By Jess Harris, Senior Sales Manager, Nano Interactive
The report from your latest CTV campaign lands in your inbox. You added streaming to an existing TV plan, and the first page looks great, with a healthy delivery total, strong completion rate and a list of big-name apps your ad appeared on.
But when your client asks which shows the ad ran in, and whether the extra spend reached anyone new, the answers are much harder to find.
Many buyers now expect very little from CTV reporting. But for such an expensive channel, it’s worth asking for more.
In our last two CTV spotlights, we looked at why the show is as important as the person, and how the strongest targeting uses vectorisation to match content by analysing meaning. This time, we’re looking at how to challenge reporting blind spots, check whether the buy followed your brief, and approach newer insights like show mood with caution.
Bring TV show blind spots into view
The streaming service often knows which show your ad ran in, but when you buy programmatically through several supply partners, that detail won’t always travel with the impression. You might find this easier with some walled garden partners where the signal stays on their own platform, but surprisingly not all of them offer show-level reporting as standard
The missing piece of the puzzle is usually the content ID, which links an impression to a specific show and its genre, episodeand rating as well as vital sensitive content information. Yet content IDs only come through on around one in five impressions, and even then details are often missing. Some adtech players are using AI to fill the signal gaps by matching partial records across other sources. Ask which sources supported each match, and which details arrived with the bid rather than being added afterwards.
Next, ask how big your show-level sample is. A good report will show what share of impressions has an identified show, and keep the rest visible as unknown delivery. If most identified shows come from one app, they might not tell you much about the rest of the buy.
Did your CTV buy follow the script?
Back to that list of big-name apps. Think of a streaming service the way you’d think of a news site. You wouldn’t run a home interiors campaign across a paper’s entire sports section just because the masthead was well known.
The same logic applies to shows within an app, so it’s important to compare the content in your report with the genres or personas you chose to target at the planning stage. What’s important here is an audience-first approach, not a content-first approach.
Sometimes that throws up a surprise. A B2B finance campaign might find that one of its strongest personas is alcohol consumers, an audience nobody thought to include. That could point to a useful new angle, or to targeting that has drifted. Either way, a content classification describes the show rather than each viewer, so it isn’t proof of who saw the ad.
Live reporting lets you investigate anything unexpected while there’s still time to adjust. Just remember that a completion rate only shows how many ads played to the end, it doesn’t reveal the intent behind the audience or offer any evidence to optimise future campaigns with. Proving a shift in brand perception needs a brand lift study.
Then check where the ad played. With 93% of viewing happening at home on the main TV set, the big screen is what most CTV buyers are paying for. But CTV is a broad label that can also cover phones, games and even audio, so make sure the device breakdown matches your brief – and that any misrepresented inventory is flagged separately.
Put programme mood theories to the test
Some reporting now describes the tone of the shows a campaign ran in, such as slow-burn romance with a gritty visual style. These descriptions are about the shows, though, and don’t tell you what any viewer felt, so treat them as ideas to test against your objective.
Viewing needs could take this further. A Friday night family quiz offers comfort and a shared moment, putting your ad in front of several people instead of one. Someone watching alone might want some escape.
Which brings us back to the extra spend. Heavy TV viewers are easy to reach through linear and subscription services, but they only make up around half of your audience (according to Thinkbox). AVOD (Advertising-based Video on Demand) can help find the lighter viewers, especially with a custom audience built around what they watch. Proving you reached new people means accounting for overlap with the original TV buy.
So when the next CTV report lands in your inbox, look past the big-name apps. Check how much delivery has an identified show, whether the content and devices match your brief, and treat mood insights as ideas to test. A report that’s honest about its gaps can still tell you what the extra spend added, and where to invest next time.
