Nearly 90.5% of CTV ad spending transacted through programmatic channels in 2025. The shifting of the CTV landscape to biddable via programmatic platforms is a structural response to a fragmented landscape where more choice, more content, more platforms, and more screens have made centralized, audience-led execution a necessity rather than a preference. The brands still anchored in linear habits are leaving performance on the table.
Tanya Arora is a Programmatic Account Manager at Google with deep expertise in CTV media consolidation, campaign measurement, and competitive platform analysis. She's led post-campaign evaluations for more than 100 large-scale clients and built internal competitive intelligence frameworks used by over a thousand members of Google's programmatic media community. Her perspective on CTV measurement is grounded in the hands-on platform economics of which buying methods actually deliver working media efficiency rather than eroding it through hidden costs and fragmented execution.
"By consolidating your CTV media programmatically, you don’t just reach viewers where they stream. You turn the household’s largest billboard into your most powerful performance engine," she says. Though CTV may look like traditional TV in form, Arora points out that internally, it’s fully digital and just as measurable. That distinction matters more than ever as advertisers face mounting pressure to hit performance goals. To achieve them, she emphasizes that brands must pursue behavioral attribution and deduplicated insights that actually tell a story instead of settling for a one-dimensional approach
GRPs aren't the same as they were 10 years ago. Linear TV reach has been declining for years, and as reach falls, frequencies rise to compensate, which means today’s GRPs are buying less than they appear to on paper. The GRP that delivered broad reach and manageable frequency a decade ago now often delivers narrower reach and significant overexposure. CTV presents a direct opportunity to recover that lost reach, with the added advantage of real-time performance visibility.
But there’s a hidden cost problem standing between advertisers and that efficiency. Buying CTV media is a bit like buying a car: the sticker price, which would be the CPM or CPCV, looks like the cost, but the real margins are buried in financing and add-ons. In CTV, that means SSP take-rates, data markups, viewability fees, and bid shading that can quietly consume as much as 30% of working media before a single ad streams. Arora has seen this gap widen dramatically depending on the buying platform. On programmatic platforms with low platform fees, like DV360, roughly 88 cents of every dollar goes to working media. On platforms where retail media network markups, audience data costs, and viewability fees stack up, that number can drop to around 51 cents. The difference is significant enough to reshape campaign economics entirely. "When you combine all the costs on some platforms, the working efficiency of the media reduces massively," Arora explains. "The same hundred dollars gets you a very different amount of actual reach depending on where you’re buying."
For CMOs evaluating CTV spend, she recommends looking beyond ROAS. Media Efficiency Ratio, which measures total revenue generated per dollar of media spend, provides a more complete picture. “A MER of five is generally considered great, meaning you’re spending a dollar and receiving five dollars against it. That varies industry to industry, but ROAS alone won’t give you the full picture for your business.”
One of the most persistent challenges in CTV is frequency waste: hitting the same household repeatedly across multiple devices and publisher deals without realizing it. Arora breaks down the math in simple terms. If a brand has three direct publisher deals and a customer has three devices, that’s nine potential impressions reaching a single person, none of which are coordinated. "If I’m buying through three direct deals and those are targeting me across a tablet, a TV, and a mobile device, that’s nine impressions going to me only," she points out. "With Google’s DV360, you set a cap at the campaign level. Now you’re reducing ad fatigue for the user, and those media savings get reinvested to reach a unique user who’s completely new."
The deduplication works by consolidating all CTV buys, including premium inventory and third-party video, into a single measurement loop. Cross-device reporting identifies overlapping reach, and frequency capping ensures each household sees the ad a controlled number of times. The savings go directly toward incremental reach rather than redundant impressions.
The scale of inventory that unified buying unlocks is significant. The top six streaming platforms account for 78% of total streaming watch time, and unified programmatic buying provides access to the bulk of it. DV360 alone reached 7.8 billion hours of ad-supported watch time across those platforms in a one-month period. Access to that inventory, as well as the ability to manage frequency across all of it from a single platform, is a meaningful structural advantage for programmatic buyers over fragmented direct deals.
Beyond efficiency gains, Arora sees the bigger strategic shift as the move from publisher-led to audience-led buying. Traditional CTV planning starts with a shortlist of publishers and guarantees. By contrast, the programmatic model starts with the audience and follows them where they lead. "Instead of just going by publisher, what you’re doing with an audience-led strategy is reaching your customer exactly where they are. You’re not restricted to one or two app URLs. If you know the demographics, geographics, and your addressable audience, you follow them across the ecosystem rather than hoping they show up on the three publishers you picked."
This shift also addresses one of the core advantages of CTV over linear: real-time optimization. Linear campaigns run on forecasts and post-campaign analysis. Programmatic CTV campaigns generate performance signals continuously, allowing marketers to identify underperforming placements or creatives and swap them mid-flight rather than waiting for the campaign to end.
For brands still running 80% linear and 20% CTV because they don’t fully trust the measurement, Arora points to experimentation as the turning point. She’s seen consistent results when brands move beyond conventional buying and test programmatic CTV strategies against their existing approach. "There’s about a 30% jump in performance when brands experiment and invest in programmatic CTV rather than going through the conventional routes suggested by CMOs and media planners. They look through one lens, whereas somebody behind the keyboard looks through a different lens." That gap between theoretical media planning and live data execution, she says, is exactly where programmatic CTV proves its value. By focusing on how much budget becomes working media, using MER as a common language, and carefully managing reach and frequency across screens, marketers can move beyond GRPs without abandoning the financial discipline that made them comfortable with TV in the first place.
