At the recent Brand Safety Summit, David Nyurenberg, SVP of Digital at InterMedia Advertising, joined industry leaders Mario Diez (Peer39), Peter Parisi (KINESSO), and Mollie Jane Garza (MJGrowth Consulting) to explore one of streaming’s toughest challenges: “The Blind Spots When Measuring Streaming Video in Programmatic Environments.”
The group discussed the advertising and streaming ecosystems and tackled one of the industry’s most complex challenges: maintaining brand safety in CTV. But for Nyurenberg, the biggest issue behind brand safety is the lack of transparency that makes true brand safety impossible.
Following up the panel, we had a conversation to unpack his takeaways from the summit, the industry’s misplaced priorities, and why he believes “brilliant basics” matter more than flashy new features in CTV.
David Nyurenberg: What struck me—and honestly, frustrated me—is that the industry keeps talking about brand safety in CTV as if we can actually measure it. We can’t. You can’t have brand safety without knowing what you’re buying or where your ads are running. I think that's where the conversation needs to start.
I sit in these publisher pitches and they all talk about the content. They push the quality of the content and high viewership. But these sales strategies are completely disconnected from the actual inventory strategies because we're just sold blind non-transparent inventory bundles where you don't really know what you're getting.
Right now, CTV is less transparent than YouTube. Think about that. When Google is the bar and you’re below it, that does not reflect well on you. If a brand safety partner doesn’t even know the show or network where the ad appears, how can they evaluate whether it’s safe? The whole conversation becomes a red herring.
We’re talking about safety before we’ve even built the necessary foundation of transparency.
At its simplest, it means we’re forced to trust the publisher or the tech partner selling the inventory. Most CTV brand safety strategies revolve around “do not air” lists where buyers specify where they don’t want to appear. But there’s no way to validate whether a publisher actually honored that list.
That’s not a sustainable model. In digital, we saw how opacity led to waste and mistrust. If we bring those bad habits into CTV, we will create a race to the bottom similar to what happened in display and online video.
Exactly. Publisher sales teams actually want transparency. They want feedback and performance data so they can go back to their yield teams and make the case for improvements.
A lot of our clients today are performance marketers and they need to know what’s working so they can optimize. Without that visibility, they’re flying blind.
The linear TV market has always functioned on buying at the show or network level. It has always been transparent and was a healthy market built on supply and demand. CTV in the way it is currently sold is largely commoditized. But again, that doesn't help anybody because different types of content take different amounts of money to produce. So in reality, those impressions are not actually all worth the same to the publisher themselves.
That’s not how linear TV works. There was a healthy supply-and-demand function that reflected production costs and audience value. If we don’t fix transparency in CTV, we’ll destroy that balance too.
Program-level data is the cornerstone. You can’t talk about brand safety, optimization, or even fair pricing without it.
Take a simple example: let’s say an ad pauses mid-program. Without knowing what show it’s in, how do you prevent that paused frame from appearing next to something inappropriate?
Some vendors love to tout “scene-level targeting” or “AI-driven contextual insights.” But that’s like putting a turbo engine in a car without an odometer. Until we have reliable show-level transparency, the rest is just noise.
Honestly, I’d rather have show-level data enriched with basic ancillary info, IMDb ratings, viewership stats, even content metadata, than all the scene-level bells and whistles. That’s what lets advertisers make informed, brand-safe decisions.
Yes, and they deserve credit. Amazon, for example, makes real-time show-level reporting available for Prime Video ads. That’s a huge step in the right direction.
Olyzon is worth mentioning. They’re a CTV platform whose whole value prop is built around enabling marketers to activate against content level data.
Iris.TV deserves a shout out as growing publisher adoption of their ID should unlock a lot of different possibilities around content targeting and measurement.
Spectrum is another. They’re one of the very few publishers that offer 100% transparent show-level data. We ran a campaign with them recently where we applied a simple linear TV tactic: we built an inclusion list of top-performing linear shows and bought those shows in CTV.
Guess what? It delivered the top performance metrics of any tactic on the buy. That’s what I mean by “brilliant basics.” You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, you just need to know what’s actually rolling.
Stop chasing shiny objects. Start demanding transparency.
We need to build CTV on solid ground, show-level data, fair pricing, and trust between buyers and sellers. Once that’s in place, brand safety will follow naturally. Until then, we’re just pretending.