Who's watching your CTV ads? Why verification is now an industry essential

What if your CTV ad runs, but no one actually sees it?

CTV has transformed the way we consume content. What began as a convenient alternative to linear television is now a global marketing powerhouse, built on the promise of delivering ads in premium lean-back environments to highly engaged audiences. Advertisers have responded accordingly: year-on-year video advertising spend rose 23% in Q1 2025, with 72% of display advertising budgets now allocated to video, according to the IAB Australia Video State of the Nation 2025 report.  

Yet CTV still has fundamental accountability and transparency issues. On CTV, ads may still play while the TV is turned off. CTV ads also have become a ripe target for fraud, which has risen to keep pace with spend. As streaming opportunities grow, so too do the risks. 

CTV's TV-Off problem 

On CTV, the mere fact of an ad playing is no guarantee that a person is watching. The most persistent reason is CTV's unique TV-off problem: even when the television itself is turned off, the content - and the ads that play alongside it - may not pause. Streaming apps can continue running in the background, sometimes for hours. And advertisers may unknowingly pay for impressions that never had a chance to make an impact. 

This isn't a fringe issue. It affects major platforms and lesser-known apps alike, and the consequences are significant. Advertisers can lose up to $700,000 USD per billion impressions without protections in place, according to 2025 DV Global Insights: Trends in the Modern Streaming Landscape.

Not surprisingly, 73% of ANZ advertisers say they're unsure whether their ads are reaching real viewers, making it difficult for them to optimise campaigns or justify additional investment. In a cautious economic climate where ROI scrutiny is only increasing, this media waste is untenable.

More scale means more fraud 

The risks don't stop at unviewable ads. As the scale of streaming expands, so too does the scale of fraud.

DV has found that 65% of all fraud in CTV is bot-driven, with more than four million infected devices generating fake traffic every day. In 2025, our Fraud Lab discovered a global scheme we named ShadowBot, which targeted mobile and CTV ad inventory. Using amateur-level automation techniques, ShadowBot generated over 35 million spoofed CTV and mobile devices to produce falsified ad impressions, costing unprotected advertisers an estimated USD2.5 million.

So how do we fix this?

On the viewability front, publishers are responding to advertisers' growing demand for transparency by refining their app experiences and working toward better verification standards. They also are increasingly supporting verification integrations as more advertisers adopt third-party measurement tags.

However, many measurement solutions and industry-standard tools like Open Measurement SDK are not supported in CTV or have not been adopted by CTV vendors.  This is why it's important to work with a verification provider who has designed measurement tools specifically for CTV. Emerging solutions are introducing more accurate ways to assess whether ads were actually seen.

On the fraud front, pre-bid protections can filter out low-quality placements before a single dollar is spent. Combined with bot fraud detection and real-time analytics, these protections are critical to building the trust, transparency and verification CTV platforms and advertisers need to thrive.

Programmatic advertisers can take advantage of innovations in streaming ad verification to avoid misaligned placements and ensure that ads don't run in in gaming or music apps, or through opaque extension networks. They can now align impressions with premium streaming-TV environments and verify that their ads run alongside high-quality inventory. These enhanced capabilities automate content exclusions, offer deeper insights into the scale, quality and context of every placement, and help prevent wasted ad spend. 

Advertisers can further mitigate risk by investing in curated marketplaces and favouring premium inventory.

CTV is an immense opportunity and a magnet for advertisers. For it to live up to its full potential, the industry must close the gap between promise and performance.