How to Navigate CTV Fragmentation for Advertisers

CTV isn’t just growing...it’s fragmenting. And Amazon DSP is stitching it back together. In 2025, advertisers are chasing premium inventory across a dozen platforms: Fire TV, Roku, Disney, Freevee, Twitch, Hulu, FAST apps, and more. The challenge? Each environment comes with its own access rules, data gaps, and pricing layers. That’s where Amazon DSP is changing the game. Amazon has quietly built a unified bridge to the entire CTV landscape curating deals across both Amazon-owned properties and third-party streaming partners. With Amazon DSP, advertisers can: Tap into exclusive inventory on Fire TV, Twitch, and Freevee Access negotiated PMPs with major publishers like Disney and Roku Layer in first-party shopping and streaming data to target with precision Measure outcomes beyond impressions to product views, cart activity, and purchases Activate across CTV, display, audio, and more from a single platform While other DSPs piece together fragmented supply, Amazon DSP offers scale, simplicity, and strategy with the added advantage of commerce-driven results. The CTV ecosystem isn’t getting any smaller. But with the right platform, navigating it doesn’t have to be complex. Amazon DSP is no longer just an ad tool. It’s becoming the most connected command center in streaming. #amazondsp #programmaticads #streamingtv

Let's talk about CTV, because there's a good chance you're buying it the wrong way. 🤔 The article below from AdExchanger hits on something crucial: treating Connected TV like a one-to-one mobile ad, when it's clearly a household screen, is leading to a ton of wasted spend and a lack of precision. You're targeting "Female 25-54" on Disney+, but you're hitting her kid with a car insurance ad. 📰 https://bit.ly/4m3K8df 📰 Reliance on third-party segments and excessive use of middlemen is driving up CPMs, shrinking scale, and yielding geo patterns that all appear the same (think over-indexing on major cities like LA and New York). This means spending time and money chasing impressions, rather than achieving actual impact in the audience segments you’re trying to reach. Advertisers need to start thinking about aggregating and consolidating our CTV investment through a single buying door. There’s serious muscle to unlock here: 💰 Cost Efficiencies: Cut out the unnecessary ad tech layers and middlemen. Think lower CPMs, less fraud. 📊 Next-Level Reach & Frequency Management: Get a holistic view and better control over who you're reaching (and how often) across all those household eyeballs, not just individual profiles. 📦 Access to Premium Inventory: A direct, consolidated approach builds leverage, giving you stronger pricing and priority access to the biggest, most engaged audiences on platforms where content actually lives. Important note: The Trade Desk doesn't provide access to YouTube, so you should be taking a look at Google Marketing Platform if you plan to include the world's largest streaming platform in your buy💡. The article advocates for linear, context-driven, geography-informed, and CTV planning tailored to households. That aligns perfectly with the power of a consolidated buying strategy. Are you still scattering your CTV buys, or are you looking to consolidate for stronger ROI? Let's discuss! 👇 #CTV #Advertising #DigitalMarketing #AdTech #MediaBuying #YouTube #Omnichannel #Programmatic

This morning, AdExchanger published an insightful piece highlighting a critical challenge in the Connected TV space—premium publishers increasingly bundling their streaming inventory in opaque ways that limit advertiser visibility. Rather than providing app and show-level transparency within the bid stream—where it can be actioned—advertisers are often left with fragmented, one-off reports that offer little opportunity for strategic optimization. By adopting these black-box models, publishers are inadvertently undermining their own value. Their most significant asset—the premium content they produce—is being devalued when advertisers cannot effectively align their investments with the programming that resonates most with their audiences. The reality is that advertisers are willing to pay higher CPMs for impressions with full content transparency because it allows them to make more informed decisions and, ultimately, drive better performance. This principle has long been the foundation of linear TV, where show-level buying had created a thriving, demand-driven ecosystem rooted in transparency and accountability. At Rain the Growth Agency, we’ve seen firsthand how transparency fuels success in CTV. By leveraging show & channel level data and aligning our digital buying strategies with the programming that has proven effective in our clients’ linear campaigns, we’re driving significant performance gains. And are willing to pay higher cpms than we otherwise might. We’re working with partners like Spectrum Reach, Samsung Ads, fuboTV Network & DIRECTV which provide the transparency needed at the show & network level to make data-driven investment decisions that maximize ROI through our custom algorithms & buying strategies. A notable example is Alexander Groysman at Spectrum Reach, who has led the charge in developing one of the most comprehensive and well-structured content metadata sets in the industry. His work has set a new standard for transparency, enabling advertisers to better understand performance at a granular level and optimize their spend accordingly. As streaming networks attempt to replicate the playbook of tech companies, they risk overlooking a crucial difference: they are not technology companies. They lack the same product offerings, incentives, and advertiser appeal that drive digital platforms’ success. In chasing the tech model, they may ultimately lose what has always differentiated them—high-quality, trusted content that brands are eager to invest in when they can do so with confidence and clarity. Publishers who prioritize transparency stand to gain the most, while those who don't risk leaving money on the table and eroding advertiser trust. It’s time to rethink the approach before it’s too late. Link to article in comments.

