Customer acquisition remains one of the biggest commercial challenges for regulated iGaming operators. While paid search, affiliate marketing and social media continue to play a central role in attracting new players, increasing competition across these channels has driven acquisition costs higher, prompting operators to explore new ways to reach and engage audiences.
To better understand how these shifting dynamics are influencing marketing strategies, SiGMA News spoke exclusively with Jason Sukhraj, CEO of Plexus Media. He believes Connected TV (CTV) is becoming an increasingly important player acquisition channel, but argues that operators also need to rethink how they measure advertising performance if they are to unlock its full potential.
The conversation comes as investment in digital video advertising continues to grow. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), spending on Connected TV, online video and social video continues to increase as advertisers shift budgets towards streaming platforms that offer both broad audience reach and measurable outcomes. For iGaming operators, Connected TV, which delivers advertising through internet-connected televisions and streaming services, is emerging as a way to reach potential players beyond traditional search, affiliate and social channels while offering greater measurement capabilities than conventional television.
The rising cost of acquisition
For years, paid search, affiliate marketing and social media have formed the backbone of customer acquisition strategies for online gambling operators. While these channels remain effective, Sukhraj argues they primarily capture users who are already searching for betting or casino products.
“The challenge is that everyone is competing for the same users, which means acquisition costs continue to rise,” he says.
According to Sukhraj, the industry’s growing interest in Connected TV is rooted in economics rather than novelty. Unlike traditional performance marketing channels, CTV offers operators an opportunity to generate new demand instead of competing solely for existing customer intent.
He points to the narrowing gap between linear television and streaming audiences, alongside significant advances in smart TV measurement, as factors that have made the channel increasingly attractive.
“For years, marketers had to choose between the reach and credibility of television or the accountability of digital,” Sukhraj says. “CTV sits between those two worlds. As measurement improves, it increasingly becomes a core acquisition channel rather than an experimental one.”
Rather than replacing search, affiliates or social media, he sees CTV complementing those channels by introducing potential customers to brands earlier in the purchasing journey.
The measurement challenge
Despite growing interest, proving the return on investment from Connected TV campaigns remains one of the industry’s biggest hurdles.
Sukhraj believes the problem is less about technology and more about expectations.
“Most operators are trying to measure CTV with a ruler built for a completely different channel,” he says.
Unlike paid search or display advertising, Connected TV does not rely on immediate clicks. Consumers may watch an advert on a smart television, only to register or make a deposit days later using a mobile phone or another device. That makes traditional last-click attribution models poorly suited to evaluating campaign performance.
Many operators continue to rely on short attribution windows, but television influences consumer behaviour over a much longer period, he explains. Judging CTV using digital-first metrics often attributes conversions to the final interaction while overlooking the role television played in building awareness and consideration.
“The challenge is not measurement itself,” Sukhraj says. “It is accepting that no channel is perfectly deterministic anymore. The focus should be on outcomes that matter, such as registrations and deposits, measured over a timeframe that reflects how television actually influences behaviour.”
Measuring what matters
The way Connected TV is measured remains a challenge for many operators. Sukhraj argues that many continue to evaluate the channel using the same performance expectations applied to search and affiliate marketing. While CTV can build brand awareness, he says it should not be viewed solely as a branding channel. Instead, it combines television’s ability to create demand with many of the targeting and optimisation capabilities associated with digital advertising.
“The conversions are real, but they tend to show up through broader consideration and downstream action rather than an immediate click,” he explains.
For operators achieving the strongest results, success comes from recognising that distinction and evaluating CTV over a longer timeframe rather than expecting instant responses.
Avoiding common CTV mistakes
As operators adopt Connected TV, Sukhraj says many continue to approach the channel as they would a traditional television campaign. Rather than adapting creative strategies for a new medium, some brands continue to approach CTV as if it were a traditional television buy.
“The first is treating CTV like a traditional TV buy and putting everything behind one hero asset,” he says. “Performance campaigns need creative variation.”
Instead of relying on a single advert, he argues that operators should continuously test different messages, offers and calls to action, allowing campaign budgets to follow the creative that delivers the strongest commercial outcomes.
Another common pitfall is an overreliance on audience targeting.
“There is a belief that more precision automatically improves performance,” Sukhraj says. “In reality, tighter targeting often just makes weak creative more expensive.”
For marketers, the lesson is straightforward. According to Sukhraj, improving campaign performance starts with the creative rather than greater targeting precision. If an advert fails to resonate with audiences, narrowing the target audience is unlikely to improve results. Instead, operators should identify the messages that work before using targeting to scale them.
More competition, higher costs
Although Connected TV is attracting increasing attention, Sukhraj is careful not to position it as a replacement for search, affiliates or social media. Instead, he sees these channels continuing to play an important role within a broader acquisition strategy.
Asked whether traditional digital marketing has become saturated, he prefers to describe the situation as one of diminishing returns. “When every operator is competing for the same in-market customer, the cost of winning that customer keeps rising,” he explains.
He also points to the growing influence of artificial intelligence on online search and content discovery, suggesting that evolving consumer behaviour could make established acquisition channels less predictable over time.
“The bigger issue is that the industry spends a lot of time competing for existing intent and not enough time creating new intent.”
