With 15+ years in SaaS and digital innovation, Lindsay Giachetti helps enterprise product and marketing leaders turn subscription solutions into meaningful, revenue-driving experiences.
She has had the privilege of working with brands like Apple, Google, and Warner Media, shaping strategies that connect creativity, data, and technology. Today at Nami ML, Lindsay leads product marketing and partner engagement, helping enterprise teams grow smarter through personalization that scales.
Imagine walking into a grocery store and finding the checkout right inside the door. There’s a basket of groceries waiting for you… it even has your name on it. But you didn’t pick any of it out. You don’t know what’s inside, how much it costs, or if it’s what you actually want. Do you really trust that what’s in that basket is for you if you didn’t do the shopping?
That’s what most subscription funnels feel like today: users click an ad, maybe they came in from TikTok or scanned a QR code on their TV, and are immediately presented with a paywall. They’re being asked to buy before they’ve had a chance to browse, explore, or understand the value.
That moment between ad interaction and purchase where intent is built, and ignoring it leaves potential subscribers behind.
To be fair it’s not just a user experience issue. It’s a symptom of how teams are structured. Marketing focuses on driving traffic and lowering acquisition costs. Product focuses on in-app experience and conversion. Between them lies a gap, and real subscription growth begins when marketing and product bridge it together.
Why Sending Users Straight to the Paywall Fails
When a user clicks an ad, they’re expressing curiosity, not commitment. They’ve seen a piece of marketing creative — an image, tagline, or video clip that captures their attention but doesn’t yet build their trust. If their next step is a demand for payment, it’s too much, too soon.
From the user’s perspective, the experience feels jarring. The visual style might not match. The offer might feel disconnected from the ad’s promise. The product’s value hasn’t been established, and the user’s psychological state hasn’t caught up to the ask.
The result: low conversion rates, high abandon rates, and wasted ad spend.
This is what happens when marketing and product operate on separate tracks. One optimizes for clicks, the other for purchases. No one owns what happens between them, which is the most psychologically sensitive part of the journey.
The Case for Bridging Marketing and Product
The path from first touch to subscription should be one continuous experience. Every step, from the ad creative to the landing screen to the paywall, should feel like part of the same story.
That requires marketing and product working as a single system.
Marketing brings insight into what message, visuals, or offer resonated enough to earn a click.
Product understands what motivates users once they’re inside the experience — what makes them engage, hesitate, or convert.
When marketing and product aligns on the funnel experience, the result is a seamless journey that builds momentum instead of friction. Design, messaging, and flow come together to bridge curiosity and commitment.
The Psychology Behind the Click
Two psychological principles explain why direct ad-to-paywall funnels tend to underperform:
1. Cognitive Consistency
People crave consistency between what they see and what they experience. If the ad promises one kind of value — say, a clean, premium experience — but the landing page or app interface feels different, it creates dissonance. The user, usually subconsciously, begins to question whether they can trust what they saw.
A consistent experience, on the other hand, builds credibility. When the tone, visuals, and message flow naturally from ad to product, users feel reassured that they’re in the right place. Things make sense and the value they were promised is real.
2. The Foot-in-the-Door Effect
Research in behavioral psychology shows that once someone takes a small action, they’re more likely to take a larger one later. This is known as the foot-in-the-door effect.
In subscription funnels, that means users who scroll, watch a short video, or interact with an experience before seeing a paywall are more likely to convert. Those micro-interactions build trust and momentum to create a sense of “I’m already in.”
When you send users straight from ad to paywall, you skip those psychological commitments. You ask for a decision before they’ve had time to decide.
Introducing Landing Flows
Direct-to-paywall experiences aren’t disappearing — and they shouldn’t. They serve an important purpose: capturing high-intent users who are ready to act. For these users, removing steps and minimizing friction can drive immediate monetization.
But that approach only works for a small segment of your audience — the ones already convinced. For everyone else, the journey from curiosity to commitment needs more context.
That’s where landing flows come in.
Landing flows are connected, on-brand experiences designed to bridge the gap between marketing and product while engaging both high- and low-propensity users. Instead of sending everyone to the same paywall, a landing flow guides each user through a short, tailored sequence that builds intent before asking for payment.
Unlike a static landing page, a landing flow can:
Segment users based on entry point or ad creative
Highlight value propositions that resonate with each segment
Educate or demonstrate before asking for conversion
The result is a funnel that works harder for every user type.
High-intent users still convert quickly — the path remains fast and frictionless.
Lower-propensity users are nurtured and educated, which increases their likelihood to subscribe.
In combination, these journeys raise total conversion rates and reduce acquisition waste by matching the experience to the user’s readiness. Landing flows don’t replace direct-to-paywall paths, they complement them, capturing more value across the full spectrum of user intent.
Designing a Cohesive Journey
Creating this kind of unified experience requires breaking down the invisible wall between marketing and product. That starts with shared ownership of the user journey.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
Shared Story: Marketing and product define the value narrative together. Every step, from creative concept to paywall language, should reinforce the same promise.
