, it is also where most media plans underutilize the medium. Because CTV inventory is delivered through internet-connected devices, it carries with it the full stack of digital audience data — which means you can target by geography down to the city or even pin code level, by household income and demographic profile, by content genre preferences, by time of day, and increasingly by behavioral signals drawn from cross-device data partnerships.

The geographic targeting capability is particularly valuable in the Indian context, where a national brand might want to weight its CTV investment heavily in markets where it is launching a new product, or where a regional brand wants to reach premium households in specific metros without paying for national television reach it does not need. We have run campaigns for a real estate developer in Hyderabad where the entire CTV budget was concentrated within a 15-kilometre radius of their project site, targeting households with demonstrated interest in property content and income signals consistent with their target buyer profile — something that would have been impossible on traditional television at any price.

What a lot of planners also underestimate is the cross-device attribution capability that CTV enables. Because most CTV platforms operate within logged-in ecosystems — users are signed into their JioCinema or Hotstar account on the TV, and often on their phone as well — it becomes possible to track whether a household that saw a CTV ad subsequently searched for the brand, visited the website, or completed a purchase on a connected device. This kind of closed-loop measurement, which has historically been the exclusive domain of performance digital channels, is increasingly available in CTV, which is one of the reasons we have seen performance-oriented brands — e-commerce, fintech, ed-tech — begin allocating meaningful budgets to CTV where previously they would have dismissed it as a brand-building-only medium.

What Does Connected TV Advertising Cost in India?

To be honest, this is the question we get asked most often, and it is also the one that has the most variance in the answer — which is why a lot of agencies either dodge it or give ranges so wide they are useless. We would rather give you a real framework for thinking about CTV costs in the Indian market, even if the precise numbers shift with inventory demand and platform negotiations.

For programmatic CTV buying, the CPM — cost per thousand impressions — typically works out to somewhere between ₹250 and ₹600 for standard pre-roll and mid-roll placements on mainstream OTT platforms, which is considerably higher than mobile video CPMs but reflects the premium attention environment and the non-skippable format. Premium placements around live sports, particularly IPL or international cricket on JioCinema, can command CPMs that are significantly higher — in the ballpark of ₹800 to ₹1,500 or more during peak inventory periods, which is a number that sounds steep until you consider the concurrent household viewership and the fact that a single impression is often reaching two to four people in the same room. Direct buys on platform-specific premium packages tend to have minimum commitment thresholds, which for mid-tier brands typically start somewhere around ₹10 to 15 lakh for a meaningful campaign flight.

The cost-efficiency argument for CTV becomes clearer when you account for the effective cost per household reached, rather than cost per individual impression — a metric that traditional television planners are more comfortable with. Our experience shows that for premium urban households, particularly in the top eight metros, CTV often delivers a more cost-efficient reach profile than comparable GRP-based television buying, especially when you factor in the targeting precision that eliminates wasted impressions on audiences outside your buying window. A FMCG client we worked with ran a parallel test — identical creative, comparable budgets, one on traditional GEC television and one on CTV — and found that the CTV campaign delivered roughly 40 percent higher brand recall among their target demographic of women aged 25 to 44 in SEC A households, at a cost-per-recalled-impression that was actually lower than the television buy.

Which Platforms Carry the Most Valuable CTV Inventory in India?

The Indian CTV ecosystem is more fragmented than most planners realize, and the platform choice has significant implications for both audience quality and campaign performance. JioCinema has emerged as the dominant force in live sports streaming, particularly after acquiring IPL streaming rights, which means it carries arguably the highest-attention CTV inventory in the country during cricket season; the platform's scale — with hundreds of millions of registered users, a meaningful share of whom watch on connected TV screens — makes it essential for any brand seeking mass reach with premium context.

Disney+ Hotstar, which retains a strong position in premium content — international series, Disney films, and a loyal subscription base — tends to index higher for affluent urban households, which makes it particularly valuable for categories like automotive, luxury, financial services, and consumer electronics where the premium household profile justifies the higher CPM. SonyLIV carries significant live sports inventory beyond cricket — including football, tennis, and WWE — along with a strong Hindi GEC content library, which gives it a broad and diverse audience base that works well for mass-market brands. ZEE5 and MX Player (now JioHotstar after the merger discussions) each bring distinct audience profiles worth considering depending on the category and geography.

At SmartAds, we plan CTV buys across this full ecosystem rather than defaulting to a single platform, which is an approach that consistently delivers better reach and frequency outcomes than single-platform concentration. The thing is, CTV audiences in India tend to have platform loyalty that mirrors their content preferences — a household that primarily watches cricket will be on JioCinema, while a household that watches Korean dramas or Marvel content will be on Hotstar; reaching both requires a multi-platform strategy, which is something we build into every CTV media plan we develop.

