Commentary
Willie Sutton Would Love The CTV Ad Business
- by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, February 6, 2025
When someone asked Willie Sutton why he robbed banks, he was famously quoted as saying, “Because that’s where the money is.” If he were alive today, Willie Sutton would probably work in the programmatic CTV advertising business.
Why would Willie Sutton pick CTV advertising? CTV advertising is where the money is. CTV ad spend in the U.S. is a $30+ billion annual market growing at more than 25% per year, operating on opaque, programmatic trading platforms built for commodity banner ads that neither support media effectiveness nor wholesomeness of transactions. And the platform gatekeepers show little care about policing either who sells on their platforms or what inventory they transact, as long as they, the gatekeepers, get a cut.
What they do support is unknown hordes of intermediaries, each taking their bites of the apple so that, all too often, the original buying and selling principals are left with not much more than over-gnawed cores.
CTV ads are attractive to fraudsters because of the 4-10X spread that CTV ads typically command relative to video ads delivered on the web, in social media, or in mobile apps. As the acronym suggests, CTV ads are supposed to be delivered on “connected TVs,” being viewed on a television or in a television-like viewing experience, dominating the screen, with the sound on by default, and have at least one known human watching them. These definitions conform to requirements by TV and CTV ad measurement and currency companies like Nielsen, ComScore, iSpotTV and VideoAmp.
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Of course, with open programmatic platforms and with sellers allowed to “self-label” their inventory, it’s no surprise that the owners of tens of billions of impressions a month of video ads delivered to places like mobile phone flashlight apps, thumbnail web videos with sound off, and bot farms in Malaysia, routinely label their inferior wares as “CTV.” They pipe these impressions into demand-side platforms (DSPs) desperate for too-cheap-to-believe inventory to help willfully ignorant ad buyers bring down the average rates of their CTV ad buys.
Can this be stopped? Yes. We have to care, and there is an easy place to start: We must demand that DSPs adopt and adhere to the 2023 IAB Tech Lab Standard for video, and not label Outstream ads (accompanying video, sound off, below-fold, etc.) as Instream ads, where the video is dominant and the sound is on.
And we have to name and shame those who won’t do this. We need to ensure that the willful ignorance of too many in our business is no longer defensible.
What do you think? Will all the major DSPs adopt and enforce the industry standard for video ads, and force low-quality video ads out of the CTV ad ecosystem?
Dave, why would they? Aren't many of the ad buys you are describing are for search or similar direct response ads where the buyer only pays for clickthroughs. So the programmatic systems chunk out trillions of "impressuons", including , it seems,many fake ones, but does this really make a difference if the advertiser isn't necessarily paying for the phoney placements?
Which raises a question in my mind. It appears that traditional national TV advertisers are devoting about $14-15 billion to streaming ad time buys. How much of this is placed direct with the sellers and how much is being done 100% programmatically? I beileve that it's mostly direct and that the major sellers ----Tubi, Pluto, Paramount +,Disney+, Peacock, Amazon, Hulu, Roku, Netflix, etc. are probably not bilking the buyers nearly as much---if at all---- as you suggest. Am I wrong about this? Are you mainly talking about advertisers who don't use sophisticated media buying agencies and rely too much on the programmatic method? Or do you mean just about everybody? Just curious.
Ed, the vast, vast majority of these deals are by agencies fir brand advertisers buying the cheapest stuff they can to dollar-average down their overall CTV ad buy CPMs. They are not looking for performance metrics.
Dave, your Willy Sutton example calls to mind the sad case of Arnold Shuster, the mild mannered clothing salesman who helped the cops nab Willy. The mob--- or Willy's pals---weren't happy about that and zapped poor Arnolda few days after he appeared in TV interviews about his role in Sutton's capture.
Great story Ed. For now, retaliation for speaking out on these issues tends to be getting shut out of spend ... hopefully, we won't see retaliation at the Arnold Shuster level!