The Creative Effect: How Creative Decisions Influence Brand Impact
Interactive CTV has moved quickly from experiment to expectation. Pause ads, shoppable overlays, trivia, click-to-purchase: the formats keep multiplying, and with them a harder question for marketers. It's no longer whether to go interactive, but how to design interactive creative that viewers actually choose to engage with.
We've spent the last three years building an evidence base to answer that. In 2024, we found that a single interactive exposure lifted unaided recall by 36% over standard video. In 2025, we showed that viewers who engaged were significantly more likely to remember the brand, view it favorably and consider a purchase. Engagement, in other words, is where the business impact happens.
This year, we set out to understand what drives it. Working with MediaScience, an independent media research firm, we ran a three-phase study: in-depth interviews across 30 real campaigns, a survey that narrowed down which creative elements were worth testing, and an in-home experiment in which more than 600 viewers watched 49 ad variations on their own TVs, during real programming.
The findings are clear. Decisions as specific as CTA size, visual focus, brand relevance and cognitive load measurably shape whether viewers lean in. Ads built on the core best practices delivered a 62% lift in unaided recall, the strongest result in our research to date. The Creative Effect lays out six best practices for designing interactive CTV ads that earn attention and deliver results.