There’s a right way and a less optimal way to run programmatic CTV, and unfortunately, the less optimal way often becomes the industry norm. This mirrors issues in other programmatic channels where incorrect buying practices prevail. Many buyers load third-party segments and blast ads across all CTV content, neglecting inventory they serve on and platform alignment. Their focus is simply chasing cross-device attribution while driving CPMs as low as possible. The right approach is different. Identify the publishers that deliver the best performance for your campaign, and allocate separate budgets for each. Otherwise, one could cannibalize the other in terms of spend. Tailor your audience solution(s) to reach your target effectively within those specific publishers—random run-of-publisher strategies don’t work as well. I know this because I’ve consulted on countless programmatic setups in CTV. After analyzing hundreds of setups, I can confidently say that optimizing for performance the right way consistently outperforms the wrong approach. Don’t settle for platform metrics or be fooled by low CPMs. If you are, you’re just burning budget. And yes, I know PG deals exist in CTV. PGs deals in my opinion are more tentpole buys than an actual programmatic approach.

Running LinkedIn CTV Ads? Start Here If you're testing LinkedIn's Connected TV ad placements, there’s one thing you should do first. In your ad account, navigate to the left-hand side under “Plan” and click on “Brand Safety.” From there, download the publisher list for Connected TV. This list shows you all the CTV publishers that LinkedIn allows by default. It includes names like MTV, The Wu-Tang Collection for TV, and Indian Recipes by iFood. Some of these placements might fit your brand, others might feel completely off. This is a different context than the LinkedIn feed, so the mindset of your audience is different too. Review the list carefully. Not all of it will make sense for your campaign goals. Once you’ve audited it, create your own allowlist or block list to control where your ads run. LinkedIn makes this easy. The upload just requires a single-column list of the publisher URLs you want to exclude. Comb through the original list and remove any that don’t align with your message or audience. How we’re using CTV right now: We’re using CTV primarily for retargeting. The reason is that people are not usually in buying mode when watching Connected TV. It’s not a professional setting like LinkedIn, but we still want to stay top of mind. That’s where CTV plays a unique role. Unless you include something like a QR code, there’s not a direct conversion point. So we treat these impressions as a way to reinforce awareness and maintain visibility with our prospects across channels. The ads are mostly unskippable, so we’re seeing very high completion rates, often 99 percent, but we know those numbers alone don’t tell the full story. The real impact comes from staying present with the right audience at the right time, especially when you’ve carefully controlled your publisher list to ensure quality placement. CTV is not about clicks. It is about reinforcing your message and brand identity. When done right, it keeps you top of mind even when your audience isn't actively searching for a solution.

