• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, January 9, 2025

Massive, open, unregulated and unruly markets are rarely good places to sell premium goods if you care about getting the best pricing, best buyers and certainty of sale. That’s why the best fine art is sold at auction at Sotheby’s and Christie's, not on Craig’s List or eBay.

That’s also why premium connected TV publishers need to reject attempts to put their ad inventory on the same kinds of open, programmatic exchange markets that commoditized, polluted and perverted the banner ad and web video markets. CTV ad inventory is fundamentally different from banners or web video.

CTV ad inventory is, by definition, finite, just like its linear TV ad brethren. CTV ads own the attention of their audiences through sight, sound and motion creative that dominates the available screen, with the sound on by default. They can never be “below the fold” or require viewers to scroll to see them or be just ”thumbnails” on screens full of other content and ads.

It’s no surprise that most CTV publishers initially used the same kinds of open, biddable, programmatic exchanges and platforms that digital publishers had used for years for banners and web video. Early CTV ad budgets were typically sourced from digital ad budgets -- and, to digital-born hammers, all digital ads were nails. Plus, that approach was automated and easy.

But now that the CTV ad market has developed some real maturity, it’s time that premium web publishers adopt and build a new generation of “programmatic” selling infrastructure that better relates to the innate scarcity and value of their inventory, and better protects its premium quality from being mixed up with and sold with much lower-value ad units that are, all too often, improperly or deceivingly labeled to make them look like CTV ads -- or, in many cases, are outright fraud or bots.

What would this more appropriate infrastructure look like? It would probably be more along the lines of an automated insertion order, with robust negotiation and instruction sets. It would be principal-to-principal, and not opened up to the entire market.

Yes, it sounds more like the way large tech walled gardens work -- and how the linear TV ad market has functioned for decades. But why would modern streaming TV programmers adopt such a closed or seemingly archaic structure in this day and age?

I can imagine at least five good reasons that premium CTV publishers should wall their gardens today to save their futures tomorrow. They are:

Keep premium CTV ad inventory in pristine pools only. Why let inferior video inventory drag down pools by being sold together?

Maximize ad control. CTV publishers can’t kill the overfrequency problem in CTV ads if their inventory can be simultaneously accessed, bidded on and controlled by advertisers making simultaneous buys across several different demand-side and sell-side platforms at the same time, which is what they do today.

Save DSP and SSP fees. Why pay third-party platform fees if you can sell your ads without them?

Keep price negotiations private. Why expose your price negotiations to everybody in the market in bid logs that they can scrape and resell?

Protect your viewers’ data. Why have your viewers’ IP addresses and device IDs made public, to be scraped by competitors and platforms to build identity graphs that they then want to resell to the market? It’s no secret how large DSPs build their “proprietary” identity graphs.

It’s time for premium CTV publishers to take control of their future and destiny. Automated and programmatic negotiation with buyers doesn’t have to mean putting your ad inventory on open exchanges and platforms. It made sense to help get the CTV ad market going. It doesn’t make sense anymore.

What do you think? Should premium publishers wall their gardens to save their future?