For years, interactive CTV advertising was the star of industry demos, like the kind attendees of the Consumer Electronic Showcase saw all up and down the Las Vegas strip this past week. But although these demos are often promising and flashy, for years they’ve been mostly theoretical.
In 2025, though, they finally made the leap from proof of concept to practice.
It’s been a long time coming.
NBCUniversal and TiVo first started experimenting with interactive features as far back as 2007. Over a decade later, interactive ad developer BrightLine started working with various publishers and streamers, including NBCU and Hulu.
According to Rob Aksman, BrightLine’s co-founder and chief strategy officer, marketers have since become far more comfortable advertising on CTV and are focusing on what it can do that linear television can’t.
It doesn’t hurt that ad tech and media companies are actively pitching new ad formats and that the technology has advanced in recent years, especially regarding measurement.
For example, you know how “American Idol” still lets users vote by SMS text or online? Samsung TV Plus improved on that formula when it implemented a voting mechanism during a live Jonas Brothers concert in October that allowed viewers to use their remote control to pick which song the band would play next.
Viewers are getting it, and “we don’t have to educate our advertisers anymore,” said Kevin Beatty, who leads global gaming, interactive experiences and emerging tech for Samsung. “They come to the conversation already knowing what the base layer is.”
What’s hot now
Pause ads swiftly gained traction to become the most popular interactive option among advertisers, platforms and publishers alike, which the IAB Tech Lab saw coming when it launched an initiative earlier this year to create standards for emerging CTV ad formats.
Over the past year alone, Wunderkind, Kargo, Magnite, PubMatic and TripleLift have all launched their own programmatically transactable versions of pause ads. On the publisher side, sports streamer Fubo rolled out its own programmatic pause ads in May, and NBCUniversal announced plans to do the same starting in 2026.
It’s no surprise that pause ads became an early favorite. Pausing is an intentional, opt-in action that occurs frequently during the viewing experience and naturally captures attention during downtime.
A recent survey conducted by Magna and DirecTV found that 91% of people pause either “all the time” or at least “sometimes” while watching streaming TV. Meanwhile, 92% remain paused for longer than 30 seconds, and over a third (35%) don’t step away after pausing.
All that time in front of a pause ad gives viewers plenty of opportunity to engage with additional interactive features.
Wunderkind, for example, helped luxury jewelry brand Zales achieve a 276% increase in QR code scans during a recent pause ad campaign. This led to a significant increase in attributable sales, according to Wunderkind VP and Head of Sales Adam Gendelman.
Shoppable features have also become more effective as more people engage in second-screening, meaning simultaneous phone-scrolling and TV-watching, said Lauri Baker, SVP and head of partnerships at interactive video company KERV.
“We need consumers to be as forward-thinking as we in the industry are,” Baker added. “From a CTV perspective, we’re starting to actually see more consumers lean in.”
What comes next
But once pause ads reach their inevitable saturation point, the CTV advertising ecosystem will have to find another format that can achieve programmatic scale.
Opinions differ on which type of interactive CTV ad will capture the industry’s attention next.
Scott Young, co-founder and chief product officer of ad manager Transmit, said he expects to see more interest in formats that reuse existing video assets by adding frames and overlays.
Meanwhile, Gendelman suggests that the next industry trend will be home screen and menu ads. Publishers have traditionally been more restrictive about making menu ads available at scale – partly as a way to maintain creative control and not disrupt the viewer experience, and partly as incentive to upsell the format to interested advertisers.
Still, programmatically biddable and interoperable home screen ads could be tricky to implement, at least at first.
Some ad tech vendors, like BrightLine and Transmit, work with enough streaming providers that their formats can be used across multiple platforms. But nearly every streamer has its own distinct home screen or menu design with completely different sizing requirements. (The “arrival ads” that NBCU announced right before CES, for example, take up almost half of a user’s profile selection screen.)
Maybe with better standards in place, though, these types of ads will get easier to execute.
The IAB Tech Lab is on a mission to standardize new and emerging CTV ad formats. After launching its Ad Format Hero initiative late last year, it released a comprehensive new CTV ad portfolio and guidance in mid-December.
The guidelines include a thorough classification of existing formats, including pause and menu ads, as well as best practices for standardizing certain types of interactive functions in VAST-supported environments, such as shoppable buttons and QR codes.
After the public comment period closes on January 31, the next step will be developing more detailed technical specifications, said Jill Wittkopp, the IAB Tech Lab’s VP of product.
In a programmatic environment, clear signaling is essential, she said. Everyone in the supply chain needs to be speaking the same language. For now, that means nailing down creative details, including file formats and aspect ratios, then expanding into metadata and declarative signaling specs, like video.plcmt or sellers.json, but specifically for CTV ad formats.
“There’s just no way around that,” said Wittkopp. “You need to have a common understanding between buyers and sellers on how those things will be signaled.”
