Truthset report: 40% of US open CTV ad spend, $7.4bn, lost to bad data

August 18, 2026 · thedrum.com

Nano Interactive's Kelly Jahrnes cites Truthset's 2026 State of Data Accuracy report, which puts the cost of inaccurate data in the open US CTV programmatic market at roughly 40% of every dollar spent, an estimated $7.4bn. The content object in a CTV bid request can carry content ID, title, episode, series, genre, rating, keywords, language and length, but publishers fill those fields inconsistently or leave them blank. A rom-com tagged in one taxonomy can appear as standard comedy in another, and Peacock's ID for an episode of The Office won't automatically match Hulu's ID for the same episode. Brand safety information covering addiction, abuse, violence, racism or suicide is also frequently missing from the bidstream, and the fragmentation deepens across a supply chain where a single platform can route bids through 30-plus SSPs.

Campaigns lean on proxies such as app lists, Deal IDs, broad demographics and completion rates to compensate, and those metrics create a false sense of control: an ad completed in a screensaver environment reports the same as one completed during a live sports broadcast. Repeated ads within a single break, a visible symptom of the underlying identity gap, have been tied to a 16% decline in purchase intent. IAB Europe's CTV Working Group has published a CTV Measurement Framework and Transparency Principles for public comment, aiming to standardize metrics like viewability and video completion, while Nano Interactive argues buyers can act now by cross-matching partial content fields across publishers and layering in open-web context such as show descriptions, cast and sensitive-content flags to fill the gaps before a global standard arrives.