The ad tech industry is betting big on shoppable TV as the next frontier in connected TV advertising. It’s a seductive promise: viewers see a product during their favorite show, click a button on their remote or scan a QR code, and complete a purchase without ever leaving their couch.

It sounds like the perfect marriage of commerce and content, but there’s just one problem: consumers aren’t buying it—literally.

Despite the hype, only 10% of U.S. adults have made a purchase via shoppable commerce on CTV. QR codes flash onto screens, interactive overlays promise seamless checkout, and remote-control shopping experiences pop up across streaming platforms. Yet these features interrupt viewing far more than they drive conversions, replicating the same mistakes that banner ads made when they degraded the early web browsing experience.

Shoppable TV fundamentally misunderstands how people actually engage with their television screens. Thankfully, there’s a better approach to driving purchase intent that respects both viewer behavior and marketing ROI.

Why the hype exists (but shouldn’t)

The push for shoppable TV isn’t coming from consumer demand or even marketer requests. It’s an ad tech narrative designed to force television into post-click attribution systems originally built for digital channels like search and social media.

In other words, the goal is to make TV “clickable” so that it fits existing measurement frameworks, not because viewers are asking for shopping carts on their streaming services. Companies need TV to behave like other digital channels to justify marketing spend and satisfy an industry trained to evaluate performance on click-through rates and direct conversions.

Fundamentally, TV will always appear to underperform under click-based measurement frameworks because, at its core, it’s not a clickable channel. Television drives awareness, credibility, and brand lift that influences purchasing decisions over time, not impulse clicks during a viewing session.

The data confirms this disconnect. Consumer engagement with shoppable formats remains stubbornly low. QR codes, interactive ads, and remote-control checkout simply aren’t resonating with audiences. If marketers want ROI from TV, they need measurement based on incrementality—the ability to isolate the actual impact of their campaigns, not just activity and eyeballs.

The reality: TV is a passive medium by design

The biggest misconception among brands is that people are willing to actively engage with the big screen in their living room. The living room context works fundamentally against shoppable experiences.

Television is about comfort, relaxation, and passive consumption. Viewers are multitasking, unwinding after work, or watching with family and friends. The couch is the opposite of a conversion-optimized landing page.

Not to mention, the couch-to-checkout experience requires transforming TV viewing into an active task. But do people actually want an active TV experience? The answer is clearly no. Direct checkout interrupts the viewing experience rather than enhancing it, creating friction instead of convenience.

This doesn’t mean TV can’t drive commerce—it absolutely can and does. But it does so by strategically building awareness and intent that leads to purchases on phones, laptops and physical stores where people actually prefer to shop.

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The path forward is performance TV without the gimmicks

If shoppable features aren’t the answer, what is? The future of CTV advertising lies in being smarter about reaching the right viewers with the right messages—not in forcing shopping experiences where they don’t belong. The most successful brands are:

• Embracing hyper-targeted advertising.

TV ads remain very loosely targeted compared to other digital channels. The next phase of CTV is about making ads highly relevant to viewers. When targeting is precise, ads feel less intrusive and drive better downstream results.

• Experimenting with skippable ads.

Though it may sound counterintuitive, skippable ads can improve campaign performance. When viewers choose not to skip an ad, they’re signaling strong relevance and intent. This behavior provides valuable data for optimization algorithms, enabling real-time refinement of audience targeting to identify which demographics, contexts, and creative variants drive genuine engagement.

• Shifting to viewer-first strategies, not inventory-first buying.

Marketers need to rethink how they buy CTV media. Instead of starting with available inventory and hoping to find the right audience, start with your target consumer: Who are they? What are their behaviors? What content are they watching? Creative and targeting strategies must work together to make CTV a true performance channel. The goal is relevance at scale, not scale for scale’s sake.

• Building their first-party data strategy for TV activation.

Heading into 2026 and beyond, marketers must prioritize their first-party data strategy and how they activate it on TV. The key isn’t just collecting data—it’s knowing how to use it for TV targeting. Partner selection is critical. Choose platforms that target based on actual buying behavior, not just demographics; maintain unique datasets rather than recycled data from brokers; and use proprietary ID graphs that connect viewing behavior to consumer actions.

• Measuring incrementality, not interactivity.

TV’s real strength is driving credibility, brand lift, and downstream conversions—not forcing viewers to shop with their remote control. Success on CTV should be measured through incrementality studies that isolate true lift, not click-through rates borrowed from digital playbooks.

Making TV smarter, not more clickable

Television remains one of the most powerful mediums for building brands and driving purchase intent. The path forward isn’t to turn TVs into shopping terminals, but to respect what makes television valuable in the first place: its ability to reach viewers in a relaxed, receptive state with messages that resonate and influence decisions long after the screen goes dark.