How Should Brands Measure the Effectiveness of CTV Campaigns?

Measurement is the area where CTV is evolving fastest, and also the area where the gap between what is theoretically possible and what most brands are actually tracking remains widest. The standard metrics — impressions, completion rate, CPM, reach and frequency — are table stakes and should be reported on every campaign; but the more interesting measurement happens at the intersection of CTV exposure and downstream behavior, which is where the medium's true value becomes demonstrable to CFOs and marketing directors who want accountability.

Brand lift studies, which measure the incremental impact of CTV exposure on awareness, consideration, and purchase intent among exposed versus unexposed audiences, are increasingly available through the major Indian streaming platforms and through third-party measurement partners. Our experience shows that well-executed CTV campaigns for mid-to-large brands typically deliver brand recall lifts in the range of 8 to 15 percentage points among exposed audiences, which is a meaningful number when you are trying to justify the premium CPM to a skeptical finance team. Cross-device attribution — tracking whether CTV-exposed households subsequently engage with the brand on mobile or desktop — adds another layer of accountability that traditional television simply cannot offer.

The BARC-Nielsen partnership for OTT measurement, which has been developing its cross-platform measurement framework, represents an important step toward standardized CTV audience measurement in India; when this matures further, it will make CTV planning and post-campaign analysis significantly more rigorous, which will in turn accelerate budget migration from traditional television. For now, we advise clients to establish clear pre-campaign KPIs — whether that is brand lift, website visitation uplift, or direct conversion — and to build the measurement infrastructure before the campaign launches, not after, because retrofitting attribution is always more expensive and less accurate.

What Creative Formats Work Best for Connected TV Advertising?

Creative strategy for CTV is one of those areas where television instincts and digital instincts both apply, but neither applies wholesale — which makes it genuinely interesting to plan. The large-format, shared-screen environment of CTV rewards creative that is visually ambitious and emotionally engaging in the way television creative is; but the data-driven, targeted nature of CTV delivery also makes personalization and dynamic creative optimization viable in ways that traditional television is not.

Non-skippable pre-roll formats of 15 to 30 seconds remain the workhorse of CTV advertising, and they work best when the creative is built specifically for the format — which means establishing brand recognition in the first three seconds, delivering the core message by second ten, and using the remaining time to reinforce rather than introduce. What we have seen backfire repeatedly is when brands simply repurpose their 30-second television TVC for CTV without any adaptation; the audience context is different enough that creative which performs brilliantly on broadcast television can feel oddly paced or visually underwhelming on a connected screen where the viewer is closer to the display and more engaged with the content they are waiting to watch.

Interactive CTV formats — which allow viewers to engage with the ad using their remote, requesting more information, saving a product to a wishlist, or scanning a QR code on screen — are an emerging format that we have been testing with select clients and which show genuine promise for categories with considered purchase journeys. An automotive brand we worked with used an interactive CTV unit that allowed viewers to select which car model they wanted to learn more about; the engagement rate on that format was substantially higher than a standard non-skippable unit, and the downstream lead quality — measured by the conversion rate of people who subsequently visited the brand's website — was meaningfully better, which suggests that the interactivity was attracting genuinely interested prospects rather than passive viewers.

Is CTV Advertising Right for Every Budget Size?

This is a fair question, and the honest answer is: not always, but the entry point is lower than most brands assume. The perception that CTV advertising requires large budgets — because it is associated with premium streaming platforms and live sports inventory — is partly true for direct platform buys, but programmatic CTV has democratized access to connected TV inventory in a way that makes it accessible to brands spending as little as ₹5 to 10 lakh on a campaign, which puts it within reach of regional brands, challenger brands in competitive categories, and mid-sized businesses that want premium video presence without committing to national television budgets.

The more relevant question is whether the target audience is actually on CTV in meaningful numbers for a given brand's category and geography. For a brand targeting premium urban households — particularly in metros and Tier 1 cities — CTV reach is now substantial enough to justify meaningful budget allocation; the Dentsu e4m Digital Report has highlighted the rapid growth of connected TV penetration in urban India, and the trajectory suggests that this audience will only grow as smart TV prices continue to fall and broadband infrastructure improves. For a brand targeting rural or semi-urban audiences, CTV remains a supplementary medium at best, and the budget is better deployed elsewhere until penetration catches up.

At SmartAds, we typically recommend that brands consider CTV as a meaningful component of their media mix when their target audience skews urban, when they have video creative assets of sufficient quality to perform on a large screen, and when they have measurement infrastructure in place to track outcomes beyond impressions. The worst CTV campaigns we have seen are the ones where the medium was added to a plan because it sounded modern, without a clear audience rationale or measurement framework — which is a pattern we actively work to prevent in every plan we develop.

