CTV is vulnerable to disruption from signal loss

Many buyers approach CTV as they approach digital advertising: audience first. Who’s watching matters more than what, when, and where they’re watching—which makes sense when most streaming content is served on demand as consumers move seamlessly between platforms. But making sense doesn’t make it easy, and with signal loss looming and programmatic gaining share of the CTV market, the data landscape is shifting.

• CTV is not immune to cookie deprecation. CTVs don’t use cookies, but consumers don’t typically convert on CTVs, and cookies have long been an essential connective tissue enabling attribution. When third-party cookies are deprecated in Chrome later this year, the CTV market will feel the effects, especially when it comes to measurement.
• IP addresses aren’t persistent identifiers. IP addresses are to CTV what cookies are to web browsers. The jury’s still out on whether they’ll remain available for advertising use cases in the long term, but even now, the fidelity of IP addresses is lower than might be expected. Only 3 in 5 US households were initially matched via IP address in an analysis conducted by the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) and Go Addressable. And match rates eroded with time, dwindling to fewer than 1 in 4 within 90 days, which can throw a major wrench in post-campaign reporting.

Read the full report, Ad Measurement Trends H1 2024.