With proper quality controls, open bidding connected TV (CTV) advertising can drive performance.
CTV is a fixture of the media mix. Streaming accounts for 47.5% of total US television viewing time and is expected to surpass linear TV in daily time spent this year. Furthermore, CTV now represents 47.5% of total programmatic ad spend, making it the largest programmatic environment.
Yet, buyers are increasingly scrutinizing that investment.
Private marketplaces (PMPs) emerged as the industry’s solution for safe, effective CTV ad buys, offering curated supply, set floor prices and perceived quality assurances. Today, they dominate CTV: 99.2% of programmatic spend transacts through PMPs, according to the Association of National Advertisers (ANA). The share of CTV PMPs run through Basis’ platform is lower than that, but the observable trend is the same – CTV ad buyers now overwhelmingly prefer PMPs.
But what’s wrong with the open market?
Fears of fraud
To be fair, advertisers have valid concerns about media quality. No one wants to buy fraudulent inventory or invalid traffic.
When it comes to CTV, 63% of marketers struggle to determine whether their campaigns reach real viewers, and 57% worry a meaningful portion of spend is lost to fraud.
However, 72% say CTV outperforms campaign baselines. Clearly, there is confidence in the channel.
Although historical analysis of top CTV apps using pre-bid filters and internal supply chain controls can show that the fraud rates and viewability between open market and PMPs are different, it’s not a dramatic divide.
The key variable is not transaction type but protection. Without safeguards, over 25% of CTV impressions may fail minimum quality standards, according to our analysis. But with pre-bid filtering, app-level verification and supply-chain validation, open market performance improves significantly.
The question is what protections are in place.
Misaligned pricing
However, there is a distortion in CTV. Programmatic infrastructure treats vastly different CTV content environments as equivalent. High-quality programming and low-viewership niche channels often enter auctions under similar CPM floors, driven more by simple device classification than actual audience engagement.
An ad opportunity could be a pre-roll before a movie, a placement at a TV show’s end credits, a display banner on static content on a streaming device or something else. In one example I observed, one low-quality placement type quickly secured 25% of a campaign’s budget despite app-ads.txt enforcement, pre-bid filtering and direct targeting. It wasn’t fraudulent, but it may not align with what buyers typically expect from CTV.
When there is legitimate inventory, transparently sold, at prices the viewing context does not justify, buyers will want to mitigate the issue.
Effectiveness of PMPs and curation
PMPs emerged as the answer to a real problem. In the early days of programmatic CTV, supply chain opacity made it nearly impossible to target specific publishers directly. Private deals were the only reliable path to known inventory.
That is no longer the case. Supply-chain transparency improvements mean buyers can now reach premium publishers through the open market with the same directness that once required a negotiated deal.
Meanwhile, the PMP pool has gotten muddier. Many deals with premium labels and premium CPMs are blending that inventory with lower-quality supply to meet volume commitments. The packaging looks clean. The delivery tells a different story: a mix of high-quality inventory alongside supply from unverifiable intermediaries. When spend bleeds into unmeasurable, low-quality inventory, outcomes suffer.
Curation emerged as the performance-oriented evolution of the PMP model and it retained the convenience buyers had grown accustomed to. But in most cases, buyers have even less control and visibility than they did with PMPs. They cannot determine what inventory they are buying. Reporting on where spend flows is limited at best. The opacity that eroded trust in PMPs deepened.
For performance specifically, curation is only defensible when the buyer’s own data is part of the package construction. Without first-party signals, conversion history or attribution logic, a curated package is a supply-side bet with a performance price tag.
Effective CTV buying
Evaluating the value of CTV advertising between open market vs. PMPs vs. curation should be based on what buyers can achieve independently with strong controls in place. Most buyers may not be using everything available to them in their DSP.
In its Q1 benchmark report, the ANA grouped advertisers into performance cohorts and found a striking gap: top-performing advertisers converted 54% of programmatic spend into qualified impressions, compared to just 32.1% for lower performers. Notably, the gap wasn’t driven by transaction costs. Both cohorts spent nearly identical amounts on PMPs versus the open market and paid similar fees to do so.
The real difference was media productivity. Top-cohort advertisers are actively managing waste out of the system, while their lower-performing counterparts are simply absorbing it. This isn’t a pricing problem; it’s a quality management problem.
The more durable fix is a supply intelligence layer that classifies inventory before the bid is placed and enforces sensible defaults without requiring buyers to build their own defense campaign by campaign. That means knowing which apps are premium, which are legitimate (but mid-tier) and which are unverified or excluded entirely – and then letting buyers control where their spend goes across those distinctions.
Curation and PMPs have a role, but they are most defensible when built on top of that kind of systematic classification rather than as a substitute for it. The question the industry consistently avoids is whether structured buying is solving a problem that buyers could not solve with better tooling. In CTV, that question has a more concrete answer now than it did a year ago.
“On TV & Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.
Follow Basis and AdExchanger on LinkedIn.
