There’s a quiet crisis happening in B2B marketing right now — one most marketers feel but rarely name.
The channels that once delivered predictable performance are now crowded, expensive, and repetitive.
Every B2B company is competing for the same few square inches of real estate in the LinkedIn feed. CPMs and CPCs rise quarter after quarter, while engagement flattens. The algorithms are efficient; the audience, numb.
It’s not that the channels stopped working.
It’s that we squeezed the juice out of them.
Marketers have optimized themselves into a corner. Everyone’s running the same playbook — the same creative, the same offers, the same cadence of remarketing. Every dashboard looks identical: LinkedIn, Google, retargeting, repeat.
The feed has become wallpaper.
And that’s the backdrop for what’s quietly becoming one of the most interesting shifts in B2B media: Connected TV (CTV).
While everyone else is driving up LinkedIn auction prices, CTV is sitting in plain sight — underleveraged, underpriced, and massively underused in B2B.
At 42, we started experimenting with LinkedIn’s new CTV placements earlier this year. What we found surprised even us:
CPMs and Cost per 1,000 members reached came in roughly 50% lower than comparable LinkedIn in-feed video campaigns.
CPAs were 30% lower.
Completion rates were nearly perfect. You can’t scroll past a CTV ad. You can’t skip it. You see it — full-screen, in motion, with sound.
It’s a rare moment in marketing when a channel is both premium and cheaper than the alternatives.
And it’s giving B2B marketers something we’ve been losing for years: time, space, and attention.
From Feed Fatigue to Full Screen
At 42, we’ve seen this story before.
Every high-performing channel — Google Search, LinkedIn, even Meta for B2B — eventually hits saturation. Costs rise, quality drops, and incremental dollars stop driving the incremental pipeline.
LinkedIn is still the best intent-based social platform for B2B, but let’s be honest: it’s become an echo chamber. Everyone’s saying the same thing to the same people in the same way.
CTV breaks that pattern.
It moves your message from the feed to the living room. It interrupts the scroll with scale. You can’t skip it. You can’t tab away. It demands attention in a different posture — the audience isn’t multitasking; they’re watching.
And there’s something powerful about that full-screen moment. It still carries prestige.
You don’t hear someone say, “I saw your sponsored post on LinkedIn.”
But you do hear, “I saw your ad on Hulu.”
That line still has weight in a B2B boardroom.
Respecting the Medium
Of course, the creative bar is higher.
What works on social doesn’t automatically translate to CTV.
We’ve seen pixelated, low-fi ads from B2B companies — clearly built for mobile — playing on a 55-inch screen. It looks cheap. It breaks immersion. It’s a waste of real estate.
CTV demands high production value.
Strong sound. Cinematic pacing. Real storytelling.
It’s not about performance gimmicks — it’s about presence. You’re not just trying to generate a click; you’re trying to imprint your brand in memory.
That’s the shift: CTV isn’t a feed format. It’s a storytelling medium for a performance-driven world.
CTV as a Diagnostic Tool
One of the most underrated benefits of CTV is what it tells you about your audience.
When you run CTV through LinkedIn, you’re not just buying impressions — you’re getting demographic and account-level reporting.
That turns it into something like a diagnostic gauge for your total addressable market.
For example, if your target job titles or accounts aren’t showing up in your in-feed campaign reports, but they do appear in your CTV delivery data, that’s a signal.
It means those people might not be active on LinkedIn in the ways your feed campaigns assume — they’re not scrolling, but they’re watching.
So you can shift your strategy: use CTV to build awareness with those hard-to-reach segments, and then recapture them later through paid search or remarketing.
In other words, CTV helps you see the shape of your market — not just the active slice.
That alone makes it worth testing.
The Mechanics: How CTV Actually Works
A lot of marketers still think CTV is too complex or expensive to test. That’s no longer true.
LinkedIn’s native CTV inventory and platforms like StackAdapt or The Trade Desk make it possible to buy Connected TV placements with the same precision as digital.
Creative Specs (LinkedIn CTV example):
Format: 16:9 aspect ratio
Resolution: 1920×1080px
Duration: 45–60 seconds recommended
Bitrate: 15 Mbps
Max file size: 500 MB
Audio: Stereo AAC preferred
That’s standard, broadcast-quality material — easy for most in-house or agency teams to produce.
Campaign setup is also straightforward.
On LinkedIn, you can use the same campaign manager interface, but target by company, industry, job title, and seniority. You can layer your ABM lists or use first-party audiences to reach specific accounts.
And for platforms like StackAdapt or The Trade Desk, you can even import LiveRamp audience segments, retarget site visitors, or build lookalikes from your CRM data.
It’s a blend of TV storytelling and programmatic precision.
