If Smartphones Don’t Equal Spending, Where Should Brands Go?

By Russhabh R Thakkar 

India may have over 600 million smartphone users, but barely 10 percent of them are driving real digital commerce and high value consumption. And it is that 50 to 60 million segment that is also powering the country’s Connected TV (CTV) growth story. This is where the real internet economy lives, households that spend, subscribe and stream, not just scroll. For brands, that is the audience worth showing up for.

The smartest screen in India today isn’t in your hand, it is the one on your wall. CTV has quietly gone from being digital’s sidekick to becoming advertising’s main stage. With more than 60 million households now streaming, CTV is where television’s emotion meets digital’s precision, and increasingly, where brand growth begins.

Every category is learning to play differently. Auto, BFSI, consumer tech and premium FMCG brands are already using CTV for high impact storytelling and sequential messaging. Others are still testing and learning. CTV sits between TV and digital, a lean back, high attention medium that forces marketers to rethink how they plan, measure, and design creatives. The smartest campaigns buy audiences, not channels; measure attention, not clicks; and plan for shared screens, not single users.

The ecosystem is maturing fast. CTV consumption in India is still fragmented across apps and devices, but platforms are catching up through sell-side curation, private marketplaces, and smarter programmatic pipes. Audience-based buying is quickly becoming standard, and as infrastructure strengthens, scaled addressable TV will move from prediction to practice.

What is really driving adoption is intent. For every 500-rupee CPM metro viewer, there is an equally affluent household in a tier-2 city watching the same content for less than half the cost. The audience quality doesn’t drop, the efficiency improves. These are high purchase, high attention homes that the mobile often misses but CTV captures naturally.

Measurement is catching up too. CTV doesn’t give clicks, but it gives attention you can prove. Geo lift studies, control-versus-exposed cohorts, and outcome-based attribution models are becoming standard. AI-led contextual tagging is also helping align the message and moment with sharper accuracy.

CTV has reached a point where both sides of marketing finally meet. Television brought emotion, digital brought data. CTV brings both together — attention that you can measure and storytelling that audiences remember. For marketers chasing growth that lasts beyond the scroll, this isn’t another platform to test, it is the next screen to win.

(The author is the Founder & CEO of Frodoh.)

Published on: Monday, February 02, 2026, 12:49 AM IST