Common misconceptions in this article…
Connected TV (CTV) continues to expand as a dominant force in digital advertising. Streaming adoption is climbing, yet advertising budgets aren’t keeping pace. With the Newfronts and Upfronts presentations completed, advertisers are being asked to make big decisions with lingering questions still in the mix.
One of the biggest barriers? Persistent misconceptions about what CTV can and can’t do. That uncertainty can hold teams back from putting serious weight behind the most addressable screen in the house.
Experian works with leading CTV partners to tackle those concerns head on – whether it’s improving measurement, reducing wasted impressions, or making audience data more actionable.
To help marketers walk into Upfront conversations with clarity and confidence, we connected with industry experts from Ampersand, the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), FreeWheel, and Madhive to separate fact from fiction.
Here are four common CTV myths – and the reality behind them
1. CTV is not ready for performance marketing
Why this misconception exists
CTV was once seen as a branding tool—good for awareness, but hard to measure. Without clear attribution or precise targeting, it wasn’t built for the kind of performance marketing advertisers expect from digital media.
What’s actually happening
In the not-so-distant past, marketers lacked a consistent way to connect CTV impressions to digital or in-store actions because of device fragmentation and limited signal sharing between platforms. Today, you can reach specific audiences on the biggest screen in the house—and know what happened after they saw your ad.
Advancements in identity resolution and cross-device tracking now allow advertisers to measure everything from incremental reach to store visits and purchases. The growing use of universal identifiers like Unified ID 2.0 (UID2) makes it easier to connect ad exposure to real outcomes across screens.
“With better visibility into who’s watching CTV and what they do afterward, it’s no longer just about getting a message in front of people—we can actually understand if it drove real-world results, like a store visit or a purchase. By tapping into high-quality audience data—from behavioral to demographic to transactional—we’re able to improve match rates and reach, which ultimately leads to more meaningful outcomes for advertisers.”
Murphy Vandemotter, Director of Data Operations, Madhive
That shift—from impressions to impact—is what makes CTV a true performance channel, not just a way to build brand awareness.
How Madhive works with Experian to provide data that drives better targeting and measurement – at scale
Madhive is helping local advertisers achieve better CTV outcomes by integrating Experian’s syndicated audiences directly into the Madhive Data Marketplace. Advertisers are using Experian’s data to better understand local audiences, deliver more personalized messaging, and extend campaign reach – in some cases, achieving 10x the reach compared to other marketplaces.
Combined with Madhive’s measurement tools and real-time optimization capabilities, advertisers can maximize their CTV investments by building lookalike audiences, quickly adjusting underperforming strategies, and personalizing engagement with viewers at the local level.
2. CTV advertising lacks brand safety and fraud protection
Why this misconception exists
CTV is sometimes lumped in with the broader digital ecosystem, where concerns around fraud, brand safety, and opaque buying paths are more common. Some advertisers worry they’re not getting what they paid for—or worse, that their ads could appear next to low-quality content.
What’s actually happening
CTV has a much stronger foundation for brand safety and ad fraud than many marketers realize. The most effective way to minimize risk is to work directly with premium publishers and their primary technology platforms — not through long, complex chains of intermediaries that can open the door to fraud and low-quality placements.
Platforms like FreeWheel provide direct access to premium CTV inventory across major broadcast and cable brands, helping marketers consolidate spend and significantly reduce exposure to risk. Working with primary supply partners ensures ads run alongside trusted, high-quality programming, not questionable or low-value content. By prioritizing direct paths to premium publishers, advertisers can take greater control over where their campaigns appear, achieving better transparency, higher quality, and stronger outcomes.
“Advertisers can reach a broad collection of premium CTV inventory directly through FreeWheel. This not only greatly reduces a marketer’s risk, but it also provides certainty that they’re getting what they paid for in terms of quality content to appear alongside their brands.”
Matt Clark, VP of Strategic Partnerships, FreeWheel
In other words, cutting corners often increases risk—while consolidation and direct access to premium supply creates a cleaner, safer media buy.
How Experian and FreeWheel match quality content with quality targeting
Industry standards like OpenRTB 2.6 are evolving to give advertisers more control over where and how their ads appear. At the same time, Experian is helping advertisers maximize that control through our integration with FreeWheel.
Advertisers can access Experian’s syndicated audiences directly within FreeWheel’s sell and buy-side programmatic advertising platforms. This gives advertisers the ability to create and activate campaigns across linear, digital, and advanced TV. Backed by a deep understanding of people in the offline and digital worlds, Experian’s data is ranked #1 in accuracy by Truthset, giving advertisers confidence that they are reaching the right people. Television audiencesyou can reach include cord-cutters and consumers who subscribe to free and paid ad-supported streaming TV services.
