Industry veteran Matt Barash is Chief Commercial Officer at Nova and NDA’s new monthly columnist.
For years, marketers treated social as an engagement engine, primarily a destination for community building, cultural relevance and upper-funnel storytelling. Fast forward and that framing is outdated.
Today, social is the most powerful creative testing environment ever built. It operates live, at scale and produces behavioral data in real time. Every impression is a signal. Every scroll is a verdict. Every share, comment and completion rate reveals something about narrative structure, pacing, emotional tone and visual composition.
In short, social has become the R&D foundation for modern marketing.
The smartest marketers are treating it that way. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram and YouTube allow brands to test hundreds of creative permutations in days rather than months. Hooks can be refined in real time. Creator voices can be validated for credibility and resonance. Visual cues that earn attention can be isolated and scaled. This isn’t just campaign optimisation; it’s creative proof generated at massive scale.
What makes this signal so powerful is authenticity. Social creative earns attention in the wild. It competes against friends, creators, culture and chaos. And when it wins, it wins because people genuinely care.
That is fundamentally different from much of the generative advertising flooding the market today. Most generative ads don’t fail because of targeting. They fail because no one ever cared about them in the first place. Authenticity doesn’t come from a prompt; it comes from proof. Social surfaces that proof at scale.
The mistake many brands make is leaving that proof confined to the platform where it originated. When budgets shift into CTV, teams often start from scratch. New scripts, new edits, new production cycles as if the signals gathered from millions of social interactions suddenly no longer apply.
But human psychology does not fundamentally change because the screen becomes larger. Attention dynamics, emotional resonance and narrative structure remain consistent. What changes is format, not human behavior.
That distinction is where opportunity lives. CTV should not represent a creative reset; it should represent a creative expansion. If an asset has already proven it can earn attention in-feed, that signal should form the foundation of CTV creative. The pacing can be adapted, the narrative extended and the storytelling rebuilt for a lean-back environment, but the core emotional insight remains intact.
This is also where the role of AI becomes practical rather than theoretical. AI should not be deployed to invent something disconnected from proven performance. Its power lies in operationalising what already works: adapting aspect ratios, versioning for audience cohorts, extending scenes, optimising sequencing and orchestrating distribution across streaming and the open web. Social generates the signal. CTV amplifies it.
We are entering a phase where creative is no longer produced once and deployed in isolation. It is tested, refined, validated, and then scaled across environments with precision. The brands that win will not be those producing the most content. They will be those treating social as a laboratory and CTV as the distribution engine for ideas that have already demonstrated their ability to capture attention.
Creative R&D begins on the small screen. Scaled storytelling happens on the big one. That is not just channel strategy, it’s modern marketing infrastructure.