Unified Design Language: The ad, landing flow, and app should feel visually and emotionally connected. Familiar design elements help users feel continuity.
Data Feedback Loops: Marketing shares insights about which messages or audiences perform best. Product shares behavioral data about which flows or paywalls convert. Each team informs the other.
Full-Funnel Metrics: Success isn’t just measured by click-through or paywall conversion. It’s measured by end-to-end subscription performance from impression to purchase.
When teams collaborate this way to bridge the gap between marketing and product, growth stops being a series of disconnected optimizations and starts becoming a single, cohesive system.
Growth Lives in the Middle
The most overlooked part of the subscription funnel is the middle — the journey between ad interaction and paywall. That’s where curiosity turns into conviction.
Bridging marketing and product isn’t just good alignment; it’s good business. It reduces wasted ad spend, raises conversion rates, and creates a brand experience that feels intentional at every touchpoint.
The companies that master this don’t simply acquire more users, they convert more of the right ones who are less likely to churn later on. Companies with cohesive product and marketing alignment understand that growth doesn’t come from louder ads or flashier paywalls. It comes from building a seamless, trustworthy journey that compels a user to follow.
Connected TV (CTV) advertising has exploded as streaming audiences have shifted away from traditional linear TV. But what’s truly transforming the landscape is the rise of interactive CTV ads — those that invite the viewer to do something while watching. For subscription-driven businesses, this innovation opens up a powerful new top-of-funnel channel that connects awareness directly to conversion.
CTV is a natural extension of the subscriber journey — one that, when combined with informed onboarding and paywall experiences, creates a seamless, measurable path from big-screen exposure to paying user.
What Are Interactive CTV Ads?
Interactive CTV ads enable viewers to engage directly with an advertisement using features like QR codes, remote clicks, polls, or shoppable elements. Instead of passively watching a brand message, the viewer can respond immediately — scanning a code, choosing an option, or even making a purchase without leaving the couch.
Unlike traditional broadcast spots, these ads are delivered digitally via streaming devices and Smart TVs (Roku, Fire TV, Google TV, Samsung, LG, and Apple TV). This means advertisers can leverage data targeting, performance measurement, and interactivity — capabilities once limited to web and mobile.
Common Interactive CTV Ad Formats
Below is a quick reference chart of the main interactive formats used in connected TV advertising today:
Format
Description
Use Case for Subscription Apps
QR Code Overlay
A QR code appears on-screen, prompting viewers to scan with their phones. The scan leads to a landing page, mobile web, or app.
Ideal for driving viewers directly into a Nami-built onboarding flow or paywall experience.
Remote-Control Response
Viewers use their remote to interact — e.g., click “Learn More” or “Start Trial.”
Best for platforms with native interactivity (Roku, Fire TV) to capture immediate interest.
Shoppable / Carousel Ads
Displays multiple products or content options to browse via remote.
Could highlight subscription tiers, premium bundles, or exclusive offers.
Gamified / Poll Ads
Simple games, quizzes, or polls embedded in the ad to boost engagement.
Build awareness or preference profiles before serving a targeted trial offer.
Pause / Contextual Overlays
Ads triggered when the viewer pauses content or during contextual moments.
Unique brand awareness plays for publishers or streaming services.
An example of an interactive CTV ad with a QR code, prompting viewers to scan and start a free trial.
Why Interactive CTV Ads Matter for Subscription Businesses
For subscription-based apps — streaming services, digital publishers, fitness platforms — CTV ads solve a long-standing problem: the gap between awareness and action.
Historically, TV advertising has been great for brand exposure but weak for direct conversion. With interactivity, a viewer can instantly move from watching a 30-second CTV ad spot to engaging with your service on their phone.
Consider the flow:
Watch – A user sees your interactive CTV ad during their favorite streaming show.
Scan – They scan a QR code offering “30 days free” or “exclusive early access.”
Engage – The scan takes them to a Nami-built onboarding flow.
Convert – They subscribe via Nami’s optimized paywall.
This creates a frictionless top-of-funnel-to-conversion journey — measurable, trackable, and consistent from the TV screen to the app experience.
Interactive features are expanding rapidly across connected TV platforms, and Roku may be ahead of the curve. Through Roku Ads Manager, advertisers can now create Action Ads — interactive units that let viewers engage with your brand directly from their Roku remote. Whether they’re requesting more information or shopping on the spot, these experiences illustrate how quickly CTV is evolving toward frictionless interactivity, where every viewer interaction can lead to a subscription or conversion.
Some platforms, like Roku and Amazon Fire TV, support interactive ads that let viewers engage directly using their CTV remote control — bridging the gap between brand awareness and instant conversion.
For enterprise subscription brands, this means CTV is no longer just a branding play, it’s a performancemarketingchannelcapable of driving measurable acquisition and retention.
Paramount+ 's interactive CTV ad for Halo ran during the Super Bowl in 2024 and prompted viewers to save the film to their watch list for future viewing.
