CTV is ready to scale. What the market needs is trust.
Article 14 of 26 in series: The Great Reach Reset
Connected TV is attracting audiences and advertising investment, but further growth depends on trust. Advertisers need transparent and comparable CTV measurement that shows unique reach, frequency and incremental contribution across platforms before they can confidently scale investment.
Over the past few years, I’ve had many conversations with advertisers, agencies, media owners, and technology partners about the future of connected TV. The direction of travel is clear. Audiences have already moved to streaming. And advertising budgets have followed.
What will it take for CTV to truly scale?
A recent study by EMARKETER and Olyzon captured something that resonates strongly with what I hear across the industry. Nearly 80% of marketers say they would significantly increase their CTV budgets if key barriers to transparency, measurement, and frequency control were addressed.
To me, the white paper highlights an important point.
CTV does not primarily have a demand problem. It has a trust challenge.
Advertisers clearly want to invest more in streaming environments where audiences increasingly spend their time. But when billions in advertising budgets are at stake, enthusiasm alone is not enough. Marketers need confidence in how campaigns are delivered, how audiences are counted, and how results are measured.
The study highlights several areas where that confidence is still developing.
Many marketers struggle to demonstrate incremental return on ad spend from CTV. Others lack confidence that their impressions reach unique audiences across platforms. And as the ecosystem has expanded, the operational complexity of managing campaigns across DSPs, walled gardens, and direct publisher deals has increased significantly.
None of these challenges is surprising. They are the natural growing pains of a rapidly evolving market.
But they all point to the same underlying issue: trust.
When advertisers cannot clearly see where ads ran, who they reached, and what incremental impact they generated, it becomes difficult to move large budgets with confidence. The opportunity for CTV is enormous, but unlocking that opportunity requires a shared foundation of transparency and accountability.
Why CTV measurement is essential for building trust
If trust is the biggest challenge in the CTV ecosystem, measurement is one of the most important tools we have to rebuild that trust. Measurement creates a shared understanding of reach, frequency, and impact across platforms. It provides a common language that allows advertisers, agencies, and media owners to evaluate performance using the same set of facts.
In many ways, the industry does not suffer from a lack of innovation. What it sometimes lacks is a shared truth.
That is particularly important as CTV becomes part of a broader media ecosystem. Advertisers no longer think about channels in isolation. They want to understand how streaming works alongside linear TV, online video, and other media investments. They want deduplicated reach across platforms and clarity about the incremental value each channel provides.
In other words, they want a cross-media perspective. When that perspective exists, CTV stops being a fragmented environment and becomes part of a unified strategy. Advertisers gain the confidence to scale their investments because they can clearly see how streaming contributes to their overall campaign performance.
The encouraging part is that the industry is moving in this direction. Interest in cross-platform reach modelling, marketing mix modelling, and AI-driven planning is growing quickly. These developments point toward a future in which media investments are based on more holistic, interoperable measurement frameworks.
From where I sit, CTV is approaching an important inflection point. The audiences are already there. The advertisers’ interest is clearly there. And the technology to activate campaigns has evolved rapidly.
The next phase of growth will depend on something more fundamental: trust. And trusted measurement is one of the most powerful ways the industry can build it.
This article is 14 of 26 in our series: The Great Reach Reset
About this article series
In a fragmented media landscape, reach is no longer a simple KPI - it is a strategic growth lever. In this article series, AudienceProject explores why advertisers are not failing at reach, but at measuring it properly, and why incremental, deduplicated cross-media reach has become essential to driving penetration, controlling frequency, and unlocking sustainable growth.
You might also like:
Why better media planning isn’t about finding the winning channel
What Coca-Cola can teach us about brand growth today
Why marketing measurement needs to catch up with media abundance
Why advertising measurement needs to move beyond Total TV
How brands grow in the era of AI
How AI is changing marketing and why measurement needs a new role
Signup for the AudienceProject newsletter
Industry relevant articles, truth-revealing studies, exiting new product launches and random thoughts from brilliant people - directly in your inbox. Free of charge and no spam guaranteed!