How Does CTV Fit Into a Broader Integrated Media Strategy?

The most powerful use of CTV is not as a standalone channel but as part of an integrated media architecture where it plays a specific, defined role — which is a framing that applies to almost every channel but is particularly important for CTV given its unique position between television and digital. In a well-constructed media plan, CTV typically serves one of two strategic functions: it either extends the reach of a television campaign into premium streaming audiences who have cut the cord or reduced their traditional TV viewing, or it provides a premium brand-building environment for brands that are primarily digital-first and want to add the emotional weight of a large-format video experience to their mix.

The sequencing of CTV within a broader campaign is worth thinking about carefully. Our experience shows that CTV works particularly well as a top-of-funnel awareness driver when paired with retargeting on mobile and social platforms — the household sees the brand on the living room screen in a high-attention context, which plants the brand memory, and then subsequent mobile touchpoints reinforce and activate that memory when the viewer is in a purchase-ready mindset. This kind of cross-device sequential messaging, which was largely theoretical a few years ago, is increasingly executable through integrated DSP platforms that can manage frequency and sequence across CTV, mobile, and desktop within a single campaign.

The GroupM TYNY Report has consistently pointed to the convergence of television and digital video as one of the defining trends in Indian media, with brands increasingly planning video budgets holistically across broadcast, streaming, and social rather than in separate silos — which is a structural shift that favors agencies with genuine cross-channel planning capability. At SmartAds, our integrated approach means that a CTV buy is never planned in isolation; it is always positioned within the broader media architecture, with clear handoffs to other channels and a unified measurement framework that allows us to assess the contribution of each medium to overall campaign outcomes.

Frequently Asked Questions About Connected TV Digital Advertising

Q: What is the difference between OTT advertising and connected TV advertising?

This distinction trips up a lot of marketers, and it is worth being precise about. OTT — over-the-top — refers to the delivery mechanism: video content delivered over the internet, bypassing traditional cable or satellite distribution. Connected TV refers specifically to the device: a television screen that is connected to the internet, whether through a built-in smart TV operating system or through an external device like a Fire Stick or Chromecast. The overlap is significant — most CTV viewing is OTT content — but they are not identical. OTT advertising includes mobile and desktop video as well as CTV; CTV advertising specifically refers to ads delivered to the television screen via internet-connected devices. For media planners, this distinction matters because the audience context, the creative requirements, the CPM benchmarks, and the measurement approaches differ meaningfully between mobile OTT and CTV, even when the underlying content and platform are the same.

Q: How is audience targeting done for CTV campaigns in India?

CTV targeting in India draws on several data sources, which can be layered together to build precise audience segments. Platform first-party data — the demographic and behavioral information that streaming platforms collect from their registered users — forms the foundation; JioCinema and Hotstar, for instance, have rich user profiles built from registration data, content consumption patterns, and linked payment and e-commerce behavior. On top of this, programmatic CTV buys can incorporate third-party audience data from data management platforms, device graph data that links household TV screens to individual mobile and desktop devices, and contextual targeting based on the content being watched. Geographic targeting is particularly strong in the Indian CTV ecosystem, with city-level and in some cases pin-code-level precision available through most major platforms. The practical implication is that a brand can reach, for example, households in South Mumbai and Bandra with demonstrated interest in luxury automobiles and household income signals consistent with their target buyer — a level of precision that would have required a very expensive and imprecise proxy strategy on traditional television.

Q: What is a realistic minimum budget to run a CTV campaign in India?

For programmatic CTV, a meaningful test campaign can be run with a budget in the range of ₹5 to 10 lakh, which is enough to generate statistically significant impression volume and gather useful performance data across a two to four week flight. Below this level, the reach and frequency are typically insufficient to generate measurable brand impact, and the campaign becomes more of a technical test than a genuine media investment. For direct platform buys — particularly on premium properties like IPL on JioCinema — minimum commitments are higher, often starting in the ₹15 to 25 lakh range for packages with guaranteed placement and viewability. Brands with larger video budgets — say, ₹50 lakh and above — have access to a much richer range of CTV options, including custom content integrations, branded content partnerships, and multi-platform programmatic campaigns with sophisticated audience sequencing. The key point is that the right budget is determined by the audience size you need to reach and the frequency required to generate brand impact, not by an arbitrary minimum — which is why we always start CTV planning with audience sizing before discussing budget.

Q: How do I measure ROI on a connected TV campaign?

