For years, TV sat outside the marketing playbook for most mobile app marketers, written off as “too expensive”, “too difficult to measure”, and “built for awareness” rather than installs. But that thinking is as outdated as an app running on a 2019 operating system. Slowly but surely, mobile marketers are updating their marketing strategy to include TV, and for good reason.
As customer acquisition costs increase across digital channels like search and social, and new audiences become harder to find, TV is quietly emerging as a meaningful performance channel. Not as a replacement for digital, but making it more effective.
TV delivers a powerful halo effect
One of the biggest misconceptions about TV advertising is that it sits purely at the top of the funnel. For mobile app marketers accustomed to deterministic targeting and last-click attribution, it’s easy to assume TV is best suited for awareness, with limited impact on performance outcomes. In reality, TV behaves much more like a full-funnel channel, one that not only introduces your app to new audiences, but also drives measurable downstream impact across your entire marketing mix.
When a user sees a TV ad, they may not install immediately, but they are more likely to search for your brand later, engage with a paid social ad, or convert after multiple touchpoints. This compounding effect, often referred to as the “halo effect”, is where TV becomes particularly valuable. It doesn’t just generate demand, it strengthens the performance of the channels you’re already investing in.
Take the number one app for sleep and mediation, Calm, for example. Following the launch of its TV campaign, the brand saw installs spike immediately after airings, with more than 7,000 downloads occurring within the first minute of a national spot. More importantly, that performance sustained over time, contributing to a 52% reduction in customer acquisition costs (CAC) and hundreds of…