Advertisers Distrust CTV Inventory Quality

Advertisers are increasing connected TV budgets while losing confidence in where their money actually runs. A new IAB report, the second installment of its 2026 video ad spend study, finds that trust in CTV inventory is weak even among the buying methods the industry treats as safest.

Trust Erodes Across Buying Methods

The IAB found that 43% of buyers have somewhat or no confidence in inventory quality when using trusted methods such as programmatic guaranteed and direct deals. This number matters because these are supposed to be the safe buys: the ones where a brand pays a premium specifically to know where its ad will run.

Confidence also weakens as buying moves toward automation, reaching 55% with little or no confidence for private marketplaces and more than two-thirds for open exchange and real-time bidding. 

According to the report, retail and commerce media networks ranked among the lowest, at 59%. This is notable because retail media is one of the fastest-growing categories in CTV, built on the promise that retailer data makes targeting more precise and outcomes easier to prove. A trust score that low suggests the sales pitch on data quality hasn’t been matched by transparency about where the inventory itself comes from. In a statement, Chris Bruderle, the IAB's VP of industry insights and content strategy, said:

"Buyers are wondering where is my ad actually running, where does the inventory come from, and how much of it is invalid traffic."  

Bruderle’s framing lines up with the numbers: the doubt is about basic verification, not performance. The report also marks a change in priorities, with targeting capability overtaking content quality as the top criterion for video spending, cited by 49% of buyers and up ten percentage points from a year earlier.

Read against the trust numbers, this is a telling shift. Buyers are increasingly picking inventory based on who they can reach rather than what they’re actually reaching them through, effectively routing around the transparency problem instead of solving it.

Fraud Reaches Direct Deals

The trust gap is not only about mislabeled inventory. Research from DoubleVerify, published in May, found bot activity inside direct CTV buys from major advertisers, undercutting the assumption that buying direct or through private marketplaces prevents fraud. That assumption has been the industry’s working defense for years: pay more, buy direct, skip the resold inventory, and the fraud problem goes away. This finding breaks that logic.

In one consumer healthcare campaign, DoubleVerify reported that 34% of impressions went to bots, alongside 25% in a major consumer packaged goods campaign, both bought through direct deals. A third of a campaign’s impressions going to bots means a third of that budget bought nothing, no human ever saw the ad, and it happened in the buying method advertisers trusted most, the same one 43% of buyers in the IAB study already doubted.

The firm also found fraud scaling quickly, detecting 140% more schemes and variants in the first quarter of 2026 than a year earlier and identifying ten times as many fraudulent CTV apps in 2025 as in 2024. 

DoubleVerify estimates unprotected campaigns can lose about $1.8 million for every billion CTV impressions served. For a sense of scale, a billion impressions is a realistic run for a mid-to-large national campaign over a few months. That means a brand running a normal-sized CTV buy without independent verification could be losing seven figures without any indication in the platform-reported dashboard that anything is wrong, since bots don’t show up as failed delivery, they show up as delivered impressions.

What Buyers Want Now

The response from agencies is a push for proof over dashboards. Media buyers have told Digiday they are building direct relationships with supply partners and leaning on independent verification to confirm where inventory originates, rather than trusting platform-reported metrics alone. 

There’s a tension worth naming here. Direct relationships are the same buying method DoubleVerify just found riddled with bot traffic. The shift isn’t buyers concluding direct is safe again, it’s buyers concluding that no buying method is self-verifying, and that a third party checking the platform’s own numbers is now table stakes rather than an extra step.

Doubt is spreading to live programming as well, with one-third of advertisers saying live content does not justify its premium price, citing gaps in measurement and business outcomes. Live inventory has always commanded a premium on the logic that it draws a large, attentive, hard-to-fake audience in the moment. If a third of advertisers no longer buy that logic, it suggests the same verification gap undermining CTV generally is starting to erode the one category of inventory that was supposed to be immune to it.

In May, The Keyword reported that social video overtook CTV in ad-spend growth in the first part of the same IAB study. CTV has already won the case for spending. It now has to win the case for accountability.