The advertising industry spent the week of November 18-25, 2025 celebrating connected TV’s continued growth while simultaneously exposing a fundamental truth nobody wants to admit: CTV advertising has recreated the exact same walled garden problems that plagued digital advertising for the past fifteen years. Despite all the talk of interoperability, cross-platform measurement, and programmatic efficiency, we’re watching the industry build separate fiefdoms that can’t talk to each other—and this time, there’s no incentive to fix it.
This week’s news cycle revealed the cracks in CTV’s foundation, from measurement vendors fighting over standards to advertisers admitting they can’t compare performance across platforms. The pattern is clear: the industry learned nothing from the Facebook-Google duopoly era, and we’re about to repeat the same mistakes at premium video scale.
Streaming Platforms Double Down on Proprietary Measurement Systems
The biggest story this week came from AdExchanger’s reporting on Netflix and Disney+ both launching enhanced first-party measurement suites that explicitly don’t integrate with third-party verification systems. Netflix announced its “Netflix Audience Insights” platform would provide advertisers with reach and frequency data using its own proprietary methodology, while Disney+ expanded its “Disney Select” measurement to include what it calls “attention metrics” that bear no resemblance to industry standards.
The messaging from both platforms was nearly identical: trust us, our data is better, and you don’t need outside verification. Adweek covered the advertiser response, which ranged from cautious optimism to outright frustration. One agency executive quoted anonymously said, “We’re being asked to compare apples, oranges, and whatever fruit Netflix just invented.”
This isn’t innovation—it’s fragmentation disguised as differentiation. Every streaming platform building its own measurement infrastructure creates a scenario where advertisers must either accept incomparable data or invest in expensive reconciliation processes that defeat the entire purpose of programmatic efficiency. The platforms know this. They’re counting on it.
Measurement Vendors Promise Interoperability While Fighting Standards Wars
Meanwhile, the measurement vendor community spent the week arguing about whose methodology should become the industry standard. Digiday reported on the growing divide between VideoAmp, iSpot.tv, and Nielsen, each positioning their approach as the “future of cross-platform measurement” while refusing to acknowledge that three competing futures means no actual standard emerges.
The Joint Industry Committee discussions that were supposed to resolve these conflicts have devolved into political theater. Sources familiar with the negotiations told Ad Age that the major streaming platforms are actively working to delay any consensus, preferring the current chaos that advantages their scale and first-party data.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: measurement vendors have a financial incentive to maintain complexity. If CTV measurement becomes truly standardized and interoperable, their value proposition evaporates. They’re selling reconciliation services for a problem they have no interest in actually solving. The entire ecosystem benefits from confusion except the one group without leverage—the advertisers funding all of it.
Programmatic CTV Promises Collide With Supply Path Reality
The supply path optimization conversation in CTV reached a crescendo this week when Marketing Brew published an investigation showing that the average CTV ad impression passes through 4.7 intermediaries before reaching a streaming platform. This is higher than display advertising in 2018, during the peak of the ad tech tax debate.
Advertisers believed CTV would be different—premium inventory, direct relationships, efficient programmatic pipes. Instead, we’ve recreated the same bloated supply chain that siphons 50-60% of advertiser spend before it reaches media companies. The major difference? CTV CPMs are 3-5x higher than display, so everyone in the chain takes a larger absolute dollar cut while claiming they’ve reduced their percentage fees.
The Trade Desk announced new “direct” CTV integrations this week, which sounds promising until you read the fine print and discover these “direct” connections still route through multiple SSPs and include data enrichment fees that somehow add 15-20% to the total cost. Roku simultaneously launched its own DSP that promises to eliminate intermediaries—by making Roku the only intermediary, naturally.
Advertisers Admit Cross-Platform Campaign Management Is Impossible
Perhaps the most telling development came from the Association of National Advertisers, which quietly released survey data showing that 73% of advertisers cannot accurately measure reach and frequency across streaming platforms. This isn’t a technology problem—it’s a structural feature of an ecosystem designed to prevent comparability.
One Fortune 500 CMO, speaking at a private event covered by industry reporters, said the quiet part out loud: “We’re spending 40% of our video budget on CTV and we genuinely cannot tell you if we’re reaching the same person twelve times or twelve different people once. The platforms won’t share deterministic data, the measurement vendors give us modeled estimates with 30% variance, and our agency tells us to trust the incrementality studies—which each platform conveniently runs themselves.”
This is the CTV measurement crisis in a nutshell. The industry has built a premium video advertising ecosystem that operates on faith-based attribution and platform-provided report cards. We’ve somehow arrived at a place where advertisers spend more per impression while receiving less transparency than they had in linear television.
What Happens When CTV Becomes the Dominant Video Channel
The trajectory is clear: CTV will represent the majority of video advertising spend within 18-24 months. When that happens, advertisers won’t have the option to demand better measurement—they’ll have to accept whatever the platforms provide because there’s no alternative at scale. Linear TV will be too small to matter, and digital video inventory outside of streaming platforms is largely fraudulent or brand-unsafe.
The industry had a window to establish independent measurement standards, interoperable data protocols, and transparent supply paths. That window is closing rapidly as each major platform builds higher walls around their gardens. Netflix, Disney, Paramount, NBCUniversal, Warner Bros Discovery, and Amazon all believe their competitive advantage lies in proprietary data and closed ecosystems—and they’re probably right.
The real question is whether advertisers will finally exercise collective bargaining power or continue accepting fragmentation as the price of admission to premium video inventory. This week’s news suggests they’ve already surrendered. The measurement crisis isn’t coming—it’s here, and the industry has decided to simply call it innovation.