Resources For TV Channel Developers

With proper quality controls, open bidding connected TV (CTV) advertising can drive performance.

CTV is a fixture of the media mix. Streaming accounts for 47.5% of total US television viewing time and is expected to surpass linear TV in daily time spent this year. Furthermore, CTV now represents 47.5% of total programmatic ad spend, making it the largest programmatic environment.

Yet, buyers are increasingly scrutinizing that investment.

Private marketplaces (PMPs) emerged as the industry’s solution for safe, effective CTV ad buys, offering curated supply, set floor prices and perceived quality assurances. Today, they dominate CTV: 99.2% of programmatic spend transacts through PMPs, according to the Association of National Advertisers (ANA). The share of CTV PMPs run through Basis’ platform is lower than that, but the observable trend is the same – CTV ad buyers now overwhelmingly prefer PMPs.

But what’s wrong with the open market?

Fears of fraud

To be fair, advertisers have valid concerns about media quality. No one wants to buy fraudulent inventory or invalid traffic.

When it comes to CTV, 63% of marketers struggle to determine whether their campaigns reach real viewers, and 57% worry a meaningful portion of spend is lost to fraud.

However, 72% say CTV outperforms campaign baselines. Clearly, there is confidence in the channel.

Although historical analysis of top CTV apps using pre-bid filters and internal supply chain controls can show that the fraud rates and viewability between open market and PMPs are different, it’s not a dramatic divide.

The key variable is not transaction type but protection. Without safeguards, over 25% of CTV impressions may fail minimum quality standards, according to our analysis. But with pre-bid filtering, app-level verification and supply-chain validation, open market performance improves significantly.

The question is what protections are in place.

Misaligned pricing

However, there is a distortion in CTV….