ROI measurement on CTV works best when the measurement framework is established before the campaign launches, with clear KPIs tied to business outcomes rather than just media metrics. For brand campaigns, the primary measurement tool is a brand lift study, which surveys exposed and unexposed audiences to measure the incremental impact on awareness, consideration, and purchase intent; most major Indian streaming platforms offer this as a campaign add-on, and the results typically arrive within two to four weeks of campaign completion. For performance-oriented campaigns, cross-device attribution — tracking whether CTV-exposed households subsequently visit the brand's website, search for the brand, or complete a purchase on a connected device — provides a more direct ROI signal. Pixel-based attribution, where a tracking pixel fires when a user who was exposed to a CTV ad subsequently visits the brand's website on any device within the same household, is increasingly available through programmatic CTV platforms and provides a reasonable proxy for conversion attribution. Our recommendation is always to use a combination of brand lift and behavioral attribution metrics, because CTV typically operates across the full funnel — building brand equity at the top while also influencing consideration and purchase behavior lower down.

Q: Which categories of advertisers benefit most from CTV advertising in India?

The categories that consistently extract the most value from CTV advertising in our experience are those where the target audience skews toward premium urban households and where the purchase decision involves a degree of consideration — categories like automotive, consumer electronics, financial services, real estate, luxury goods, and premium FMCG. These categories benefit from CTV's combination of large-format brand impact and precise audience targeting, which allows them to reach high-value households in a premium content environment without paying for the broad reach of national television that includes large swaths of audience outside their buying window. E-commerce and direct-to-consumer brands have also found significant value in CTV, particularly when using it as a top-of-funnel driver paired with retargeting on mobile; the scale of streaming audiences in urban India is now large enough that a well-executed CTV campaign can meaningfully move brand awareness metrics even for brands with relatively modest overall media budgets. Categories that tend to see lower returns from CTV — at least in the current Indian market — are those targeting rural or semi-urban audiences, or mass-market FMCG categories where the broad reach of traditional television at low CPMs remains the most efficient way to build household penetration.

Q: How does frequency capping work in CTV advertising, and why does it matter?

Frequency capping — limiting the number of times a single household sees the same ad within a defined time period — is one of the most important levers in CTV campaign management, and it is also one of the most commonly mismanaged. Because CTV inventory is delivered programmatically and tied to device identifiers, it is technically possible to cap frequency at the household level across platforms, which is a capability that does not exist in traditional television. The reason this matters is that without frequency capping, CTV campaigns can quickly reach a point of diminishing returns where the same household sees the same ad eight or ten times in a single week — which generates irritation rather than brand affinity and wastes budget that could be deployed against new households. Our standard recommendation is to cap frequency at somewhere between three and five exposures per household per week for awareness campaigns, and to monitor frequency distribution closely throughout the campaign flight; if a significant portion of impressions are being delivered to households that have already seen the ad multiple times, the targeting parameters need to be broadened to access new reach. The GroupM TYNY Report has noted that frequency management is one of the key differentiators between high-performing and average-performing digital video campaigns — which is a finding that aligns closely with what we observe in our own CTV campaign data.

The Bigger Picture: Where CTV Is Headed in Indian Advertising

The trajectory of connected TV in India is not particularly difficult to read, even if the precise pace of change is hard to predict. Smart TV prices have fallen dramatically over the last three years — a 32-inch smart TV is now available for under ₹15,000, which means the connected TV audience is no longer confined to upper-income urban households; it is spreading into Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities at a pace that will materially change the reach calculus for CTV advertising within the next two to three years. The rollout of affordable broadband — both through Jio's fixed broadband expansion and through improving 5G home broadband options — is removing the connectivity barrier that previously limited CTV adoption outside metros.

What this means for media planners is that CTV is transitioning from a niche premium channel to a genuinely mass medium, which changes the strategic calculus significantly. The brands that establish CTV expertise and audience relationships now — building first-party data integrations, testing creative formats, developing measurement frameworks — will be substantially better positioned than those who wait until the medium is fully mainstream and inventory prices have risen to reflect its scale. This is a pattern we have seen play out repeatedly in Indian media: the brands that moved early on digital video, on social media advertising, and on programmatic display all extracted disproportionate value before the market matured and CPMs normalized.

At SmartAds, we have been building our CTV planning and buying capabilities with exactly this trajectory in mind; our integrated approach — which spans traditional television, digital video, and connected TV within a single planning framework — means that we can help brands navigate the transition from broadcast to streaming without losing the brand-building impact that television has always delivered. If you are a brand manager or media planner who is trying to figure out where CTV fits in your 2025 or 2026 media plan, we would genuinely enjoy that conversation. The team at SmartAds.in works with brands across categories and budget sizes to develop CTV strategies that are grounded in real audience data, honest cost benchmarks, and measurable outcomes — which is, at the end of the day, what good media planning has always been about.