• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, April 17, 2025

As regular readers of this column know, I am a big proponent of the industry bringing more clarity to the definition of CTV advertising -- what it is, and what it’s not.

CTV advertising has a real mislabeling problem today, with billions of dollars of CTV ad spend each year going to web video and bot traffic improperly presented, and sold to unsuspecting programmatic buyers as “instream” video. This exploits the hotness of the CTV sector and its budgets, which are growing faster than CTV viewership.

So, it was heartening to get a note from a client heralding the Video Advertising Bureau’s initiative in this area. It just published a must-read, super-informative and level-setting piece on CTV, anchored by a very clear and concise definition of CTV advertising:

“CTV advertising refers to video ads delivered through internet-connected TV devices that enables data-driven personalized ad delivery for more precise targeting, real-time optimization and performance on a large screen. Premium CTV inventory is designed to be bot- and fraud-free, ensuring ads reach real, engaged viewers in brand-safe environments.”

Does it matter that our trade organizations publish reports like this? Yes, it matters a lot. The more confusion that we have about newly emerging products, the more that mystery will be converted into profit by bad actors.

This is a real problem in the world of CTV, since a mislabeled impression can transfer from one supply-side platform to another and finally to a demand-side platform, with the final buyer having very little sense of what they really bought, and all of the folks along the way in the programmatic daisy chain having lots of plausible deniability.

For example, it's not unusual for buyers to find that a significant amount of their “CTV” ad spend was delivered on PCs (probably to thumbnail video players with the sound off).

So, it’s important to make it clear -- by definition -- that CTV ads need to be delivered on TV devices.

Definitional challenges aren’t limited to the CTV world, of course. Murky definitions and the absence of industry leadership leave us with similar problems in audience targeting data, where even gender-based targets are frequently wrong 50% of the time, or retail media attribution, where there is so much overclaiming of sales effect that the gross domestic product of the U.S. would have to be doubled to account for all the sales folk claim they've made.

In that spirit, I thank the VAB, its CEO Sean Cunningham, and his team and board for stepping up here. It’s very much appreciated. Definitions matter. The good folks doing the right things win when definitions are clear -- and when they are followed.