Digitas North America CIO Liane Nadeau and Roku's Carly Friedman discussed the balance between performance-based CTV metrics and long-term brand building at the Cannes Lions festival. The panelists emphasized that while shoppable technology is advancing, advertisers should avoid over-prioritizing low-funnel metrics at the expense of broader brand goals.
The shift toward shoppable CTV creates a tension between immediate ROI and the medium's traditional strength in upper-funnel awareness. As platforms like Roku integrate more retail media data from Instacart and Best Buy, the pressure from CFOs for instant conversion signals is intensifying. However, over-indexing on short-term sales risks devaluing the long-term brand equity that premium video environments typically provide. The industry must now develop more sophisticated attribution models that account for gradual consumer behavior changes rather than just immediate clicks. Watch for whether standardized cross-platform measurement emerges to solve the fragmentation issues currently forcing agencies into manual, siloed reporting workflows.
Roku has been aggressively expanding its retail media capabilities, positioning itself as a full-funnel advertising platform rather than a pure awareness play. In early 2026, Roku announced a partnership with Instacart to integrate grocery purchase data into its ad targeting and measurement suite, giving brands access to closed-loop attribution across streaming and commerce. That same quarter, Roku launched Curate, a self-service tool allowing advertisers to build custom audience segments from first-party retail data, signaling a direct challenge to Amazon's DSP dominance in retail media. These moves place Roku squarely in the performance-measurement camp that Nadeau's warning addresses.
The broader measurement landscape for CTV advertising is undergoing consolidation and standardization efforts that directly affect how agencies like Digitas evaluate campaign success. In May 2026, the IAB Tech Lab released updated guidelines for cross-platform CTV measurement, recommending that advertisers track both brand lift and conversion metrics in unified dashboards. Meanwhile, Nielsen announced in July 2026 that its Nielsen One platform had reached 90% coverage of CTV households for deduplicated audience measurement, reducing the fragmentation that has historically forced agencies into siloed reporting. For advertisers like Bank of America and The Hershey Company that run large CTV budgets through Digitas, these developments offer a path toward reconciling upper-funnel brand objectives with lower-funnel accountability.
On the technical side, shoppable CTV remains nascent but is gaining traction among early adopters. Roku reported in its Q2 2026 earnings call that shoppable ad engagements grew 140% year over year, though average order values remained below $35, underscoring the tension between engagement volume and meaningful revenue contribution. Best Buy, which has been testing interactive product overlays on Roku City content, disclosed in a June 2026 investor presentation that CTV-driven purchases accounted for less than 2% of total digital sales but showed 3x higher customer lifetime value than paid search conversions. These figures illustrate why Nadeau and Friedman argue that low-funnel metrics alone cannot capture the full value of premium video environments, even as the technology to track them improves.
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