SAN JUAN, PR – The television industry has effectively rebuilt the fragmented and challenging ecosystem of cable advertising in the streaming world, making it difficult for marketers to measure campaign effectiveness and manage frequency, according to Jonathan Steuer, chief science officer at Simulmedia.
“The TV industry has done a great job of recreating the worst of the cable ad sales ecosystem in the world of streaming and smart TVs,” Steuer said in a conversation with David Kaplan at the Beet Retreat San Juan. “That’s sad because the problem we had then was it was really hard to buy across the different operators, all of whom sold their own way and were disjoint geographies.”
Walled gardens complications
The combination of TV manufacturers, platforms and consolidated publishers has recreated this fragmentation, complicating cross-platform planning and measurement.
“While that makes business sense for each of the folks on the ad sales side of the house, it makes it extremely challenging for buyers to make smart decisions about where their dollars should go because they can’t understand integrated delivery across all the different platforms,” Steuer said.
He pointed out that buyers often can’t use consistent targeting data and identity frameworks across inventory sources, leading to decreased match rates and targeting precision.
“That means the loss of fidelity with each of those matches and each of those targeting data sets is amplified by the fact that you’re also fragmenting it,” he said. “And it creates a terrible experience for consumers to have multiple walled gardens selling to the same marketers because they get massive over frequency of the same ads.”
“Rampant” ad fraud
CTV ad fraud as “pretty rampant right now and growing fast,” Steuer said, attributing this to the medium’s rapid growth trajectory and high CPMs that make it an attractive target for fraudsters.
“It’s a ‘we rob banks because that’s where the money is’ situation,” he quipped, referring to the old Willie Sutton line.
Fraud varieties range from bot farms and fake users to device-level issues like the “TV off” problem where streaming devices deliver ads when the connected television isn’t actually on. Supply chain complexity and tag manipulation also contribute to the issue, with outstream ads sometimes misrepresented as full-screen instream placements.
Currency war?
Having worked for over a decade to develop alternatives to traditional TV measurement, Steuer expressed frustration with how the evolution of measurement has been characterized.
“Couching the evolution of measurement in the context of a war created a lot of uncertainty and created a public perception of the competitive environment that made it seem like there would be a winner and some losers,” he said.
Steuer advocates for multiple measurement approaches rather than a winner-take-all scenario, noting that “different kinds of data sets are good for different things.”
Democratizing TV advertising
On a positive note, Steuer highlighted how CTV is opening television advertising to smaller businesses that previously couldn’t afford to enter the medium.
“CTV is absolutely opening up new opportunities for advertisers who’ve never been able to afford to approach TV before,” he said, mentioning Simulmedia’s SkyBeam business that offers self-service TV buying.
“As much as I have concerns about AI content generation, if you’re a small business, it’s a way for you to create a video ad that you would never have been able to afford at the rates of traditional commercial production,” Steuer added. “We’ve got a bunch of forces colliding to make it easier than ever for small and medium sized businesses to advertise on television.”
You’re watching coverage from Beet Retreat San Juan 2025, presented by Cognitiv, Index Exchange & TransUnion. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
