Written by:
Stay updated with Roku Advertising.
Many speakers and attendees at this year’s Mobile App Unlocked (MAU) conference in Las Vegas were grappling with the same question: When mobile user acquisition gets harder and more expensive, where do you find your audience?
Turns out, the biggest growth hack for mobile brands may not be in mobile at all, but in the living room. That was the upshot of my conversation with Işıl Eralp, marketing director at Rovio (the gaming company behind Angry Birds), and Maor Sadra, CEO at measurement platform INCRMNTAL.
Our session revealed some strong signs that the next wave of growth in mobile will come from CTV. Below is my recap of our discussion, with takeaways for mobile marketers.
Mobile audiences can be reached efficiently (on a different screen)
Mobile gaming user acquisition has never been harder. Channels are more expensive. Measurement is fragmented.
Rovio knows this better than most people. With 15 years of brand equity behind the mobile game Angry Birds, the company is preparing two new game launches alongside a major theatrical release, Angry Birds Movie 3, arriving in December 2026. As it pursued a growth strategy that matched the size of the franchise moment, the answer wasn't to go deeper into mobile. It was to go broader,
We moved from channel-first to audience and moment-first planning. We stopped asking which network we could acquire users from and started asking where the best audience for the Angry Birds ecosystem actually lives.
- Işıl Eralp, Marketing Director, Rovio
That audience, it turns out, watches a lot of TV. CTV now represents close to 10% of Rovio's UA spend — and it's growing. The reason isn't just reach. It's the co-viewing dynamic that television uniquely offers.
Most U.S. households have two to three people on the couch during prime viewing time. For a multi-generational franchise like Angry Birds, where a co-viewing environment is a strategic advantage, not an afterthought.
CTV gives IP-rich brands a rare chance to deepen that emotional connection at scale, reaching fans across generations in a single, shared moment. For gaming brands especially, where the IP is the product, that kind of full-household presence turns a media buy into a brand-building opportunity.
Key takeaway: The co-viewing household is where brand awareness compounds across multiple audiences in a single impression.
CTV is working. The problem is how brands measure it
Here's where the speakers got candid. CTV's measurement problem isn't that it can't be measured; it's that most brands are measuring it wrong.
CTV is usually not clickable. And even on a view-through basis, CTV is rarely going to be the last touchpoint before a conversion, according to Sadra.
"The worst way to measure CTV is last touch," said Sadra. "Users watch an ad on their TV, then come back later on another device. If your attribution stack is looking for the last click, CTV looks invisible."
INCRMNTAL, which has measured more than $4B in media spend across mobile, web and CTV, has seen this pattern play out repeatedly. Marketers run CTV media and get a gut feeling it's working, but then they can't prove it in their reporting stack. Finance pushes back. Budgets get cut.
"Then the wind goes out of the sails, the boat slows down. And that's when they realize CTV was actually driving performance on all their other channels."
- Maor Sadra, CEO, INCRMNTAL
This is the core case for incrementality measurement. Rather than asking which ad got the last click, incrementality testing measures whether your overall performance improves when CTV is in the mix. CTV delivered roughly 10X more incremental return per dollar than linear TV, despite linear receiving far more total budget, according to an INCRMNTAL white paper.
Key takeaway: Don't judge CTV by last-touch metrics. Run an incrementality test to see what happens to your other channels when CTV is in the mix. The lift is usually already there — the standard attribution stack just can't see it.
CTV outperforms linear TV with digital native audiences
The average linear TV viewer is approximately 70 years old. For performance marketers chasing mobile-first consumers, that audience skew is a structural mismatch.
Linear TV still captures enormous budgets because the supply is there, the medium is established, and many marketing verticals continue to depend on it. But for brands trying to drive measurable downstream action — app installs, purchases, signups — CTV delivers results that linear simply can't.
We're definitely heading toward a more CTV world than a linear-going digital world
- Maor Sadra, CEO, INCRMNTAL
And the data backs it up: streaming has surpassed linear and cable combined in total time spent for multiple years running. Strip out live sports, and the gap is even wider.
CTV's share of the media mix is still small. INCRMNTAL estimates it at roughly 5% of the $4 billion in media tracked on their platform. Three years ago, it was near zero. That trajectory tells you where attention and accountability are heading.
Key takeaway: Linear TV still has its place for certain audiences and verticals. But if your core customer skews under 55 and is digital-native, CTV will outperform on a per-dollar basis. Start small, run tests, and scale from there.
A shift in how mobile brands buy media
The most important strategic insight from the panel wasn't about CTV specifically. It was about how media planning has changed.
Rovio's reframe — from "which network can I buy users on?" to "where does my best audience live?" — is a useful model for any mobile brand facing UA pressure. When you start with the audience, you stop comparing CTV to Google Search campaigns on the same ROAS spreadsheet and start asking what each channel is built to do.
"Think ecosystems, not channels,” is how Eralp summed up the mindset shift. “Focus on long-term value."
Sadra agreed that marketers need to take a broader view of how channels work together to drive growth.
"You cannot do a siloed approach to measure mobile while ignoring CTV, while ignoring podcasts, while ignoring influencers," Sadra said. "You have to look at things holistically because otherwise the duplication numbers make zero sense and you end up making decisions based on data that doesn't add up."
In other words, CTV earns its place in the mix not just by what it directly converts, but by how it makes your search, social, and performance campaigns more efficient. That this discussion is now part of the MAU discourse is a positive sign that mobile marketers are embracing smarter, more efficient ways to drive acquisition across the full spectrum of media they buy.
