Connected TV advertising is programmatic advertising delivered on internet-connected television devices — smart TVs, streaming sticks (Roku, Fire TV, Chromecast), and gaming consoles. As someone building CTV exchange products at InMobi, I see CTV as the most significant ad surface opportunity since mobile. The numbers support this: CTV ad spend is growing 25%+ annually, CPMs are 5-10x higher than display, and completion rates exceed 90% for most video formats.
Why CTV Matters
CTV combines the premium environment of television with the targeting precision of digital. Unlike linear TV where advertisers buy against broad demographics, CTV enables household-level targeting, frequency capping, and real-time optimization through programmatic infrastructure. At InMobi, our CTV exchange connects streaming publishers with DSPs like The Trade Desk, DV360, and Amazon DSP, enabling this precision at scale.
The CTV ad experience is fundamentally different from display. Ads are full-screen, typically unskippable, and delivered in content environments where users are highly engaged. This explains the CPM premium — brand advertisers pay $15-40 CPM for CTV versus $2-8 for display because the attention value is dramatically higher.
How CTV Ad Serving Works
CTV ad delivery uses either SSAI (Server-Side Ad Insertion) or CSAI (Client-Side Ad Insertion). In SSAI, ads are stitched into the content stream on the server before delivery to the device — creating a seamless viewing experience with no buffering. In CSAI, the client application requests and plays ads separately. Most premium CTV environments use SSAI because it prevents ad blocking and provides a TV-like experience.
The ad format is VAST-based (Video Ad Serving Template), typically VAST 4.x, which defines the video creative, tracking pixels, companion ads, and verification scripts. Ad pods — groups of ads played together like traditional TV commercial breaks — are managed through VMAP (Video Multiple Ad Playlist), which defines when ad breaks occur within content and how many ads each break contains.
CTV Exchange Architecture at InMobi
At InMobi, our CTV exchange handles the unique requirements of streaming ad delivery: ad podding with competitive separation (ensuring competing brands do not appear in the same break), frequency capping across sessions and devices, SSAI integration with major streaming platforms, and CTV-specific OpenRTB extensions for content metadata and device identification.
The identity framework for CTV relies on device-level IDs (IFA — Identifier for Advertising) rather than cookies, and increasingly on household-level graphs that connect the TV to other devices in the home. This enables cross-screen attribution — connecting a CTV ad view to a mobile or web conversion — which is essential for proving CTV advertising ROI.
CTV Measurement Challenges
Measurement remains CTV's biggest challenge. Traditional viewability does not apply — the ad is full-screen by default. Instead, CTV measurement focuses on video completion rate (VCR), reach and frequency, brand lift, and increasingly attention metrics. Cross-screen attribution — connecting CTV exposure to downstream actions on other devices — requires sophisticated identity resolution.
At InMobi, we integrate with major measurement vendors including Nielsen, Comscore, IAS, and DoubleVerify to provide comprehensive CTV campaign reporting. We also transmit attention-related signals in our bid requests that help DSPs value CTV inventory more accurately.
CTV will surpass mobile as the highest-revenue programmatic surface by 2030. The infrastructure being built now — ad podding, SSAI, cross-screen identity, attention measurement — will define the CTV advertising ecosystem for the next decade. At InMobi, building this infrastructure is my core focus, and I believe the exchanges that get CTV right will lead the programmatic market.