For five years, connected TV advertising has been the budget line that brand teams owned and performance teams ignored. No clicks. No pixel events. No direct-response path. You justified it with reach numbers and brand lift studies, filed it under awareness, and moved on. That framing is now out of date.
At Brandcast 2026 on May 13, YouTube announced Buy with Google Pay for connected TV: a two-tap purchase flow that lets viewers complete a transaction directly on their TV screen without picking up a phone. The product data pulls from your existing Merchant Center feed — if you're already running Shopping campaigns, the infrastructure is there. The viewer sees your ad, clicks twice with a remote, and buys.
That's a fundamentally different channel than the one you planned for last year.
The conversion data YouTube is reporting
YouTube shared two figures at Brandcast that are worth sitting with.
CTV conversions grew more than 200% year over year in Q1 2026. That growth happened before Buy with Google Pay was broadly available, meaning it's coming from existing formats and Demand Gen campaigns, not the new checkout feature.
Demand Gen campaigns that include TV screen placements drive 7% additional conversions at the same return on investment compared to campaigns without TV. Seven percent is incremental, not transformative. But it's incremental at no cost to efficiency. If you're running Demand Gen and the TV screen placement is off, you're losing conversions for no good reason.
The measurement caveat: CTV attribution is still messier than mobile. Google Pay will create a direct purchase signal, but TV-to-purchase paths that don't run through the checkout flow are harder to track. Treat the 200% growth as directional momentum rather than a number you'll immediately replicate.
What else Brandcast introduced
The commerce push extended well beyond the Google Pay headline.
Affiliate Partnerships Boost lets you pay to amplify creator content where your products are already tagged with affiliate shopping links. You don't need to find the creator or negotiate a deal. If someone already made a video featuring your product and linked it, you now have a paid lever to surface that content in the feed. For brands with active affiliate programs, this is a distribution channel that didn't exist last month.
The Custom Content Shelf pairs a masthead placement with a curated video collection underneath it. Instead of a straight billboard rental, you're building a short-form branded destination on the platform, mixing your own creative with creator-led content in a single unit.
On the creative side, YouTube integrated Gemini and Veo into a single workflow that takes a brief to a finished ad asset without leaving the platform. For teams that need to produce TV-length creative — 30-second spots for the living room format — that compresses production cycles enough to make CTV testing realistic for brands that previously passed on it because of production costs.
The creative problem none of this solves
None of the commerce features work if your creative isn't built for a TV screen. YouTube's own figures show 45% of watch time happens on actual televisions. Living room viewing is lean-back, often with multiple people in the room, at ten feet from a large screen.
Most e-commerce brands have mobile-first creative: fast cuts, heavy text overlays, hooks designed for a scroll. That content reads cheaply on a 65-inch TV in a quiet room. The text is unreadable from across the room. The pacing assumes someone is about to swipe away, which on a TV they're not.
If you're testing Buy with Google Pay or Demand Gen with TV placements, the first question is whether you have a 30-second asset built for a living room, not just reformatted from a mobile cut. Gemini and Veo can help with resizing, but the brief still needs to be TV-native.
What to change in your account
First: if you're running Demand Gen, check your placement settings and confirm TV screens are included. The 7% conversion uplift data gives you a reason to test it before you have a dedicated CTV creative strategy.
Second: verify your Merchant Center feed is live, error-free, and linked to Google Ads. Buy with Google Pay pulls product listings directly from Merchant Center — any gaps or errors in the feed break the checkout experience.
Third: look at what percentage of your current YouTube impressions are landing on CTV placements. Most accounts don't track this at the device level. A campaign delivering 40% of impressions on TV but structured around mobile performance goals is already misaligned, and that's before the commerce features roll out.
Fourth: if you have an affiliate program running, check whether your products are already tagged in creator content. Affiliate Partnerships Boost turns that existing coverage into a paid amplification lever you can control.
If you're not sure what your YouTube account looks like across those dimensions, a free audit at Gromerce will surface it in a few minutes.
CTV advertising is no longer the channel where measurement stops. YouTube made that case at Brandcast — and 200% conversion growth before the checkout feature even launched suggests the market was already moving that way.
Related articles: youtube-ctv-unskippable-30-second-2026
Sources: YouTube Official Blog, Google Ads Blog, AdWeek, Best Media Info, May 2026
