Lost in the streams? How to take back control of your CTV advertising

CTV has errupted, more apps, more inventory, more ways to reach audiences on the biggest screen in the home. But for marketers, that growth has come with a trade-off: less control over who you reach, how often you reach them and how you prove impact across a fragmented streaming landscape.

That was the theme of our session at New Video Frontiers in London, hosted by VideoWeek: if streaming has turned into “chaos”, the winners won’t be the brands that buy more streams, they’ll be the brands that connect them, using identity and measurement to turn impressions into outcomes.

What’s changed in CTV (and why it matters now)

In the UK, streaming is now mainstream: BARB reports 20M households with streaming services, with an average of 2.9 SVoD services per household and 2.5+ hours per day spent watching streaming platforms. At the same time, Comscore data shows a 43% year-on-year increase in hours watched on free, ad-supported streaming, meaning more inventory and (often) lower CPMs, but not automatically better reach, frequency, or results.

The 3 control gaps holding CTV performance back

• Reach and frequency without control: you can buy reach, but it’s harder to control who sees your ads, when and how often, especially across multiple publishers and platforms.
• Identity built on weak signals: over-reliance on IP address signals (which can be unstable and shared) increases duplication, waste and irrelevant repeat exposure.
• Measurement in silos: when every platform measures differently, proving incremental impact (and defending budget) becomes an uphill battle.

The shift: plan around people, not platforms

Real customer journeys aren’t linear. People move fluidly between CTV, online video, display, audio and in-store moments, often in the same day. That’s why CTV works best when it’s connected to an identity layer that helps you recognise the same person (or household) across environments. When you can connect exposure to outcomes, you can sequence messages, cap frequency intelligently, reduce duplication, and optimise spend based on what actually drives action, not just what was delivered.

What to look for in a CTV strategy (and partner) if you want more control

If we took one thing away from New Video Frontiers, it was this: control comes from capabilities, not CPMs. In practice, that means evaluating your CTV approach against five essentials:

• Identity resolution: how reliably can you reach and measure real people/households across environments?
• Audience targeting + inventory: can you activate the audiences that matter on premium supply, with transparency?
• Reach + frequency management: can you control duplication and oversaturation across publishers?
• Creative solutions: can you tailor messaging and sequence creative to move people forward?
• Measurement + insights: can you prove outcomes (and learn) consistently across your mix?

Download the CTV Buyer’s Guide

To make this easier, we’ve turned these key themes into a practical CTV Buyer’s Guide to help you select partners and build a CTV approach that reaches real people, manages frequency and measures what matters.

• The questions to ask to uncover how a platform handles identity, duplication, and transparency
• The five essential capabilities to evaluate (identity, targeting/inventory, frequency, creative, measurement)
• How to treat CTV as part of your full channel mix, not an island
• What “good” measurement looks like so you can prove impact and improve spend decisions

Download the guide

If you attended New Video Frontiers and want to compare notes, or you’re rethinking how CTV fits into your performance mix, we’d love to hear what challenges you’re seeing most often in planning, frequency and measurement. Contact us through the button below.