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Most DTC brands put the bulk of their paid budget where attention is thinnest. Viewers spend about 99 minutes per session on Connected TV and 8 minutes per session on social, yet only 9% of standard marketing budgets go to CTV. This episode is about closing that gap on CTV with the same measurement & targeting you get on social (starting at $7 CPMs!)

Emily Huo built ad businesses at X (Twitter), Reddit, and Spotify, and now runs SMB advertising at Paramount. She walks through how a DTC brand actually gets onto Survivor, Landman, or RuPaul's Drag Race, what to spend, and how to know if it worked.

Sign up for Paramount Ads Manager today. Get your brand on TV tomorrow.

This episode, we get into:

The seasonal play: build awareness over the summer, retarget in the fall, convert in Q4
Why you start broad on targeting and let the data tell you who is really watching, not the persona you imported from Meta
The pixel setup that ties a TV impression to a site visit, a lead, or a purchase
The geo holdout test for measuring halo effect with no third-party tools
Why a 30-second unskippable spot changes how you tell a brand story when you are not a household name yet
Budgeting: carve out 10% as experimental, expect a three-month ramp, scale from there

Who this is for: DTC founders and growth marketers who have maxed out social, anyone planning Q4 now, and operators curious whether CTV is real or just a hot label.

What to steal: the install-pixel-now, build-in-summer, convert-in-Q4 sequence, and the broad-then-narrow targeting approach.

Timestamps:

0:00 Emily Huo's Journey to Paramount

3:10 Why CTV Is Growing So Fast

8:07 CTV Targeting vs Meta Ads

12:14 CTV Budget & Testing Strategy

23:18 Measuring the Halo Effect

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Bonus: The CTV Blueprint for DTC Brands: Build in Summer, Convert in Q4 (Paramount Ads Manager)

DTC Podcast

Bonus: The CTV Blueprint for DTC Brands: Build in Summer, Convert in Q4 (Paramount Ads Manager)