The $40bn Inflection Point: Why CTV’s Next Wave Is Being Ridden By Independent Agencies & Smaller Brands.
- Origin
- 14h
- 5 min read
Connected TV is officially ready to cross the $40bn mark. That’s a headline. But it’s not the interesting part.
The interesting part is where the growth is now coming from.
For the better part of a decade, CTV’s rise has been driven by the blue-chip giants. The global brands with holding company agencies. The ones with innovation budgets, test-and-learn line items, and the luxury of being first to try something new. They validated the channel. They normalized it in media plans. They pushed measurement providers to evolve. They funded the early learning curve.
But as CTV enters this next chapter, the growth story is shifting. The acceleration we’re seeing now - the momentum in the market - is increasingly coming from smaller, independent agencies and the brands they represent. And for the record, that is no footnote. It’s a signal.
Why Now?
For years, independent agencies and mid-market brands largely sat on the sidelines of CTV. Not because they didn’t see the appeal. But because CTV still felt like television - and television, historically, has not exactly been the most ‘democratic’ of media destinations.
Linear TV demanded scale and really broad curb appeal. Big budgets. Long commitments. Risk tolerance. It favored incumbents.
Early CTV, despite its initial appearance, still carried some of that aura, which made it slightly intimidating. Measurement was still coalescing, inventory relationships seemed opaque at best, and the perception (and sometimes the reality) that you needed millions to play properly was not exactly being corrected by anybody except a limited few.
That perception (or spell) has now broken and CTV has now been recognized more broadly for what it is - simply a larger digital screen.
Think about it with these considerations in mind:
Targeting sophistication has matured.
Campaign entry points are lower.
Frequency controls are tighter.
Creative flexibility is higher.
Reporting is clearer.
A $50k test no longer feels like lighting money on fire - it feels like a strategic allocation that feels less daunting when viewed as being part of a larger mixed media model strategy. For independent agencies whose brands don’t have bottomless pockets, this matters. Every dollar carries consequence. CTV no longer feels like a prestige buy. It feels like a performance lever with brand upside.
That shift alone unlocks participation.
But it’s not the only reason.
The Social Plateau
There’s also the quiet recalibration happening inside media plans.
For a decade, social and display absorbed outsized growth. They were efficient. Predictable. Easy to scale. They promised performance and delivered it - until increasingly, they didn’t.
CPMs rose. Attribution blurred. Incremental growth became harder to prove. Auction volatility intensified. Creative fatigue accelerated. And many mid-sized brands began asking uncomfortable questions about diminishing returns and over-concentration.
CTV entered that conversation at exactly the right moment.
Not as a replacement for social. But as a stabilizer. A channel that can drive upper-funnel impact with increasingly measurable downstream effects. A format where creative still commands attention rather than competes with scrolling thumbs. A space where brand and performance don’t have to sit in separate silos.
For independent agencies, the calculus is simple: diversify intelligently or risk dependency. And luckily, CTV has matured just in time to be that diversification play.
Measurement Finally Feels Real
Let’s be honest: for smaller brands, “trust us, it works” is not a strategy.
Early CTV measurement was fragmented and sometimes aspirational. That’s not a criticism - it was a natural stage in the lifecycle of any emerging channel. But mid-market agencies are pragmatic. They don’t get rewarded for experimentation; they get rewarded for outcomes.
Over the past few years, the ecosystem has evolved meaningfully. Cross-device attribution. Split-testing. Cooperative partnerships flourishing into the living room (see here). Retail media tie-ins. MMM inputs. The measurement stack is no longer theoretical - it’s operational.
And perhaps more importantly, it’s explainable.
Independent agencies can now walk into a client meeting and defend CTV allocations with credible data. Not just reach charts, but business impact narratives. That unlocks confidence. And confidence unlocks budgets.
We wrote an article recently about Mixed Media Modeling which we recommend reading - here.
The FOMO Factor (Let’s Not Pretend It Doesn’t Exist)
There’s also a human truth at play. Smaller brands have been watching the category leaders lean into CTV for years. They’ve seen the creative. The placements. The case studies. The awards. They’ve watched it become table stakes in competitive sets.
At a certain point, holding out stops feeling disciplined and starts feeling like lagging.
FOMO is not a strategy. But it is a catalyst.
When the largest brands in a category consistently invest in a channel - and publicly talk about its importance - the rest of the market eventually follows. Not blindly. But decisively.
And that’s where we are now.
What We’re Seeing at Origin
Toward the tail end of 2025, we saw something unmistakable. Origin won more new brands than in any previous year in our 7 year history. And almost all of them were smaller, independent brands. Not Fortune 100 household names. Not global conglomerates. They were hungry, lazer-focused brands. Brands that likely waited until CTV felt stable, measurable, and strategically necessary.
That’s not coincidence. That’s a tide turning.
We see it in RFP language. We see it in budget conversations. We see it in the types of questions being asked. The conversation has shifted from “Should we test CTV?” to “How do we make CTV work within our reality?”
That distinction matters and it has forced us - in a good way - to evolve. If the next wave of growth belongs to smaller brands, then the tooling, workflows, and service models must support them properly. They cannot feel like second-class citizens because their budgets are six figures instead of seven.
We’re investing heavily in the systems that allow for precision at smaller scales. Automation through AI where it makes sense, yet still built from a handcrafted strategy. Reporting that doesn’t require a data scientist to interpret. Creative support that elevates, not overwhelms.
The promise is simple. In our eyes: a $1m brand deserves the same intentionality as a $500m brand.
Because in this phase of CTV’s growth, the mid-market is not an afterthought. It is the engine.
The Maturity Curve
Every channel follows a similar arc.
Early adopters experiment.
Market leaders validate.
Infrastructure builds.
The majority arrives.
CTV is now firmly in phase four. Crossing $40bn isn’t just a financial milestone. It’s a maturity signal. The foundations are strong enough that the cautious players feel safe entering. And when cautious capital enters a market at scale, growth becomes durable.
That’s the story here. Not the story that CTV is growing - we’ve known that for years. But the story that surfaces the fact that the composition of its growth is changing.
The next $10bn won’t be powered solely by the giants. It will be fueled by the ambitious independents who finally see CTV not as television’s expensive cousin, but as a controllable, measurable, creative canvas that fits their world.
And that is when an industry stops emerging…and starts running the way it always knew it could.
If you find this topic interesting and would like to know more, you can schedule a consultation with one of Origin's CTV specialists by clicking here.
Origin is a multi-award winning provider of creative solutions and services for media buyers, creative teams and brands who want to transform conventional CTV ad creatives into powerful, personal and provocative advertising experiences.
With unparalleled creative capabilities and proprietary ad serving technology, Origin’s unique suite of dynamic ad overlays and native CTV ad extensions allows advertisers to engage distracted audiences and achieve the results they need.
Founded by media veterans Stephen Strong and Fred Godfrey, Origin is driven by the belief that winning viewers today requires breaking free from how it was done yesterday.
Learn more at: originmedia.tv