Busting the “CTV Isn’t Measurable” Myth
Let’s address the biggest misconception head-on:
“CTV isn’t measurable.”
It is. It just requires thinking beyond the click.
You’re not tracking who clicked on your ad — you’re tracking who saw it, and what happened after.
On LinkedIn, you can measure view-through conversions. That means when someone sees your CTV ad and later fills out a form, requests a demo, or visits your site within 30 days, LinkedIn attributes that conversion to the CTV exposure.
You can also layer in CRM data to look at pipeline influence: how many opportunities were created or advanced after exposure to CTV campaigns.
And if you’re using a data visualization platform like Databox, you can track lift over time — branded search volume, direct traffic, or account engagement — before and after launching a CTV flight.
For higher-volume programs, you can even run statistical lift studies: A/B tests where one region or audience segment sees CTV and the other doesn’t, then compare pipeline impact.
The trick isn’t whether you can measure it — it’s whether you’re measuring the right thing.
Clicks don’t tell the whole story anymore. Attention does.
CTV in the ABM Playbook
CTV becomes even more powerful when you think about it as part of an account-based marketing strategy.
The best ABM campaigns create what we call surround sound: your message shows up everywhere your target audience spends time.
The problem is, LinkedIn alone can’t achieve that anymore.
Decision-makers log in sporadically. Algorithms throttle reach. There’s a hard cap on impressions.
CTV fills that gap.
You can reach executives who may never engage with your sponsored content but will still see your message in a premium, trusted environment — while watching news, sports, or streaming.
We’ve run CTV campaigns for enterprise clients where the reporting showed the exact accounts being reached — sometimes hundreds of key companies that hadn’t appeared in months of in-feed engagement data.
That’s what makes CTV a force multiplier in ABM:
It reaches the unreachable.
It builds familiarity before your sales team ever reaches out.
It complements your digital mix with a brand layer that feels bigger, more credible, more real.
When combined with first-party CRM lists, StackAdapt or Trade Desk campaigns, and audience data from platforms like LiveRamp, you can push your ABM strategy well beyond the feed.
CTV becomes the awareness layer that drives better performance everywhere else.
We’ve seen LinkedIn CTV and search campaigns feed each other in interesting ways.
When CTV flights go live, branded search volume almost always spikes within two weeks.
It’s not a coincidence, it’s recognition.
CTV and YouTube: Different Tools, Same Story
We often get asked: “If I’m already running YouTube, do I really need CTV?”
The answer: it depends on what story you’re trying to tell.
YouTube is still one of the best intent-linked awareness channels out there — especially because it ties directly into your Google Search performance. You can target people based on keywords, search behavior, or remarketing lists.
That makes YouTube ideal for reinforcing performance channels.
Someone searches for your product, watches your YouTube ad, and then clicks a search ad a few days later — measurable, attributable, clean.
CTV, on the other hand, is more independent.
It’s not tethered to Google’s ecosystem or search intent. It’s built for reach and resonance.
If YouTube amplifies what people are already looking for, CTV reaches the people who aren’t looking yet.
That’s why they work beautifully together.
We often pair the two:
CTV to drive broad awareness and emotional storytelling.
YouTube to re-engage warm audiences, reinforce intent, and nudge them toward action.
In measurement terms: CTV lifts the ceiling; YouTube fills the funnel.
The Future: Brand and Demand, Reunited
For the last decade, B2B marketers have been trained to chase efficiency.
Every channel was judged by conversion rate and CPL. Every creative asset was designed to be “direct response.”
It worked — until it didn’t.
Today, the constraint isn’t data. It’s differentiation.
Everyone has the same targeting tools, the same automation, the same dashboards. What’s scarce is memory.
CTV brings that back into the mix.
It doesn’t replace your performance channels. It amplifies them. It’s what happens when brand and demand finally stop fighting and start collaborating.
Run a CTV ad, and then check your Google Analytics a few weeks later.
You’ll see the curve bend. Branded search goes up. Direct traffic rises. Email open rates improve.
That’s not attribution magic. That’s what happens when people remember you.
At 42, we think that’s where the next decade of B2B marketing is heading — a world where brand recall and performance data live in the same playbook.
Because attention is finite. Channels evolve. But storytelling still scales.
And for now, Connected TV is the most underpriced, underutilized storytelling surface in B2B.
It’s not a trend. It’s a reset.
The B2B feed is saturated.
Performance marketing has plateaued.
The next edge won’t come from cheaper clicks — it’ll come from deeper impressions.
CTV gives you that — premium attention at a performance price.
The question isn’t if it’ll become core to B2B marketing.
It’s when you’ll start testing it. If you're considering CTV, give us a shout.
 | A guest post by
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