CTV is increasingly competing for budgets that once belonged to linear television. But while buying has moved quickly, reporting and transparency haven’t kept pace. For many buyers, that mismatch has become the main constraint on scaling investment.
According to Peer39’s data, only 40% of CTV bid requests contain usable program-level content signals. The other 60% have no show title, genre classification, or content rating. At the same time, more than 25% of open exchange CTV bid requests lack meaningful content signals entirely.
This is the standard operating environment for most programmatic CTV buys. And it’s a problem, because CTV isn't matching linear's ability to optimize using program, genre, network, and daypart information.
What linear buyers optimized against
Linear television was never perfectly precise, but it was transparent. Buyers understood the difference between a primetime drama and a late-night rerun because program, genre, network, and daypart were known to all buyers.
Thanks to these signals, they were able to plan, evaluate, and adjust accordingly. This visibility created accountability; when a campaign underperformed, buyers could trace results back to programming or scheduling decisions. When it worked, they knew where to invest more.
This feedback loop made spend explainable and defensible, which is a large part of why linear budgets proved so durable over time.
What programmatic CTV optimizes against
In programmatic CTV, those familiar levers are often replaced. Programs and genres give way to app names. Networks and schedules are abstracted into Deal IDs, CPMs, and completion rates. Content-level context is reduced to transaction-level metadata.
While these familiar digital video metrics are easy to transact against, they don’t reliably describe the viewing experience. For example, an app name doesn’t indicate whether an ad ran against scripted programming or user-generated content. A Deal ID can group very different content under a single label. Completion rates remain consistently high across both premium programming and low-value environments.
CTV gets television budgets while not even matching the reporting of the early days of digital display.
Why completion rates and CPMs fall short as TV metrics
Completion rate is the default performance signal in CTV. The metric’s assumption is straightforward: if viewers watched the entire ad, the placement must be working.
But our data tells a different story.
Across genres, completion clusters tightly between 95%–100%. Drama averages 98.39%. Comedy reaches 98.74%. Live sports completes at nearly the same rate as background or ambient programming that routinely post 100% completion with minimal active viewing. Fake CTV environments, including mobile games and radio apps masquerading as programming, often clear 99–100%.
Completion confirms delivery without differentiating between intentional viewing and passive playback.
CPM tells a similarly incomplete story. Price reflects supply dynamics and deal structure rather than content quality. Yet without content-level signals, CPM is nothing more than a cost indicator. Together, completion and CPM can make campaigns look efficient while leaving buyers unable to know what actually ran.
What linear-grade transparency in CTV looks like
Despite this, improving transparency doesn’t mean reverting to legacy buying models. It requires making the same signals available — program, genre, and screen type — pre-bid and post-buy.
When those signals are present, the picture changes.
Peer39’s authenticated, program-level CTV data reveals an ecosystem of genres that looks a lot like traditional cable: Drama leads at 25%, followed by News & Information at 18%, Comedy at 17%, Reality TV at 12%, and Action at 11%. Programming views on TV screens exceed 90% for content types like Drama, Sports, and Documentaries. This means buyers are getting living room ads, running against professional content, on actual television screens.
Quality inventory is out there. What’s been missing is the visibility required to consistently identify and evaluate it.
How buyers should operate while standards catch up
In the absence of standardized, content-level transparency for CTV, buyers can still tighten how they evaluate spend in four ways:
1. Don’t treat app-level reporting as proof of quality. A single app can include everything from premium programming to filler. When reporting stops at the app level, it shows a label, not the content, and limits what can be verified.
2. Prioritize authenticated environments. Using program-level signals reduces Fake CTV accounts exposure from 25.2% to 2.21% without sacrificing scale and makes performance easier to explain.
3. Expect television-grade visibility. Buyers should be able to see the program, genre, daypart, and screen type. Without those signals, CTV reporting lacks the detail that long supported linear investment.
4. Use completion as a delivery check. Completion confirms ads ran, but not whether the placement justified the spend.
As CTV continues to grow, restoring this kind of visibility will give media buyers a clearer basis for evaluating performance and determining where additional investment makes sense.
Want to learn more about how linear-grade transparency unlocks confident, scalable investment in programmatic CTV performance?