3. CTV audiences are too fragmented to manage effectively
Why this misconception exists
With so many streaming platforms and devices in play, US households subscribe to 4 paid video streaming services on average, it can feel nearly impossible to manage reach and frequency without overspending or annoying your audience.
What’s actually happening
Advertisers don’t need to choose between scale and precision anymore. With the right audience and identity strategy, it’s possible to connect the dots across screens and unify fragmented viewing behaviors.
“We activate first- and third-party data across CTV, linear, and video-on-demand in a consistent way—making sure campaigns reach real households, not just devices. We also track unduplicated reach and frequency across platforms, so advertisers can understand what’s actually working. Together with Experian, we can measure whether those impressions moved the needle and guide media planning with full-funnel attribution insights.“
Anastasia Dukes-Asuen, Sr. Director of Advanced TV Data & Insights, Ampersand
Experian Audiences are built on our household-level identity graph, giving advertisers a powerful tool to manage reach and frequency across screens.
How Ampersand works with Experian
Ampersand utilizes Experian Marketing Data to enhance audience-based media planning, activation, and optimization across linear and addressable TV platforms. By combining Experian Audiences with a footprint of 64 million data-enabled homes, Ampersand helps advertisers find the most valuable networks and dayparts to reach their intended viewers. Through its Addressable Simulator tool, powered by Experian data, Ampersand models different budget scenarios to show how reallocating spend into addressable TV can extend reach and improve efficiency. Using Experian-powered targeting has delivered real-world results, like helping a national cruise brand achieve a 14% lift in incremental reach, a 3.1x increase in frequency, and a 24% lower effective CPM.
4. CTV is only for younger, tech-savvy audiences
Why this misconception exists
Streaming was originally associated with younger viewers, leading advertisers to believe CTV wasn’t an effective way to reach older demographics. That impression stuck, but it’s no longer true.
What’s actually happening
Smart TVs are everywhere, and CTV has gone mainstream. Across generations, households are tuning in to ad-supported streaming services in record numbers—and they’re doing it on the biggest screens in their homes.
What ARF data shows
New research from the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) backs this up.
According to the 2024 DASH TV Universe Study:
- 77% of U.S. households own at least one Smart TV
- 82% receive at least one ad-supported streaming service
- 62% of households receive at least one ad-supported subscription streaming service (AVOD) like Netflix or Max with ads
“The audience with the highest Smart TV and ad-supported CTV adoption? Millennials and Gen Xers—Americans in their prime parenting years. Even Boomers have embraced CTV: 73% own a Smart TV and 72% receive at least one ad-supported CTV service.”
Jim Meyer, General Manager of the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) DASH TV Universe Study
ARF and Experian gives marketers the most accurate understanding of who is watching
We partnered with the ARF and its DASH universe study to create 18 TV audiences. By combining the ARF’s DASH data set with Experian Marketing Data, we developed one-of-a-kind TV audiences that reflect how viewers interact with digital devices and e-commerce accounts. We created this resource so our customers can align their marketing campaigns with media usage. These audience segments also yield insights that help marketers reach their audiences with the right messages and content.
Make CTV work for you this Upfront season
CTV is evolving fast, and advertisers who rely on outdated assumptions risk missing out on its full impact. If you’re weighing where to place your bets this Upfront season, don’t let old myths steer you off course. CTV delivers reach, performance, and accountability—especially when powered by high-quality data.
Experian helps advertisers get more from their CTV investment with household-level insights that control ad frequency and unified audience activation to maintain consistent messaging across platforms.
Let’s make your CTV campaigns work smarter. Learn how Experian can help you understand your customers, reach the right audience, and measure performance.
