By Kieran Greene, Founder and CEO, Shinka
The way audiences watch television is changing, and advertising is following them. As viewers move between traditional broadcasting, streaming services and connected devices, connected TV (CTV) is becoming an increasingly important part of the global advertising market.
According to dentsu’s May 2026 Global Ad Spend Forecast, CTV advertising is forecast to grow by 11.5% worldwide in 2026, driven in part by premium content, sports rights and the expansion of ad-supported streaming services.
As investment grows and more buyers enter the market, the challenge for publishers goes beyond meeting the demand. It’s about how effectively that demand competes for each advertising opportunity.
While more connections create opportunity, they can also introduce complexity. The auction technology determines how demand comes together, how bids compete, and how much publishers can understand about the outcome. As CTV continues on its growth trajectory, the next stage of development will depend on improving the infrastructure through which that demand competes.
Keeping pace with demand
The growth of streaming is creating new opportunities for advertisers to reach audiences across a wider range of services and viewing environments. For publishers, this means more potential buyers and more ways to monetise their inventory.
But more demand connections do not automatically translate into stronger competition or better results.
The outcome depends on how advertising requests are routed, which partners respond and how their bids are evaluated. When these processes are difficult to assess, publishers can struggle to tell whether an outcome reflects limited buyer interest or how the auction itself is operating.
As CTV becomes more sophisticated, its infrastructure needs to do more than connect buyers and sellers. It needs to coordinate competition effectively, without adding unnecessary complexity or compromising the publisher’s control over its inventory.
Independent mediation provides one way to address this. When an advertising opportunity becomes available, a mediation layer coordinates competition between a publisher’s existing demand partners. Rather than supplying its own demand, it manages how those partners participate in the auction, complementing established advertising infrastructure rather than replacing it.
The aim is not simply to increase the number of bids, but to make existing demand work together more effectively and give publishers a clearer view of the competition.
The auction result is only part of the story
One challenge with programmatic advertising is that the final outcome doesn’t always reveal what publishers need.
A publisher may see which demand partner won an auction without having a clear view of which other partners responded, what they bid or why their bids were unsuccessful. The winning transaction is visible; the competition behind it may not be.
That creates a blind spot. Without visibility into competing bids, publishers have less information to evaluate demand partner performance, investigate unexpected results or identify opportunities to improve monetisation.
As streaming brings more inventory and buying opportunities into the programmatic ecosystem, transparency needs to extend beyond reporting the final transaction. Publishers need to understand which partners participated, how their bids compared and what shaped the outcome.
Greater visibility will not automatically produce higher prices. It does, however, give publishers the information they need to assess auction performance, understand how demand partners are competing and make informed decisions about their commercial relationships.
Access to demand determines who can potentially compete. Visibility into the auction helps publishers understand how that competition actually plays out.
Improving auctions without rebuilding the stack
Better auction infrastructure does not require publishers to start again.
CTV businesses already operate established ad servers, supply-side platforms and commercial relationships. Additional technology should strengthen how these systems work together, rather than force publishers to replace their existing setup.
Independent mediation can sit alongside established infrastructure, coordinating existing demand while providing greater visibility into auction activity. This lets publishers improve how they handle advertising opportunities while keeping the technology and relationships they already rely on.
The principle is straightforward: publishers should be able to improve how demand competes without sacrificing control of their existing ecosystem.
Making growth work harder
The continued shift towards streaming is expanding opportunities for CTV publishers, but growth alone will not determine how much value they capture.
As the market evolves, the focus needs to extend beyond the number of buyers connected to an impression. Publishers need infrastructure that supports effective competition, provides meaningful visibility into auction outcomes and helps them make informed decisions about monetisation.
CTV’s future will be shaped not only by where audiences watch and where advertisers invest, but also by how effectively the industry connects that investment with available inventory.
Greater demand creates the opportunity. Better auctions help publishers make more of it.
