If nobody knows your brand, you have a memory problem.
I see founders try to fix that with more LinkedIn posts, more iPhone videos, more dashboard screenshots, and more safe explainers. Some of that can help. But when awareness is close to zero, safe content usually blends in with everything else.
I’m Rob Comeau, founder of CinemAds. I’ve been filming since I was 14, starting with skateboard videos and little stories on MiniDV. I’m a filmmaker first, entrepreneur second. And in my world, one thing is very clear right now: B2B CTV advertising is one of the best ways to get remembered in 2026.
A lot of startups still think CTV is for giant companies with giant budgets. I don’t see it that way at all. I think it’s one of the best shortcuts for a growth-stage SaaS or AI brand that wants to look bigger, feel more established, and warm up the market before sales ever gets the first meeting.
Zero Awareness Means Your Market Has No Reason to Remember You
If you’re a founder, you probably know your product inside out. You know the features. You know the tech. You know why it’s better. The problem is your buyer usually doesn’t know any of that still, and they are not sitting around waiting to study your category.
They are busy. They are overloaded. And by the time they talk to a vendor, they are already deep into the buying journey.
A 6sense buyer report says B2B buyers usually reach out when they are already about 70% through the purchase journey. It also says 84% of deals are decided before that first meeting. Another benchmark found an average of 8 touchpoints to close a lead.
That matters a lot.
If your brand never created a memory before that moment, you are late. You are asking sales to close cold attention. That is a rough place to be.
This is why I push brand awareness so hard. Not fluffy awareness. Useful awareness. Memorable awareness. The kind where your buyer says, “I’ve heard of these guys,” or, “I keep seeing them,” or, “That ad was actually funny.”
That little bit of familiarity is powerful. It lowers resistance. It makes your outbound land better. It makes your retargeting work better. It makes the demo feel warmer.
And yes, video still matters. 90% of marketers say video helps generate leads. So the question is not whether video matters. The question is where you put it, and how memorable you make it.
Why I’m Pushing CTV so Hard in 2026
I’m seeing CTV work firsthand.
I have marketers coming to me and saying they want videos for CTV. Nothing else. I’m sure they still use those videos on social too, and that makes sense. But the fact that they are leading with CTV tells me a lot.
The timing is good too. IAB projected 13.8% growth in U.S. CTV ad spending in 2025. And only 29% of B2B marketers are investing in CTV right now. At the same time, 90% say they are likely to test it in the next year or two.
That tells me something simple. The channel is growing fast, but it still is not crowded enough.
Attention is the other reason I’m bullish. Forrester says nearly 40% of B2B decision-makers watch television daily to keep up with business trends. And industry reports put CTV completion rates around 95% to 98%. Typical social or mobile video is much lower, closer to 30%.
Think about that for a second.
On social, your ad is fighting everything. DMs. Notifications. Comments. A hundred other posts. On CTV, you are full screen. You are non-skippable. You are in a lean-back environment. That changes the attention level right away.
And the scale is already there. Innovid says 53% of digital video ad impressions now come from CTV. So if you still think this is some side channel, I think you’re behind.
Why the Big Screen Gives Startups a Premium Look
One thing founders care about, whether they say it out loud or not, is perception.
If you’re a Series A company, you want to look stable. You want to look premium. You want to look like you belong in the conversation with bigger players. CTV helps with that fast.
I always say a funny or cinematic ad hits much harder on a 65-inch screen than in a tiny LinkedIn feed. I mean that literally. The same script feels bigger. The same lighting feels richer. The same joke lands harder.
There’s data behind that feeling too. A Thinkbox/House51 study found TV-advertised brands were seen as higher quality and more financially strong than brands advertised on social, print, or radio. Different market, same human brain. Big-screen brands feel bigger.
I’ve noticed this in my own life too. My wife and I watch the 15 to 30-second ads on our basic Netflix subscription. We are not always looking at our phones. If an ad is funny, we watch it. Sometimes we repeat the joke to each other after.
That matters.
You want your buyer to remember a line. A visual. A character. A weird little moment. You do not need them to understand every feature on first touch. You need them to remember you.
And yes, one more thing I love here: CTV lets me stay in 16:9. I’m a filmmaker. Horizontal screens are where cinematic work really breathes. Vertical has its place because phones are vertical, sure, but CTV rewards the full frame.
How I Build a B2B CTV Ad That People Actually Watch
So if CTV is the channel, what do you put on it?
This is where a lot of B2B brands mess it up. They think they need to explain the entire product in the first three seconds. I don’t agree with that at all.
