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As CTV continues to mature, premium video providers are giving advertisers new ways to navigate an increasingly fragmented media landscape with greater precision, transparency, and measurable business value.
That broader shift came through clearly in a recent study Spectrum Reach conducted with eMarketer, based on a survey of 239 CTV ad buyers and in-depth interviews with senior agency and brand leaders. Buyers are not confused about what they want. They want precision, transparency, strong measurement, premium content, and assurance that their media is delivering incrementality.
The opportunity now is to help them act on those priorities with greater confidence. The study’s findings make clear that this is not an awareness gap, but an aspiration gap. Buyers already know what matters. What they need are better signals, better proof, and better ways to buy against those priorities.
That is where multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) have become much more relevant to the conversation.
For a long time, buyers navigating a complex media landscape often faced trade-offs. You could pursue scale, or you could prioritize more deterministic data and greater control. However, MVPDs like Spectrum Reach, the advertising sales business of Spectrum—the leading broadband and video company in the nation—make it possible for buyers to prioritize both. Today, deterministic CTV data can offer both precision targeting and meaningful scale, giving advertisers a stronger foundation for audience quality, measurement, and reach.
And when you look at what buyers are saying, the message is consistent. They want to know where their ads ran. They want frequency managed in a way that reflects the household, not just the platform. They want clearer reporting. And above all, they want to know whether a campaign is adding reach or simply duplicating what they already had.
As one brand-side buyer in the retail sector put it in the study:
“The most important question we always ask is, is this partner or path giving us incremental reach or impact, or is it just duplicating what we are already getting elsewhere? You have to see true incremental reach.”
The performance data backs up that shift in mindset. MVPD campaigns delivered 2.5 times the sustained accurate reach of programmatic CTV over a 90-day flight, 61% reach versus 24%. Buyers who work with MVPDs are also more likely to prioritize goals like frequency management, inventory quality, and reporting — in other words, the things that tend to matter more as CTV investment matures.
What stands out most to me, though, is how directly buyers connect trust to spending.
As the same senior buyer said:
“Transparency is the tiebreaker when two partners are otherwise equal on cost and performance.”
Another buyer, the CMO of an online bank, added:
“If that level of data made us 20% more efficient with a publisher, I would pay a 10% premium for it.”
Those are strong signals that trust is not some soft, secondary value in CTV. It affects where budgets go.
And there is clearly room for the overall programmatic CTV market to improve. More than half of buyers said measurement is inconsistent across platforms and 52% of DSP-path buyers said proving incremental lift is a top challenge. But that should not be read as a reason for pessimism. If anything, it shows that buyers are ready for something better — and increasingly willing to reward partners who can offer it.
To me, that is the real story here. Buyers are telling us, clearly, what the next phase of CTV needs to look like: better data, better transparency, better proof, and better control. MVPDs are well positioned to help meet that moment.
CTV is becoming a more accountable medium. That is good for buyers, good for brands, and good for the future of the market.
Discover the full findings and insights here.
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