TV ad measurement is breaking down. Privacy restrictions are mounting, traditional identifiers are disappearing, and the deterministic measurement advertisers once relied on is harder to maintain.
On this episode of Inside the Stack, Cynopsis’ Lynn Leahey speaks with Benjamin Heaton, Senior Director of Product Management at Tatari, about what’s actually wrong with TV measurement and why patchwork ad tech solutions haven’t worked.
Publishers hold impression data linked to sensitive identifiers. Advertisers hold conversion data governed by the same constraints. As privacy rules limit how that data can be shared, measurement models lose accuracy. Optimization suffers, and performance can start to look better—or worse—than it really is.
“When you take all of your conversion data and measure it against one siloed publisher’s impression data, those impressions get full credit for every conversion. Then you go into another clean room, and the next publisher gets full credit again. That’s where you end up double-dipping—and your performance looks too good to be true,” says Heaton
The product manager explains that many clean rooms were designed for digital environments, not for the realities of TV and streaming. This forces brands to measure performance in silos, leading to double-counting.
Tatari’s Vault takes a different approach. Built as privacy-first infrastructure, Vault allows publisher and advertiser data to be anonymized, combined, and measured without exposing PII.
Heaton also highlights server-to-server ingestion as a key unlock for modern TV measurement, helping advertisers capture conversion events that pixels often miss.
