The news: As CTV ad spending accelerates, buyers are shifting focus from convenience to performance—zooming in on ad quality, viewer experience, and actionable signals that drive measurable impact.

• Nearly half of global agencies and demand-side platforms (47%) prioritize ad quality and a positive user experience, per a new BCG and Google report.
• Easy integration, responsive customer support, and platforms’ ease of use rank far lower.

And buyers know what they’re looking for:

• The top signals buyers want are content genre and theme (65%), ad exposure history (62%), and real-time event signals (56%).
• Data on context and content identity and technical identity signals are equally important, reflecting the dual challenge between maintaining relevance and ensuring measurement accuracy.

The opportunity: 82% of CTV ad buyers are likely to increase their programmatic live CTV investment in the next 12 months. However, CTV publishers only sell about 35% of live event CTV inventory programmatically.

That unevenness between advertiser demand and publisher supply is both a challenge and an opening—the gap gives marketers a chance to test partnerships, connect data, and find new ways to reach live CTV viewers.

The problem: A lack of metadata on content type and platforms’ strengths and weaknesses could limit advertisers’ ability to scale targeting and measure performance in live CTV environments: Only 11% of CTV advertisers target at the channel level, and just 9.2% target at program level, per Gracenote.

What marketers should do: As CTV viewership accelerates, the next wave of revenue growth will depend on closing data and signal gaps between content owners, distributors, and advertisers.

Align media strategy with relevant content through standardized metadata and push for consistent data-sharing and collaboration with publishers to turn CTV from an experimental channel into a predictable growth engine.