The CTV advertising gold rush has everyone fooled. Everyone's talking about how Connected TV will save traditional advertising and finally put a dent in digital dominance. want to know how to win the CTV advertising battle ? (even if you're not the biggest player). After watching this industry shake-up unfold, here's the exact framework that separates winners from the noise. I call it 'REACH.' R - Recognize the Real Opportunity Stop chasing the same SMB clients everyone else wants. The 44% of users browsing across platforms for 10+ minutes are your goldmine. E - Embrace Multi-Platform Strategy Single-platform thinking is dead. Roku and Magna data proves brands get 18% more attention with cross-platform exposure. A - Analyze Streaming Behavior People add 4 new services and quit 4 services on average. Plan for this churn-and-return pattern. C - Capitalize on Breadth and Scale With identical viewability rates across free and paid streaming (around 75%), your advantage isn't in the platform type but in strategic reach. H - Harness the Triangulation Effect The magic happens when you connect audiences across multiple touchpoints ↳ streaming services, FAST channels, and traditional TV. With just this strategic shift, you can outperform platforms with bigger budgets and flashier features. So try REACH for the next quarter and watch what happens. The future belongs to those who think beyond single platforms. Ready to stop fighting in the crowded space and start winning the real game? ✍️ What's your biggest CTV advertising challenge right now? ♻️ Share this to help others navigate the CTV landscape. 💚 Follow me for more strategic media insights.

Campaign A or Campaign B? Which would you rather invest your CTV budget in? Spoiler alert, Campaign A is a recent Dial-Up campaign. Earlier this year I shared an image similar to the one below. Highlighting just how bad CTV delivery can be if you are not focused on supply path optimization. That post touched a nerve, took off, and had a life of its own. The reaction to that post reinforced that advertisers need better solutions for CTV. That's why I decided to launch Dial-Up Media with August Tesfasilase. And with a tagline like “CTV the Right Way,” it’s safe to say that SPO is at the core of everything we do. For the last few months, I have been auditing a ton of CTV campaigns and I can confidently report that Campaign B is not an outlier. This specific campaign ended up running on 516 individual apps. Including gems like Woof World and Meow World. But what is most striking is what's not there. Where is Hulu, Paramount, Peacock, Max etc? Campaign A is a Dial-Up campaign where we delivered on 2 key components for effective SPO on CTV. 1) No Open Market Inventory - 100% of all spend was against 1st party PMPs that we secured directly with the publisher. No long tail, no garbage. 2) Delivery Optimization - Having PMPs in place won’t prevent you from massively over-delivering in a few places. We also take the extra step and time to manage bid optimizations and shape delivery to meet campaign objectives. Unfortunately, most campaigns look like Campaign B. They let it rip and hope for the best. Some campaigns check the box on #1 and take the time to curate inventory. But it’s easy to mess that up and end up too far down the long tail. Very few campaigns benefit from the extra steps taken in #2. To manage delivery and counterbalance the DSP’s quest to chase high-volume low-cost inventory. Let’s not forget, the DSP’s primary KPI is to clear daily budgets… Yes, Campaign A came in a bit higher on CPM, but not by much. 😀 DM me if you want to learn more. Happy to chat about the details. Dial-Up Media - CTV The Right Way #CTV, #Streaming

Increased fragmentation across the streaming sphere has somewhat impacted our ability to deterministically manage frequency. Given that, It is very important to understand the core functions of both buy-side & sell-side ad servers, as they both deploy rule based mechanisms to ensure advertisers are reaching HH's effectively while maximizing the viewing audience experience. Its great to see potential industry standard creative ad Ids' coming in to help build better guardrails & control for ad repetition. As you can imagine, operationalizing a CTV strategy is complex and requires the proper stewardship. This means a highly skilled and sophisticated set of traders & strategist who fully understands both the buy side & sell side marketplace. ADVERTISERS: If your CTV channel continually underperforms on upper funnel metrics (brand lift, purchase consideration, etc) directly attributable results, MMM (ROI) or MTA, then you may want to start asking your agency to confirm existing f-caps implemented at the DSP level. Additionally, your agency should be looking to provide quarterly or half year Optimal frequency analysis to ensure they are fine tuning f-caps based on correlation to either sales, leads, brand lift, search lift, etc. You'd be surprised...your agency may have an "unlimited campaign frequency" in order prioritize delivery against your approved budget vs focusing on performance. Kenneth Rona, Ph.D. states ( or maybe Lou Paskalis) 🙂 "Don't expect what you don't inspect" ...Request Frequency reporting and insights from your agency. Its an important metric!