The data: A pervasive lack of content signals is holding back connected TV (CTV) advertising, per a Wurl analysis. It found that 89% of ad requests in the CTV bidstream were missing a program name, and 45% didn’t have a channel name.

Transparency is even more muddied at the genre level:

• 35% of ad inventory had a genre label that was unrelated to the actual genre of the underlying program.
• 37% of genre-labeled bid requests provided buyers with either a single vague label, multiple vague labels, or little to no genre information at all.
• 3,600 different labels appeared during a two-hour window of prime-time ad requests, many of which were overlapping for the same apparent genre—such as “reality,” “reality shows,” and “genre_reality_tv.”

What it means: CTV advertising has a systemic problem that is impeding ad buyers’ ability to target viewers with relevant placements. It’s a two-pronged issue—content data is outright missing or it’s muddled by nonstandardized labeling.

Without proper channel-, program-, and genre-level data, ad buyers won’t know the context of the placement they’re buying and therefore which ad is most suitable to run.

The labeling issue is more insidious: Ad buyers will have a harder time using established media strategies when the genre labels they're seeing don't seem to go together on a single show or match their perception of the program. This also confuses measurement because placements made for media with overlapping genre labels may or may not be comparable with each other.

Implications for ad buyers: Moving the industry toward better and more consistent content signals needs to be a key priority. If left unaddressed, this issue will curtail CTV’s potential for all involved parties—nearly half of US media planners view content-level transparency as a top barrier to increasing their CTV ad spend, per Gracenote.

While there has been positive movement from some ad tech players around more granular content data, such as at the episode-level, this isn’t enough. A foundational problem can’t be solved through a piecemeal approach, so ad buyers need to bring the rest of the industry to the table to hash out standards that will ultimately benefit them all.

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