By Michael Shaughnessy, COO at Kargo

Deal IDs have been around for over a decade, which means they have been available for nearly the entirety of programmatic CTV media buying. But Deal IDs haven’t been able to deliver exactly what advertisers have been looking for, or curation wouldn’t have taken off the way it has. By leaning into curation, our industry can ensure that advertisers and publishers get what they are looking for – a premium environment that gives advertisers the information they need to buy quality inventory with confidence. 

Where Deal IDs Fall Short

Deal IDs help buyers and sellers speak to each other in specific terms through programmatic pipes. Deal IDs can be set up for audience segments, content types, and a lot more. They’ve been sold to CTV publishers as a way to highlight unique offerings to buyers. While many publishers are packaging products with Deal IDs, they are finding that buyers are pushing for curated deals anyway. 

There are a number of important reasons why Deal IDs aren’t cutting it for advertisers:

• Lack of transparency: Buyers complain about limited information about what they are getting when they buy CTV. There’s no genre, pod position, or engagement context shared. These are red flags for fabricated or misleading supply. Inconsistent metadata also causes problems.  Labels like “entertainment” make brand safety optimization nearly impossible.

• Fake audiences: Jounce data shows tens of millions of “devices” offered in auctions are not real CTV households. Many supply chains show suspicious device IDs (IFAs) that look real but have never appeared in direct publisher auctions. This means advertisers paying for reach may be buying phantom audiences. There are 125m CTV devices, but media buying isn’t always focused on stringent frequency management. That gap invites fake and redundant inventory, buried deep in a complicated supply chain. 

• Supply chain complexity:  Buyers chasing cheap CTV scale often get what they pay for – lack of control and low quality. They are sleepwalking into MFA. Fake apps, dead inventory, and phantom traffic are eating budgets alive.

• Measurement madness: Advertisers don’t always know what they bought or how to measure it. Completion, attention, ad load, and frequency signals are often missing. ‘Premium CTV’ can mean anything from a top show to a cluttered, ad-heavy stream. Inconsistent measurement doesn’t just frustrate reporting, it creates ROI blind spots where waste and fraud can hide unchecked and good publishers lose out to low quality.

Curation Cleans Up CTV

With curation, our industry has an opportunity to fix a lot of these problems.

One important focus needs to be transparency. With the standardization of metadata, advertisers know what they are getting across the quickly growing landscape of CTV supply. OpenRTB 2.6 provides fields that can be used to share a lot more useful information about content including genre, title, rating, live/on-demand and pod position. For a brand like Nike, performance comes from aligning with moments that matter to athletes and fans. If an SSP passes fields like genre=sports, title=NBA Finals Game 7, livestream=yes, pod position=2 of 4, Nike knows its ad is running in a live, high-stakes environment where attention is peaking. 

To reduce fraud and improve ROI for buyers, supply paths also need to be cleaned up to unlock the full potential of CTV. Curation can take advantage of app-ads.txt and sellers.json, but we all need to be stringent about ensuring these files are kept clean and verified so that only real broadcasters and publishers benefit from additional advertiser investment. 

CTV “data spam” also needs to be replaced with consistent, high quality signals. As much as sellers want to dazzle buyers with unique insights, core metrics need to be established and standardized so they can compare performance and optimize campaigns, which will lead to more premium CPMs for quality publishers. Signals like surface completions, pod position, ad load and attention all help advertisers know if they are getting value for their spend. 

If these standards are all in place, publishers can augment with their own information like audience data, context details, etc. But they shouldn’t try to jump ahead of the foundation we need to lay first. These improvements don’t just reduce risk, they give advertisers the confidence to shift more investment into CTV, fueling premium creative, unique sponsorships and bigger commitments. 

Where CTV Could Go From Here

We are early enough with CTV that we can set standards to actually chart the evolution of CTV. 

If we require direct paths only, we prevent tens of millions of dollars spent on fraud through shady resellers this year alone.  

If we stick to real reach numbers, advertisers can be confident that their ads are being shown to real people. Buyers will get real returns, rather than big numbers but bad performance. 

If we put proven data and measurement standards in place, advertisers will gravitate towards quality content and will spend more, not less, with the best publishers. Solutions like a conversion API that ties impressions directly to outcomes like purchase, signup, download gives advertisers the insights and control they want without publishers losing anything. 

These best practices also set the stage for effective omnichannel measurement frameworks that buyers are demanding. When curated CTV supply exposes standardized signals, it becomes easier to connect performance to the entire media buy. 

Curation enables advertisers to protect budgets, prove outcomes and differentiate experiences.  Deal IDs were meant to bring trust and control, but, without reform, they’ve become black boxes of fraud and opacity.

Ultimately, it’s not about fixing Deal IDs, but setting the next standard and building the infrastructure that positions CTV as the premium growth channel, powered by attention based buying, ROI-driven measurement and differentiated experiences.