Open with a Bold Hook
For CTV, and really for most top-of-funnel ads, I want the opening to create curiosity.
I would rather open up with a funny, bold, unhinged scenario that gets the viewer eating their popcorn and asking, “What the heck is going on here?” That question buys attention. That question keeps the ad alive.
I’ve done this a bunch of different ways.
For Lavender, I opened an explainer with Lavender Joe getting arrested by the email police with sirens going off, then rewound to explain what the product was. For Right-Hand Cybersecurity, I deliberately avoided mentioning cybersecurity until the end because I wanted the front of the ad to feel like content, not a sales pitch.
I even did this with Maple using a very bold opening. A man appears to be naked, covering himself with an open laptop while romantic music plays. Then the record scratches and you realize he is actually talking to a telehealth doctor. That kind of crazy visual at the front makes people stop.
And here’s the key point. The hook does not always need to be a joke. Replicant is a good example. We shot a rainy night diner scene inspired by Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. It was dramatic. It was cinematic. It looked more like a mini movie than a software ad. That tension is a hook too.
Turn the Product Into a Simple Metaphor
Once I have the attention, I simplify the product.
This is what I love doing. We create funny videos out of complex products by turning them into real-world situations. It gives the audience something human to grab onto.
Aligned became a dating scenario. The guy asks, “What are next steps?” on a first date and even brings out a PowerPoint about the relationship. Sales people get that joke instantly because it uses their own lingo.
HockeyStack became a fight between sales and marketing with a hockey referee handing out penalties for “high dissing.” Again, the audience gets it fast because it feels like their world.
That is the whole point. I want your ICP to see the ad and think, “Yep, that’s me.” Or, “I know exactly what they’re making fun of.” Humor helps, but relatability is the engine.
Land the Message at the End
I really like showing the problem and then landing on a clean tagline. I don’t really care for the old before-and-after format. It feels cheesy to me, and audiences have seen it forever.
So for top-of-funnel CTV, I usually want the ad to stay less dashboardy. Let the story do the heavy lifting. Let the tagline deliver the “aha” moment.
If a founder really wants UI in the ad, I can do that. I just keep it near the back end. Sometimes I’ll put it in the end bumper. Sometimes I’ll give the client two edits so they can A/B test it.
Then I like to retarget.
If someone watches more than 50% of the brand ad, great. Now they’ve earned the more direct explainer. That second touch can show the product, the dashboard, the features, and all the detail your team loves. Top of funnel and lower funnel have different jobs. I just handle the bucket of video, but that sequencing makes a lot of sense.
There’s one more benefit here. It helps you avoid ad fatigue.
I strongly dislike seeing the exact same ad repeated over and over. So I prefer one big idea that can branch into a series. Same world. Same character. New scripts. That is how you build recall without annoying people.
Lavender Joe is the clearest example. Prospects brought that character up on discovery calls. People recognized him at the Collision tech event in Toronto. That is what strong awareness looks like.
How CTV Helps Pipeline Without Turning Into Vanity Marketing
Let me be blunt here. I do not guarantee results.
I hate when marketing gurus throw around crazy promises. They say a video will 10x growth or solve the whole pipeline problem by itself. I don’t talk like that. My job is to make the best video possible. Then the brand and media team run the ads and do their job.
Still, the financial case for CTV is getting stronger.
Platform data from MNTN points to an average cost of $0.03 per completed view. It also reported about 4.36x return on ad spend. I never promise those numbers. I do think they show why people are paying attention.
A Demandbase analysis found that pairing CTV with display drove 46% more domains visited. It also drove 21% more leads and 54% higher click rates than display alone. And a Paramount analysis found CTV lifted paid social conversion by 8.5% and paid search conversion by 22%.
That is why I keep saying CTV warms the market. It makes the rest of the funnel work harder.
I’ve also seen it in my own client work. Replicant came to me for a CTV campaign. Six months later, they told me one customer saw one of the videos, became a sale, and that single sale paid for the whole production investment. They came back for another campaign. I also have another company that came back for a second CTV campaign six months later, then a third six months after that.
I don’t always get every KPI from every client. But repeat business tells me plenty. If people come back, the channel is doing something right.
How I De-Risk the Creative When Leadership Gets Nervous
This part matters for founders because I know how these decisions go.
You might love the bold idea. Your marketing team might love it too. Then the CEO, the board, or an older investor gets nervous. Fine. That happens all the time.
I’ve been there. I wrote a cybersecurity concept built around “practice safe tech.” The founder thought it was funny. An older investor did not. Art is opinion, not fact.
So I never force one extreme tone on a whole campaign.
