Transparency remains a major sticking point in CTV, with buyers regularly failing to receive information on the content their ads ran against. But rather than being a technical challenge, Mateusz Jędrocha, Chief Product Officer at Adlook, argues that this opacity is the result of a commercial choice by publishers, and outlines the types of signals the buy-side should demand from CTV platforms.
Connected TV is the channel marketers have been crying out for. The combination of premium content shown on the biggest screen in the house, with lean-back attention and controlled ad loads, has attracted serious investment from brands eager to connect with these highly engaged audiences. US CTV ad revenue reached around $26.6 billion in 2025, and the trajectory shows no signs of softening.
In every respect, CTV should be the most accountable video environment a brand can buy. But it isn’t. And that’s because most post-buy reports tell buyers almost nothing about where their money actually went. The impressions were delivered, completion rates looked healthy, and frequency caps were respected. But which shows did the ads run against? Which genres? Was a luxury car spot served inside a prestige drama, or alongside a low-budget filler reel padding out a free ad-supported channel?
For a large chunk of CTV inventory, this information either isn’t available at all, or sits behind a premium reporting tier. As an example, Gracenote’s most recent contextual analysis of sports-adjacent CTV found that just 14.3 percent of inventory carried league information and 17.9 percent carried team information. So, any ad that relies on this context to resonate is likely to fall flat. For a channel sold on the quality of its content, this is a massive blind spot in the data.
The transparency gap is a commercial choice
This isn’t a technical problem. Signals on genre, programme title, episode metadata, content rating, and viewing context, all exist upstream. Most of these signals trickle at least part of the way down the supply chain before being stripped out or generalised.
If all buyers want more signals, what is the mechanism allowing sellers to still withhold them? The answer lies in basic supply and demand. Premium CTV inventory is genuinely scarce, while demand density remains exceptionally high. When publishers do not need to compete fiercely to fill their ad slots, they have little commercial incentive to offer more than the absolute minimum required to close a deal. In a seller’s market, signal richness is viewed as a concession – and concessions are rarely made from a position of strength.
This opacity is also driven by monetisation logic on the publisher-side. It is a rational strategy for revenue protection. If genre and specific title signals flowed freely through the programmatic bidstream, media buying would instantly concentrate on a small number of marquee titles and prestige franchises. While that would drive premium yields for a few winning shows, it would simultaneously destabilise yield across the rest of a publisher’s portfolio, leaving perfectly serviceable but unglamorous long-tail inventory unsold. Keeping the picture slightly blurry prevents cherry-picking and protects total portfolio revenue.
We must also acknowledge that many major CTV publishers evolved from subscription and linear TV business models rather than programmatic advertising. As ad-supported tiers scale, infrastructure, trading norms and commercial relationships are still catching up. Much CTV inventory continues to be sold through legacy transaction models that predate modern programmatic buying entirely.
Buyers are not passive or oblivious to this gap; most fully understand the compromises they are making. However, agency teams are under immense internal and external pressure to commit and scale budgets. When dealing with a handful of powerful sellers who control the exact premium cultural content brands need, the switching costs of pushing back hard are real. Demanding data transparency at the risk of losing access to premium inventory is a gamble few planners are willing to take. Consequently, the market has accepted a compromise, but it is one that creates several inefficiencies for the demand-side.
Quantitative signals are necessary
The standard CTV scorecard consisting of impressions, completion rate, viewability, and reach, is fine as a hygiene check. Completion rates near the high nineties are table stakes for in-stream video on a connected TV; anything below that is a sign of fraud or technical failure rather than a measure of quality. But what they don’t tell you is whether the ad ran somewhere worth running.
For marketers who want to see that a $40 CPM is actually worthwhile, qualitative signals are required. In terms of content adjacency, IAS found that consumers were four times more likely to recall a brand unaided when an ad appeared in a contextually relevant environment than when it didn’t. PA Consulting’s research for Newsworks put the lift from premium environments at 40 percent on purchase intent and 85 percent on brand trust. These numbers represent the difference between a campaign that delivers and one that doesn’t. On a campaign report that only offers viewable impressions, they’re invisible.
Attention measurement has advanced to the point where it can sit alongside these signals at scale, rather than living in panel-based studies that get cited at conferences but ignored by planners. Combined with content-level transparency, attention data turns CTV into a channel buyers can actually get a clear picture of.
What CMOs should demand of CTV platforms
To make progress on this issue, the buy-side must make bigger demands and keep making them until they get what they want. For a start, programme-level reporting should come as standard, not as a premium feature. Genre and show title are data points that already exist; passing them through to the buyer (or not) is a policy decision, not an engineering project.
Next, viewing context covering the device, app, time of day, and co-viewing signals where available, should be included by default in post-buy logs. Finally, attention measurement must be integrated into planning rather than retrofitted into measurement reports post-campaign.
Sellers will resist, and this reluctance may very well be attributed to privacy concerns, contractual constraints, or some kind of technical limitation. And while some of those objections may be genuine, most will be commercial. The buy-side does have leverage, but utilising it requires gradual, sustained negotiation rather than expecting a sudden market shift. The growth of CTV depends on continued budget migration from linear, and that migration depends on advertisers being able to defend the spend internally. Vague reports that give few verifiable details on what happened and where will not survive a post-campaign review. Buyers need to make sure the sell-side can’t ignore this fact.
Audiences are watching more CTV than ever before. But data on whether the ads inside that video are being seen in environments worth being seen in is mostly being kept upstream of the people paying for it.
CTV doesn’t have a measurement problem; it has a disclosure problem. The players that fix it first will be the ones buyers trust with the next wave of TV budget.
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