CTV’s Growing Complexity Makes A Clear View Of The Customer Essential To Better Buying

CTV buyers can reach the same viewer through a growing number of routes, from direct deals and private marketplaces to open exchanges and resellers. Every added route brings another fee and another definition of who that viewer is, so CTV gets harder to price and harder to target as the supply chain expands. Buyers get the most from the channel when they start with their client's business goals, then choose the price, audience data and creative that will meet those goals across every part of the media plan.

Gautham Ram Pingali is Chief Media Officer at WPP Media Canada, the Canadian arm of WPP's media investment business. Before stepping into the role, he led performance and innovation at GroupM and headed marketing science and analytics at Mindshare. That background in data shapes how he plans for an audience that no longer sits in one place.

"The same audience shows up differently in different places. Planning for that is more challenging than it's ever been," says Pingali. A decade ago, reaching a consumer meant buying time on a TV channel or space in a newspaper. Now a single placement can sit behind several layers of technology, and buyers have to decide which of those layers are worth paying for.

Lost in transit

Before an ad reaches a CTV screen, it often passes through a chain of companies, and each one takes a share of the budget. "If you look at the supply chain now, there's a door to a door to a door. There's a DSP, there's an SSP, there's a private marketplace, there's a PG. If you add too many jumps from inventory to consumer, you're constantly paying one gatekeeper to another," Pingali notes.

The way sellers price inventory adds to the cost. Many charge one rate for direct deals, another for the open exchange and another for resellers. Each tier makes sense for the seller on its own, but together they leave buyers weighing several prices for the same viewer, and those fees compound quickly over a campaign.

Each company along the way also defines the audience by its own rules. A demand-side platform builds segments one way, while broadcasters describe the viewers in their inventory another way. When those definitions don't match, the ad can end up in front of people outside the audience the buyer was trying to reach. The result is what the industry calls signal loss. By the time the ad runs, the buyer has paid several fees and may have a weaker read on who is watching.

Signals that matter

Pingali compares the ad industry's relationship with its metrics to the Greek myth of Pygmalion, in which a sculptor falls in love with a statue he made. Agencies, platforms and publishers created KPIs and audience segments to measure results for clients. Over time, it's easy for teams to treat those tools as the goal and lose sight of the customers the client wants to reach.

His team starts with the customer. "When we go to clients, our biggest goal is to listen to them and simplify that audience story into signals that truly matter, rather than creating an Excel sheet and a laundry list of targeting parameters," he says.

Take an automaker selling a full-size pickup like the Ford F-150. The brand might ask the agency to target "outdoor enthusiasts" on Google, a ready-made segment built on Google's own definitions. Pingali's team asks the client to describe how the next F-150 buyer behaves, then finds audience data that matches those behaviors. Programmatic and platform specialists get a focused brief to work from. Because that brief describes the customer, it can guide planning for CTV and every other channel in the campaign.

Breaking through the clutter

Ad spending in Canada keeps outpacing the economy, and WPP Media's This Year Next Year forecast expects that gap to continue. One explanation Pingali offers is that people now see far more ads than they did five or 10 years ago. With that much competing for attention, creative decides whether a brand gets noticed. "The creative holds the power to cut through the clutter. How you develop that by format, by screen and by need is where a ton of creativity is required," he adds.

Where an ad runs shapes how it lands. A YouTube pre-roll on a TV screen and an ad inside a Prime Video stream reach viewers in different moments, and the same message can perform differently in each. That makes creative and placement a single decision. Teams also have to choose how many versions of an ad to make. "Does it mean you just make one creative, or you use AI to make hundreds of creatives? It's a different strategic approach, but it has to be a creative-led approach," Pingali says.

Speaking the CFO's language

The buyer's last job is to explain all of these choices to the people paying for them. A CMO or CFO reviewing a CTV investment wants to know whether the money reached the right customers and what it did for the business. DSP labels and seller price tiers rarely come up in that conversation. Ad tech has its own vocabulary because the work is complicated, and Pingali doesn't fault the industry for that. But a buyer who can't explain a media plan in business terms leaves the client guessing about whether it worked.

That explanation depends on seeing CTV as one piece of a client's total investment. "Our job is identifying the role of each asset in the grander scheme of everything that's being bought, and translating it into a language of outcomes and value," says Pingali.