What I like to do is diversify the scripts from safe to bold to unhinged. If we are filming 10 to 15 ads in one day, we can test one or two risky ideas without betting the whole campaign on them. That is how you de-risk a video campaign by shooting 10 to 15 ads in one day.
The production model helps with that. I usually keep the shoot in one location all day so we do not waste time moving gear around the city. We plan heavily in pre-production. My campaigns usually take 60 to 75 days from brief to delivery, with scripting, casting, locations, props, and approvals all locked in before cameras roll.
The economics work too. A typical CinemAds package is around $30,000 for 15 high-quality commercial videos. That gets the cost down to about $2,000 per ad. Compared to old-school agency pricing, that can mean bringing down the budget by 50% or more while giving the brand way more content to test.
And if leadership is hesitant, I’ll often write sample scripts for free until the internal champion has what they need to get approval. I do that because fear usually drops once the idea becomes concrete.
One more thing here. Even when I push for bold humor, I keep a boundary. I never want comedy that punches down or makes fun of specific people. You can be over the top without being nasty.
What I’d Do if I Were a Founder with Zero Awareness Right Now
I would get clear on three things fast.
Who is the audience? What problem do they care about most? And what makes your product meaningfully different? That is where my brainstorming always starts. Once I know that, the ideas come. Sometimes on a Google Doc. Sometimes while I’m driving. Sometimes while I’m walking my dog.
Then I would build one strong campaign idea, not one lonely ad.
I’d shoot multiple spots that live in the same world. I’d test different hooks. I’d keep the front end bold and memorable. I’d save the heavy product explanation for the retargeting layer.
And I would absolutely use CTV as part of that plan.
Unlike old TV, you can target by job title, industry, company size, geography, intent, and retargeting pools. That is why I call it TV-level attention with digital-style targeting. You get the big-screen impact, but you still get the precision modern B2B needs.
I would also reuse the same creative across channels. Once I make a campaign, my clients can run those videos on CTV, LinkedIn, YouTube, and whatever else fits their strategy. That makes the investment go further.
And I would stop believing that talking into an iPhone is enough to build a brand moat.
Look, founders are busy. You are building product, managing team, raising capital, and pushing GTM. You do not also need to become your own director, casting agent, editor, wardrobe stylist, and ad strategist. An idea is only an idea until somebody knows how to shape it into something watchable.
Final Thought
If your awareness is zero, you do not need more forgettable marketing.
You need attention. You need recall. You need premium perception. You need a reason for the market to remember you before sales shows up.
CTV gives you that. It gives you full-screen attention, digital targeting, and room to tell a story in a way social often cannot. And when you pair that with a strong hook, a clear metaphor, and a clean retargeting plan, it becomes a very serious growth channel for B2B.
The best marketing wins.
So if you’re a founder in growth mode, I would not wait around until you feel “big enough” for streaming. I would get in now, while the channel is still opening up. Make a commercial that looks like a movie. Make people laugh, or at least make them curious. Give them something they’ll remember.
That’s how you fix zero awareness.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do we actually track pipeline from a CTV campaign?
You track it like digital, not old-school TV. Platforms track site visits and conversions after a completed view. It pays off. Demandbase data shows pairing CTV with display drives +21% more leads and +46% more domain visits. It is not vanity metrics. It warms up your entire funnel.
Will B2B CTV advertising actually shorten our enterprise sales cycle?
Yes, because you stop asking sales to close cold attention. The average deal takes 8 touchpoints. If prospects enter a demo already remembering your brand’s cinematic hook, resistance instantly drops. You solve the memory problem top-of-funnel, letting your AEs bypass the initial friction and close deals faster.
Should we shift our entire paid social budget into CTV?
Definitely not. I view CTV as a force multiplier for your existing channels, not a replacement. When you run full-screen ads, your lower-funnel clicks get cheaper. Paramount found adding CTV lifted paid search conversions by +22%. Let CTV build the memory, then let social capture the intent.
Can we target niche buyers like CISOs, or is CTV just broad awareness?
You absolutely can target niches. That is why I love this channel for technical SaaS. You get big-screen impact with digital-level precision, targeting by exact job titles, company sizes, and intent signals. Plus, 40% of B2B decision-makers watch TV daily for business trends. Your exact buyer is already there.
Why shouldn’t we just wait until our Series C to run TV ads?
Because you will miss the early-adopter window. Right now, only 29% of B2B marketers invest in CTV, but 90% plan to test it soon. It is an uncrowded space where early-stage startups can look massive, capture market share, and build a premium brand moat before legacy competitors wake up.
