By Ed McLoughlin, Founder and COO of Ribeye
CTV has become one of the most important growth channels for local advertising. Streaming audiences continue to expand, and budgets are following. For broadcasters and media organizations, this shift should represent an opportunity to extend reach and capture new revenue.
But there’s a disconnect.
As CTV has scaled, transparency around what’s actually being bought and delivered hasn’t kept pace. According to a recent report from Peer39, a staggering 60% of CTV bid requests contain no usable program-level data, and only about one-third include genre data. In many cases, buyers can’t even see the show, episode, or any meaningful content descriptors at all for the inventory they’re purchasing.
In response, the market has adapted. App names and deal IDs, for instance, have become stand-ins for quality. Unfortunately, though, these often don’t reflect what appears on screen: a single app can include long-form programming, short clips, and filler inventory under the same label.
But what does the data show about CTV transparency at the local level? And how can local teams adapt?
CTV transparency and local media
Importantly, Peer39’s report finds that approximately 25% of open market CTV supply falls into what it classifies as “Fake CTV.” These impressions resemble TV in the bidstream but don’t correspond with a true viewing experience. At the same time, completion rates remain consistently high across environments, whether the content is premium programming or background playback.
But not all CTV inventory suffers from the same lack of visibility. That’s particularly true at the local level. Additional proprietary data from Peer39 shows that local news, for example, is a high-quality, highly transparent environment, with little-to-no user-generated content or Fake CTV exposure. It also carries stronger signal density: 84% of local news channels have more than half of impressions tied to known program-level content, and 71% exceed 80% visibility.
In other words, high-quality, transparent CTV environments already exist at the local level. But they don’t always show up that way in buying or reporting.
Without consistent program-level signals, the risk here is that local inventory can get grouped into the same opaque buckets as everything else. Strong environments, therefore, become harder to identify, and the value of that inventory is difficult to communicate.
The delivery patterns for local media reinforce this point. Again, per Peer39’s data, the vast majority of impressions run on TV screens (88.3%), with a smaller share on tablets (7.1%). And a meaningful portion of viewing (13.1%) happens overnight, pointing to different audience behaviors that are difficult to capture without clear signal.
For local sellers, that gap shows up in their conversations with advertisers, where they’re expected to explain where ads ran and why performance changed. When visibility is limited, those answers require guesswork. When signals are clear, they can point to specific environments, audiences, and outcomes with confidence.
Here’s what local advertisers are demanding of their partners
Given the gaps in open market transparency, and the fact that high-quality local inventory doesn’t always surface clearly, local teams need a more disciplined approach to visibility and reporting for their advertisers.
Based on my conversations with buyers and sellers, here are four things local media organizations can do:
1. Start with what you can see. Assess how much of your campaign data resolves to program, channel, and device. If reporting stops at the app or deal level, there are probably limits to what can be understood or communicated.
2. Examine how your stack shapes that view. At the local level, many local media orgs operate across multiple systems that were added over time. Each one captures a different part of the campaign. Bringing those pieces together often requires manual work.
3. Pressure-test your reporting against concrete questions. If an advertiser asks where its ads ran and why performance changed, can you give a clear answer? Or does the answer depend on stitching together multiple reports?
4. Align optimization with environments instead of just metrics. Completion rate and similar metrics are of course, useful, but they won’t tell the full story. Understanding the content behind those metrics leads to better decisions about where to allocate spend.
Taken together, this approach will make it easier for local teams to see what’s actually running and to explain why it’s performing the way it is.
Rebuilding confidence in local CTV
CTV has scaled faster than the signals needed to understand it. The data tell us that a meaningful share of inventory on the open market still lacks basic visibility, making it harder to both tell what’s running and why it’s performing (or failing to).
Local media tells a slightly different story. High-quality environments like local news are already delivering strong signals and real TV viewing behavior. However, without consistent visibility, that value doesn’t always carry through into how campaigns are bought or reported.
By following these steps, local teams can build a clearer picture of what’s running and how it’s performing, and communicate that with the consistency that advertisers expect. In doing so, they’ll reinforce the trust upon which local media depends.
Bill Brazell
917-445-7316 cell
