Customer acquisition costs have surged 222% over the past eight years, and the traditional playbook built to manage them is no longer working.1 The awareness-to-consideration-to-conversion funnel assumed consumers moved in a predictable sequence. They don’t. With consumers spending 5–9 hours daily in content environments, discovery and purchase have collapsed into a single moment. A consumer can encounter a brand, decide to trust it, and convert all within the same scroll.
According to Ovative Group’s latest EMR Power Rankings release—a ranking of the most effective paid media channels from data across their retail brand portfolio—Meta Brand Awareness, Meta Performance, Affiliate Content Publishers, and YouTube are the channels where new customer trust is earned fast enough to actually convert. Here’s what that looks like in practice.
Meta Brand Awareness: The Counterintuitive New Customer Engine
Most CMOs fixated on cost-per-acquisition assume Meta Performance campaigns are the faster route to new customers. The data says otherwise, and the reason is structural.
“Conversion campaigns optimize toward users likely to convert, usually those brand familiar, as they’ve already demonstrated purchase intent,” says Mara, Director of Paid Social at Ovative. “This means new customers that come through act very similarly to your current file.” Performance campaigns are efficient. They’re not expansive.
Brand awareness campaigns work differently. “They push the algorithm into discovery mode, typically aligned more to your strategic growth customer who may have different attributes than your core customer today,” Mara Koons explains. The algorithm isn’t just finding buyers; it’s finding the right future buyers. And the creative has to do double duty: “An awareness ad may itself be the conversion moment. That means creative needs to carry both jobs simultaneously: brand-building and enough product signal to convert someone ready to act now.”
Last-click CPA will consistently undervalue this. New customers require a longer time horizon and more touchpoints, and a measurement system that holds brand and performance equally accountable to revenue and new customer growth is what lets you balance immediate return with long-term acquisition.
Where to start: Run Meta Brand Awareness alongside performance campaigns, not instead of them. Build creative that carries both the brand story and enough product clarity to convert a first-time encounter. Measure incremental new customer acquisition rate as a primary KPI, not just CPA.
Affiliate Content Publishers: The Sleeper Channel Driving Real Acquisition
Affiliate channels now drive 16% of all ecommerce orders, yet most brands treat affiliate as a coupon-and-cashback afterthought.2 Affiliate-sourced buyers have 21% higher average order values, and niche authority publishers achieve conversion rates of 4–6%, nearly double broader lifestyle sites.3
“All brands benefit from content through affiliate, from mass media publishers to independent blogs and websites,” says Parker Moss, Director of Affiliate at Ovative. “It’s important to show up where your audience is to broaden your customer base.” The difference between a high-performing strategy and one that just adds cost comes down to structure. “Flat fees are crucial to content publisher relationships but shouldn’t be an always-on strategy. Factor that cost in during the initial stages and around key seasonal moments.” The best strategies combine high commission rates, exclusive offers, and cross-channel buys to unlock sustained growth.
Where to start: Audit your current affiliate mix. If it skews toward coupon and cashback, rebalance toward content publishers adjacent to your core audience. Use flat fees for onboarding and seasonal coverage; structure the long-term relationship around performance-based commissions and exclusive offers.
YouTube: The New Customer Channel No One Is Treating That Way
YouTube captured 12.4% of all U.S. TV viewing time in 2025, the single largest streaming destination in American living rooms.4 CTV surpassed mobile as YouTube’s largest U.S. watch surface in Q4 2025, with 60% of total watch time now on television screens.5 Yet most brands still think of YouTube as a social video buy.
“YouTube’s dominance in the video space is far outpacing the growth of investment,” says Tommy McQuillan, Sr. Director of Video and Programmatic Media at Ovative. “Brands winning on YouTube are winning customers that are hard to find on other platforms.” The reach is genuinely incremental: 65% of Shorts users are not on Meta Reels, and 45% are not on TikTok.6
Google’s product development has amplified the channel on both ends of the funnel. “Demand Gen adoption is increasing across nearly all of our clients because we’re seeing performance on par or better than social, especially with creator content,” Tommy says. On the brand side, YouTube’s CTV dominance creates cost-effective connections that generate targetable signals for lower-funnel tactics. For brands new to the platform: “The most effective way in is to test Demand Gen with high-performing creator content and ensure you have vertical assets for Shorts.”
Where to start: Launch a Demand Gen campaign using your best-performing creator content with vertical assets for Shorts. Measure new customer acquisition rate and view-through attribution alongside clicks, then expand into brand formats to capture CTV’s reach advantages.
The Trust Problem That Sits Behind All of It
What these channels share is the ability to compress the trust-building timeline for new customers. But that compression has limits.
“5–9 hours of daily content consumption hasn’t made new customer acquisition easier; it’s made the environment noisier and consumers harder to convince,” says Maya Gorr, Director of Media Strategy at Ovative. “The brands finding traction aren’t spending more to reach more people. They’re being deliberate about where they show up and why.” 72% of consumers trust product reviews more than ads.7 Borrowed credibility from the right source compresses what would otherwise take months into a single content moment but only if the source is real and the fit is genuine.
The measurement implication follows: a last-click model won’t show any of this working. Enterprise revenue, new customer acquisition rate, and incrementality need to be the primary signals or you’ll keep optimizing for the customers you already have.
Take the First Step
At Ovative, we work with enterprise brands to build acquisition strategies for how consumers actually make decisions today. The channel insights here come from our 2026 EMR Power Rankings. To see the full data or talk through what it means for your acquisition strategy, connect with our team.
Sources: 1) Amra & Elma, 2) Post Affiliate Pro, 3) DesignRush, 4) Vidivo, 5) Digital Applied, 6) Loopex Digital, 7) Marketing LTB
