For years, the standard objection to Connected TV (CTV) was simple: "It's too expensive."
Agencies were used to buying social impressions for $5 and seeing CTV represented as a $40 "premium" product.
But in 2025, that math has changed.
As social platforms battle saturation and signal loss, their CPMs (Cost Per Mille) have climbed. Simultaneously, the explosion of ad-supported streaming tiers (Amazon Prime, Disney+, Netflix) has flooded the market with supply, driving CTV prices down.
Today, a high-quality conversion campaign on Meta often commands a CPM of $15–$25.
Programmatic CTV inventory often clears in that exact same $15–$25 range.
The objection isn't "CTV is too expensive" anymore. The new reality is Price Parity.
Here is how to use this new baseline to win more budget.
1. The "Quality of Impression" Arbitrage
If a client is paying $20 CPM for Instagram and $20 CPM for CTV, they are paying the same price for two radically different assets.
Social ($20): Buys a fleeting, skippable moment in a cluttered feed. The "Viewability" standard is often just 2 seconds of 50% pixels on screen.
CTV ($20): Buys 30 seconds of non-skippable, full-screen, sound-on storytelling.
The Agency argument is no longer about "justifying the premium." It is about identifying the bargain. You are buying television-grade attention at social media prices.
2. The Efficiency Equation
Even if your CTV CPMs are slightly higher than your blended social costs, the math often works out in your favor when you look at the Effective Cost Per Completed View (eCPCV).
Social: If you pay a $10 CPM but only 10% of users watch your video to the end, your Cost Per Completed View is effectively $0.10.
CTV: If you pay a $25 CPM but 95% of users watch to the end (standard for CTV), your Cost Per Completed View is $0.02.
When you frame the cost around consumption rather than just delivery, CTV is frequently 5x more efficient than social video.
3. Measuring the "Assist"
The challenge with pivoting to performance is that CTV is rarely a "last-click" channel. Users do not click their TV screen; they pick up their phone and search for the brand.
If an agency measures CTV using only Last-Click Attribution (like Google Analytics), the channel will look like it drove $0 revenue.
To make the performance pivot work, the agency and brand must agree on a measurement framework that captures the View-Through contribution:
Cross-Device Graphing: Using a DSP that can match the IP address of the TV to the IP address of the phone or laptop that visited the site.
The Attribution Window: Setting a realistic lookback window (e.g., "Anyone who visited the site within 24 hours of seeing the TV ad").
Summary
The era of "CTV is a luxury channel" is over.
CPM answers: "What does it cost to serve the ad?"
CPA answers: "What does it cost to acquire the customer?"
By showing clients that the price gap has closed—but the attention gap remains massive—you can position CTV not as an experiment, but as the most logical place for their next performance dollar.