July 16, 2026  |  SIGN UP

PRESENTED BY

Michael Bürgi
SENIOR EDITOR, MEDIA BUYING AND PLANNING

For all the hype and interest around connected TV, you'd think advertisers, agencies and sellers would have figured out how to optimize its efficiency and effectiveness. And yet, almost a decade later, that ad marketplace remains messy, oversold, complicated and parts of it fraudulent — despite, or possibly because, it's where most viewership seems headed these days.

So far, everyone is working to identify the problems, but the efforts to solve them seem few and far between. Granted, it's not an easy problem to solve. For one there's so much inventory. For another, the CTV players themselves control only so much of it — between DSPs, SSPs, self-serve vendors and other ad-tech participants, the problem is largely one of control. 

Whether and when clarity and control get re-established is a big question few can answer. Meantime, viewership will continue to migrate toward the streamers and CTV providers, which will only attract more advertisers, and create more issues.  

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