Viewed through that lens, Connected TV strengthens existing acquisition channels rather than competing with them. By building awareness before consumers actively search for a betting brand, CTV can help generate demand that later flows through search engines, affiliate sites and other digital touchpoints.
Access over targeting
The advertising landscape is also becoming more complex as platforms tighten policies around data privacy and regulated industries. For gambling operators, however, Sukhraj believes the greatest obstacle is often not audience targeting but gaining access to advertising inventory.
Many streaming platforms remain cautious when working with gambling advertisers, particularly where uncertainty exists around licensing, creative standards or local market regulations.
“A lot of the blocking and gating advertisers encounter is not necessarily opposition to gambling as a category,” he says. “It is uncertainty.”
According to Sukhraj, direct relationships with publishers, platforms and advertising partners are becoming increasingly valuable because they provide greater clarity over campaign requirements before advertising begins.
“When working directly with platforms, publishers and ad-serving partners, you can establish the rules upfront,” he explains. “You can align on where the campaign can run, which markets are approved, what creative standards need to be met, and how frequency and compliance should be handled.”
That certainty, he argues, removes unnecessary friction while helping platforms evaluate gambling campaigns more confidently within regulated markets.
Rethinking attribution
One of the key distinctions in measuring Connected TV performance is the difference between attribution and incrementality. According to Sukhraj, operators that achieve the strongest results from Connected TV understand that the two concepts answer different questions.
“The operators who succeed separate two concepts that are often conflated: measurement and credit,” he says.
Television advertising typically influences consumer behaviour over a longer period than search advertising, making longer attribution windows necessary to understand the full impact of exposure. However, a conversion taking place after someone has seen a television advert does not automatically mean that CTV deserves full credit for that outcome.
“The question is not whether a conversion happened after exposure,” Sukhraj says. “The question is what the channel actually contributed.”
While attribution helps explain the customer journey after exposure, incrementality measures whether advertising genuinely changed consumer behaviour. Understanding that distinction enables operators to evaluate Connected TV more accurately and allocate marketing budgets with greater confidence.
The sequencing problem
As advertising technology becomes increasingly sophisticated, marketers have access to more audience data and targeting capabilities than ever before. Yet Sukhraj believes many operators are still prioritising the wrong part of the marketing equation.
While some in the industry assume that more precise targeting naturally leads to better campaign performance, he argues that this often masks a more fundamental problem.
“There is definitely an imbalance, but I would describe it as a sequencing problem rather than a targeting problem,” he says.
According to Sukhraj, many operators respond to declining campaign performance by refining audience targeting, when the real issue often lies in the creative itself.
“The industry tends to overestimate what targeting can solve. When performance softens, the first reaction is often to increase precision. In reality, targeting cannot compensate for weak creative.”
Instead, he believes operators should first identify the messages, offers and storytelling that resonate with audiences before using targeting tools to scale successful campaigns.
“If the message is not resonating, better targeting simply makes you more efficient at delivering the wrong message,” he says. “Creative tells you what resonates with an audience. Once you understand that, targeting becomes a powerful way to scale it.”
The streaming shift
Looking ahead, Sukhraj expects the continued shift towards streaming platforms to further reshape how gambling brands engage potential players.
As more consumers move away from traditional television, he believes Connected TV will become a standard part of operators’ media strategies rather than a channel reserved for experimentation.
“The audience shift is very real,” he says. “As streaming-native consumers become the majority, CTV stops being an experimental budget line and becomes part of the core media plan.”
However, he believes the technology itself will continue to evolve beyond today’s television-style advertising formats.
At present, many Connected TV campaigns still resemble conventional television adverts. Over time, Sukhraj expects platforms to introduce more interactive experiences, including home-screen placements, picture-in-picture advertising and eventually more shoppable formats that reduce the gap between viewing an advert and taking action.
“The way these platforms interact with viewers will continue to evolve,” he says. “As those formats become more actionable, the gap between exposure and conversion will continue to shrink.”
For operators, that evolution could create new opportunities to engage audiences while generating more measurable outcomes than traditional television has historically been able to provide.
A category of its own
Despite growing adoption, Sukhraj believes the industry’s biggest misunderstanding is trying to compare Connected TV with channels that operate very differently.
“The mistake people still make is trying to fit CTV into a category they already understand,” he says.
According to him, some marketers continue to approach Connected TV using a traditional television mindset, relying on fixed media plans, single creative assets and assumptions that premium inventory must always come at a premium price. Others judge it solely through digital marketing metrics, expecting immediate actions and short attribution windows.
Neither approach reflects how the channel actually works.
“CTV sits between those worlds,” Sukhraj says. “It combines the reach and credibility of television with many of the measurement and optimisation capabilities associated with digital media.”
As operators continue searching for more sustainable ways to acquire players, he believes Connected TV should be viewed as a distinct discipline rather than an extension of either television or digital advertising.
“The operators seeing the strongest results are treating CTV as its own discipline rather than forcing it into an existing framework.”
That shift in thinking, he argues, may ultimately prove just as important as the technology itself. For an industry facing rising acquisition costs, changing consumer behaviour and an increasingly competitive advertising landscape, success will depend not only on adopting new channels but also on understanding how those channels influence player decisions throughout the customer journey.
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