Everything I thought about CTV buying was wrong, and remains wrong. Maybe that's overstating it, but bear with me for a minute. We brought over CPM models from other digital and applied it here. That's a lose - lose for everyone and basically uncovers a ton of cracks in the system.

First, CPM models incentivize impressions and take quality out of the equation. I'd argue that CTV is of such quality we are doing it a major disservice buying on a CPM. Are we in a race to the bottom again? New day, same story.

Second, People aren't viewing CTV like they do traditional TV and that's a big issue for frequency. From what I see, most people binge on a service and switch to another service and rarely watch exclusively just one. So, when we look at frequency and do projections like this user saw an ad 3 times over a time period. Are we look at a month and realizing that the user saw all three ads in a massive binge one weekend?

Lastly, CTV has been largely additive to buying and usually sits either outside a DSP or inside a DSP. For the former, it becomes even harder to measure its effectiveness due to it being disassociated with the larger buy. For the latter, CTV competes with all other channels and could run the possibility of losing frequency to another channel. Are we saying a CTV impression on a premium network is valued like a display impression (frequency wise)?

As the channel evolves, it'll be harder to ignore these undercurrents. My sincere hope is that we address them with innovative solutions like Cost per Second, or other ways to value the inventory appropriately. The value is massively understated today and the only thing holding it back is us being more willing to change!