Why Premium CTV Outperforms: What We Learned at Marketecture with Disney and NBCU

More than ever, performance marketers are stepping into CTV and TV advertising – and they're bringing a measurement-forward mindset to the table as a result. What was once seen as a branding channel is quickly becoming a powerful extension of the performance playbook.

They've scaled search and social, they know their CAC, their ROAS, their attribution stack. But TV has always felt like a different world. Brand budgets. CPM negotiations. Upfronts.

At Marketecture's March summit in NYC, Vibe’s Co-Founder and CTO Franck Tetzlaff sat down with Brendan Garrone,  Vice President, Programmatic Sales & Partnerships, Advertising & Partnerships, from NBCUniversal and Doug Fleming, Director, Programmatic Sales, from Disney to make the case that more than ever, connected TV is blurring the lines between digital and television. Here's what came out of our conversation.

Performance means something different to every advertiser

There are 10,000 advertisers on Vibe.co today. From local businesses spending a few thousand a month to enterprise brands spending millions. Every single one of them defines performance differently.

The answer isn't a sales team trying to translate. It's a product. The same way self-service advertising platforms let every advertiser define their own goal and KPI, the same infrastructure needs to exist for TV. 

There are two models for buying CTV. Only one works like performance.

Traditional media buying has long relied on impressions, whereas a performance-minded future is rooted in audiences. It's media planning, not performance. CPMs dropped 20% last year under that model.

The precision model is different. You identify who's behind every bid request in real time. You bid on the specific profiles that are likely to convert. You're driven by the outcome, not the CPM.

That's the model Vibe runs on. And in that model, premium publishers win by a wide margin.

Why Disney and NBCUniversal sit at the top of the performance stack

This is the part that surprises most digital marketers: premium inventory outperforms on conversion metrics.

Live sports on Vibe.co drives roughly 6% conversion rate per impression. Top streaming apps come in at 2-4%. Those numbers have tripled in less than a year.

Premium works because of who's watching, how they're watching, and the environment they're watching in. Disney+ and Peacock users are leaned in. They're engaged. They're in a brand-safe, fraud-free context. When you combine direct access to that inventory with a precision buying model, the results follow.

Direct publisher access changes the math entirely

One of the more structural points of the conversation: Vibe.co removes intermediaries between publishers and advertisers.

For a performance marketer, this matters. No intermediaries means no signal loss, no markup stacking, and no dilution of your audience data before it reaches the bid. Your identity graph runs directly against the supply. You're not approximating your audience. You're finding them.

Performance advertisers pay more for premium. And the math still works.

Performance marketers on those search and social pay on conversions, not impressions. The same logic applies to CTV. As CVR per impression improves across premium inventory, the cost per conversion drops. Premium becomes more affordable, not less.

That's the shift: from CPM compression as the path to performance, to conversion rate improvement.

What this means for performance marketers right now

The opportunity isn't to approach CTV the way TV has always been bought. It's to apply the same performance rigor you use on major platforms to a channel with more reach, higher attention, and better conversion rates than most performance marketers expect.

10,000 advertisers are already doing it on Vibe.co. The goal is 100,000 by the end of 2027, with over $1B in ad spend flowing to premium publishers.

Want to see how premium CTV performs for your business? Start here.