Get in touch
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Originally appeared on MarTech Series Marketing’s understanding of identity has evolved rapidly over the past decade, much like the shifting media landscape itself. From the early days of basic direct mail targeting to today's complex omnichannel environment, identity has become both more powerful and more fragmented. Each era has brought new tools, challenges, and opportunities, shaping how brands interact with their customers. We’ve moved from traditional media like mail, newspapers, and linear/network TV, to cable TV, the internet, mobile devices, and apps. Now, multiple streaming platforms dominate, creating a far more complex media landscape. As a result, understanding the customer journey and reaching consumers across these various touchpoints has become increasingly difficult. Managing frequency and ensuring effective communication across channels is now more challenging than ever. This development has led to a fragmented view of the consumer, making it harder for marketers to ensure that they are reaching the right audience at the right time while also avoiding oversaturation. Marketers must now navigate a fragmented customer journey across multiple channels, each with its own identity signals, to stitch together a cohesive view of the customer. Let’s break down this evolution, era by era, to understand how identity has progressed—and where it’s headed. 2010-2015: The rise of digital identity – Cookies and MAIDs Between 2010 and 2015, the digital era fundamentally changed how marketers approached identity. Mobile usage surged during this time, and programmatic advertising emerged as the dominant method for reaching consumers across the internet. The introduction of cookies and mobile advertising IDs (MAIDs) became the foundation for tracking users across the web and mobile apps. With these identifiers, marketers gained new capabilities to deliver targeted, personalized messages and drive efficiency through programmatic advertising. This era gave birth to powerful tools for targeting. Marketers could now follow users’ digital footprints, regardless of whether they were browsing on desktop or mobile. This leap in precision allowed brands to optimize spend and performance at scale, but it came with its limitations. Identity was still tied to specific browsers or devices, leaving gaps when users switched platforms. The fragmentation across different devices and the reliance on cookies and MAIDs meant that a seamless, unified view of the customer was still out of reach. 2015-2020: The age of walled gardens From 2015 to 2020, the identity landscape grew more complex with the rise of walled gardens. Platforms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon created closed ecosystems of first-party data, offering rich, self-declared insights about consumers. These platforms built massive advertising businesses on the strength of their user data, giving marketers unprecedented targeting precision within their environments. However, the rise of walled gardens also marked the start of new challenges. While these platforms provided detailed identity solutions within their walls, they didn’t communicate with one another. Marketers could target users with pinpoint accuracy inside Facebook or Google, but they couldn’t connect those identities across different ecosystems. This siloed approach to identity left marketers with an incomplete picture of the customer journey, and brands struggled to piece together a cohesive understanding of their audience across platforms. The promise of detailed targeting was tempered by the fragmentation of the landscape. Marketers were dealing with disparate identity solutions, making it difficult to track users as they moved between these closed environments and the open web. 2020-2025: The multi-ID landscape – CTV, retail media, signal loss, and privacy By 2020, the identity landscape had splintered further, with the rise of connected TV (CTV) and retail media adding even more complexity to the mix. Consumers now engaged with brands across an increasing number of channels—CTV, mobile, desktop, and even in-store—and each of these channels had its own identifiers and systems for tracking. Simultaneously, privacy regulations are tightening the rules around data collection and usage. This, coupled with the planned deprecation of third-party cookies and MAIDs has thrown marketers into a state of flux. The tools they had relied on for years were disappearing, and new solutions had yet to fully emerge. The multi-ID landscape was born, where brands had to navigate multiple identity systems across different platforms, devices, and environments. Retail media networks became another significant player in the identity game. As large retailers like Amazon and Walmart built their own advertising ecosystems, they added yet another layer of first-party data to the mix. While these platforms offer robust insights into consumer behavior, they also operate within their own walled gardens, further fragmenting the identity landscape. With cookies and MAIDs being phased out, the industry began to experiment with alternatives like first-party data, contextual targeting, and new universal identity solutions. The challenge and opportunity for marketers lies in unifying these fragmented identity signals to create a consistent and actionable view of the customer. 2025: The omnichannel imperative Looking ahead to 2025 and beyond, the identity landscape will continue to evolve, but the focus remains the same: activating and measuring across an increasingly fragmented and complex media environment. Consumers now expect seamless, personalized experiences across every channel—from CTV to digital to mobile—and marketers need to keep up. The future of identity lies in interoperability, scale, and availability. Marketers need solutions that can connect the dots across different platforms and devices, allowing them to follow their customers through every stage of the journey. Identity must be actionable in real-time, allowing for personalization and relevance across every touchpoint, so that media can be measurable and attributable. Brands that succeed in 2025 and beyond will be those that invest in scalable, omnichannel identity solutions. They’ll need to embrace privacy-friendly approaches like first-party data, while also ensuring their systems can adapt to an ever-changing landscape. Adapting to the future of identity The evolution of identity has been marked by increasing complexity, but also by growing opportunity. As marketers adapt to a world without third-party cookies and MAIDs, the need for unified identity solutions has never been more urgent. Brands that can navigate the multi-ID landscape will unlock new levels of efficiency and personalization, while those that fail to adapt risk falling behind. The path forward is clear: invest in identity solutions that bridge the gaps between devices, platforms, and channels, providing a full view of the customer. The future of marketing belongs to those who can manage identity in a fragmented world—and those who can’t will struggle to stay relevant. 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