Marketers have spent a decade treating connected TV as an awareness channel and mobile ads as a performance playground. That wall is crumbling fast. Shoppable CTV formats from Samsung TV Plus, Roku Action Ads and YouTube now turn a 55-inch impression into a phone-in-hand conversion, while SingleTap installs from Digital Turbine wipe the app-store detour out of the funnel. Add in interactive playable ads, ubiquitous QR code advertising and Google’s DV360 cross-device attribution, and the distance between a couch view and a mobile app install has shrunk to barely a heartbeat.
Samsung fired the starting gun in July 2025, plugging Mobile Conversion overlays into its CTV inventory. An AI model spots gamers inside Samsung TV Plus and serves a send-to-phone prompt that early testers say lifted install rates by double digits. Roku followed with Action Ads that drop “Send to Phone” buttons or QR codes on top of shows — wellness brand fatty15 moved 30 percent of carts to purchase during a June pilot. Google has joined the sprint: at Marketing Live the company demoed shoppable YouTube mastheads on TV and rolled out DV360 reporting that stitches those views to in-app revenue, finally giving growth teams the cross-device attribution they need to defend CTV budgets.
On the small-screen side, SingleTap installs erase friction by letting an APK download silently in the background; click-to-install rates jump as much as 200 percent when the app store never opens. Digital Turbine already powers this flow on 40 million ONE Store devices in Korea and is marching across Asia–Pacific. The company has also baked SingleTap into web tags and offer-walls, letting reward publishers claw back 20-30 percent of users who normally abandon at the store redirect.
Creatives are evolving just as quickly. Vertical-video assets feed directly into Samsung’s new Creative Canvas, where brands can add interactive elements — QR frames, polls, stickers in under a minute and push them live to both CTV and mobile. Industry benchmarks show playable ads converting at triple the rate of static video, while TikTok’s global release of Interactive Add-ons gives performance buyers a fresh layer of intent signals without breaching privacy rules.
Measurement — the long-standing weak link — has finally caught up. Google’s Campaign Manager 360 now models co-viewing and feeds cross-device metrics into DV360 dashboards, while Roku, Samsung and Mountain expose IP-graph lift reports that tie a living-room exposure to a handset install or in-app order. Because QR scans and SingleTap events live inside first-party data, they fit neatly into Privacy Sandbox and ATT guardrails, making the whole funnel privacy-safe marketing rather than a compliance headache.
So what should a growth team actually do? First, test shoppable overlays on Samsung or Roku before the Q4 retail surge; real ROAS beats historical CPM arguments every time. Second, benchmark DV360’s cross-device numbers against your current multi-touch model if CTV shows reliable assist value, shift spend accordingly. Third, A/B SingleTap against store redirects on Android traffic with high bounce: if your CPI drops, scale immediately. Finally, embed QR and playable layers in creatives to feed richer engagement data back into bid algorithms.
The takeaway is simple: the line between the “lean-back” TV and the “lean-in” phone is gone. Brands that connect shoppable CTV, one-tap installs and interactive creative into one seamless path will own a closed-loop growth engine long before rivals realise the funnel has moved.