Nami’s platform already powers the mid and bottom of the funnel — onboarding flows, paywalls, and subscriber analytics. Now, with interactive CTV ads feeding directly into those experiences, brands can own the entire subscriber journey:
CTV Ad → QR Scan or Embedded Interaction→ Nami Onboarding Flow → Nami Paywall → Subscription Experience
This unified approach ensures consistent messaging, streamlined UX, and clear attribution from first impression with an interactive CTV ad to recurring revenue. It’s the bridge between marketing and monetization, and it’s what modern subscription growth demands.
Key Takeaways
CTV ads are the new top-of-funnel frontier for subscriber growth.
Interactivity turns awareness into measurable action.
Nami connects the journey from interactive CTV ad to subscriber conversion.
Ready to connect your next campaign from the big screen to the checkout screen?
Why Adding More People Doesn’t Increase Subscription Growth
At a certain level, adding more team members to product or marketing does not increase velocity so enterprise teams need to shift focus to how monetization experiences get built.
A good analogy is a band that keeps adding members as its stage gets bigger. A coffee shop band that finds itself playing small town venues might add percussion to give their sound more depth. But once the group moves to playing a big city arena, adding more musicians doesn't automatically create better music. Past a certain point, the arrangement becomes crowded. Multiple guitars compete with the keys, drums drown out the verse, and a swelling horn line swallows the melody. The performance doesn’t fall apart because the musicians lack talent. It falters because the focus was on filling the stage rather than creating music the audience wants to hear.
Rather than throwing more headcount at subscription growth issues and overcrowding the stage, product and marketing leads need to look at other ways to grow subscription revenue.
Operational Efficiency as a Strategy for Subscription Growth
For talented enterprise teams where everyone has maxed out their bandwidth, operational efficiency is a strategic lever that directly determines how fast subscription revenue grows.
Every paywall, offer, product, legal copy, experiment variation, and onboarding step requires coordination across multiple categories. Design, product, engineering, brand, marketing, legal, compliance, analytics all contribute. Each function introduces handoffs, reviews, and rebuilds.
Addressing inefficiencies is the key to creating operational harmony that leads to subscription growth.
Risks of Not Addressing Operational Efficiency
Enterprise teams cannot afford to ignore inefficiencies. There are product and marketing leaders who may be comfortable with the status quo or may feel disempowered by limited resources, but choosing to not address inefficiencies creates risks to subscription growth, including alienating your customers before they convert.
Without operational efficiency:
Brand drift creeps into paywalls and onboarding
Legal and compliance language varies or becomes outdated
Pricing and terms can vary unintentionally across markets
Visual patterns diverge across teams and surfaces
The result is broken experiences that leave customers disengaged and disoriented, rather than ready to convert.
What Operational Efficiency for Enterprise Subscription Growth Looks Like
When monetization experiences take weeks or months to update, product and growth teams can run only a small number of experiments or update a minimum number of experiences with each release. There’s stalled momentum, a lack of visibility into what is or isn’t resonating with customers, and teams are unable to respond quickly to shifts in user behavior, pricing strategy, or competitive pressure.
Product and marketing need ways to:
Ship new paywalls, landing funnels, and onboarding experiences with little or no engineering effort
Increase experiment volume without increasing headcount
Reduce back-and-forth across internal and external teams
Shorten time-to-market for insights that improve revenue
Efficient operations increase velocity by helping teams ship more high-quality iterations, and that compounding effect is what drives revenue performance. The core band members are better with their instruments and the fanbase grows.
Turning It Up to 11 With Reusable Assets
Reusable assets can give teams a shared source of truth. The typography, tone, imagery, and compliance language stay aligned across every monetization touchpoint. The workflow becomes predictable, so teams avoid version mismatches and prevent avoidable errors. And user experiences become congruent and refined.
Reusable assets can include:
Page and paywall templates
Brand-approved visual frameworks
Pricing & offers
Graphics
Marketing video URLs
Messaging
CTA’s
Interactive components (e.g. buttons)
Compliance-ready legal copy
When these elements are created as reusable components, teams stop reinventing the wheel with every user experience. They reduce QA overhead. They simplify brand and legal review. Marketing has the bandwidth to play a role in experiments and refinements. Teams spend more time on strategy and testing, and less time on assembly.
Much like your favorite band plays the same song they recorded in the studio on stage, reusable assets bring harmony with familiar experiences on your pages and paywalls, reducing errors, ensuring consistency, and increasing experimentation velocity — all essential elements of subscription growth.
Enterprise subscription growth isn’t driven by a single breakthrough. It’s shaped by a steady cadence of small, high-quality improvements that compound over time. Operational efficiency gives teams the capacity to make evolutionary improvements reliably.
Efficient, enterprise teams can:
Run more experiments with less effort
Implement insights faster
Stay aligned across brand, legal, and compliance
Coordinate harmoniously between product and marketing
Protect quality while accelerating execution
Scale without adding unnecessary headcount
The most successful subscription organizations don’t just scale their teams. They redesign their operations so every team can work smarter and faster. They reduce friction in the build process, standardize what can be standardized, and focus their talents on high-impact decisions.
When the system becomes more efficient, growth becomes more predictable, relieving enterprise teams from operational burden, and creating a clear rhythm that customers can follow.
