I’ve been in a lot of meetings about CTV recently with good reason; in December 2025 streaming accounted for 47.5% of all TV viewing in the US. Advertisers know that much of their budget will be spent on CTV and they want a cohesive plan that works across CTV, linear, and the open web. While programmatic marketing has the potential to create such a plan, three areas of fragmentation in programmatic CTV – supply, planning, and measurement— makes this difficult.
A cohesive strategy is essential to ensuring that inefficiencies are resolved rather than compounded. Curation is an important part of that strategy.
Supply Fragmentation: Where and How to Buy
CTV supply is complex. Buyers can go directly to broadcasters, use streaming aggregators, or transact programmatically with first-party data. With more streaming apps than ever it can be hard for advertisers to know what is safe, what is valuable, what targeting works in each environment, and ultimately where to spend their money.
The same content can appear in multiple places with different ad units, data signals, and targeting options. Buying Disney directly, for example, is closer to traditional linear TV ad buy. It offers premium, controlled inventory, standardized ad experiences, and data defined by Disney’s own ecosystem. Buying through Pluto—a free, login-based app—on the other hand, offers first-party data and additional ad units, but raises the question: where exactly is the ad running?
Supply-side technology adds yet another layer of complexity. Metadata – the information about what content you’re targeting – is often inconsistent across platforms. The same program may be correctly labeled on one SSP but partially or incorrectly on another, so seemingly identical impressions can differ in contextual detail.
This creates a confidence gap because advertisers don’t know precisely where and how their ads are appearing and which targeting and audience signals actually apply.
Planning Fragmentation: Aligning Screens and Strategy
Planning ad buys that include CTV can also be confusing because advertisers are straddling different systems with different buying logics. The client brief has not changed — put my brand in a video environment in front of the right audience at the right time — but the pieces don’t naturally align.
In fact, in many agencies, linear TV and programmatic continue to be separate teams with separate tools, separate KPIs, separate measurement metrics, and often separate conversations with the same client.
Even when a campaign spans both, the strategic logic guiding those placements is often not unified. It’s entirely possible to reach the same audience twice across two screens—once on traditional TV and again on CTV—without any mechanism to see it happening, manage frequency, or optimize against it.
Measurement Fragmentation: Making Sense of Performance
CTV occupies an awkward middle ground: it offers a high-production, full-screen experience like linear TV but is often delivered through programmatic systems built for performance marketing. These realities lack a unified measurement framework, and there’s still no single way to capture CTV campaign ROI. Some advertisers track CPA, others focus on reach and frequency, and media mix modelling rarely integrates smoothly with attribution reporting.
Programmatic is often seen as a scaled performance channel rather than a brand-building environment, which shapes how success is judged. A branding-focused CTV campaign evaluated purely on performance may seem underwhelming—not because it failed, but because the metrics don’t align with the objective. Conversely, focusing only on branding can overlook incremental performance gains.
If linear and CTV are measured through different frameworks, and programmatic is assessed through yet another, true cross-screen efficiency becomes nearly impossible to quantify. You cannot optimize if you aren’t seeing the whole picture.
Curation: Bringing Order to CTV Fragmentation
These three fault lines — supply, planning, and measurement — are interlocking. Limited transparency in supply affects contextual confidence. Siloed planning restricts cross-screen learning. Disjointed measurement obscures what is actually working. And each one reinforces the others.
Curation can help simplify that.
Instead of the buyer having to untangle supply and data issues separately, for example, they can be packaged together around the audience and context into a single deal ID or private marketplace. This can be passed back to the trader in a cleaner, more actionable way. Curation doesn’t remove the complexity behind the scenes, but it shields the advertiser from having to navigate every moving part themselves.
Curation can also help in the planning process by creating a more coherent structure. Instead of the planner having to separately evaluate publishers, ad formats, targeting layers, brand safety, and data sources across multiple platforms, curated marketplaces bring that together. The supply is pre-vetted. The data is layered in. The environment is known. And it’s delivered through a single deal ID (private marketplace), which makes it easier to activate inside a DSP.
It also helps connect traditional TV planning with digital execution. For example, if a planner already has a clear sense of when their audience is most likely to be watching on linear TV, curated solutions can carry that thinking into CTV or online video by matching it to the right audiences at the right times.
What was once only about context is now about context and audience. Geography, time of day, and content context can all be built into the curated package from the start. That means planners don’t have to rebuild a video strategy from scratch for every channel. Instead, they can stay focused on reaching the right people and driving results.
And, of course, when all of this is well-planned out, measurement becomes easier as well. There is clarity of objective and consistency in how impressions are delivered and reported.
CTV is a huge opportunity for advertisers, but it has still not been seamlessly integrated into programmatic buying. A well-built curation layer can help address fragmentation by connecting the ecosystems we have already built.
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