OLV is Not CTV. Some CTV Ad Platforms are Deceiving Advertisers

I love adtech. I really do. But sometimes I get frustrated with certain actors in our industry who hide behind the complexity of what is otherwise an incredible ecosystem.

Here’s a recent example. A customer of ours tested an alternative platform. They were excited to report that their test had delivered a lower cost per action than our Performance TV campaign. Naturally, the advertiser wanted to understand why our numbers weren’t as strong.

Thankfully, the customer was transparent and shared their data. Unfortunately, it took significant escalation — including threats to pull their business — before they could get even basic summary campaign data from the other platform. And when they did, it revealed the kind of shady tactics some companies use to manufacture “good results.”

Specifically: The customer thought they were buying CTV. In reality, a large portion of the campaign delivery was OLV (online video), and a significant chunk was display.

Combined, OLV and display made up over 50% of total delivery. Even worse: both were treated as if they were CTV impressions from an attribution standpoint, simply because they could be cookie-tracked.

Let me explain how egregious this is:

• OLV is not CTV. OLV can run on cluttered websites, often with no clear content adjacency. The share of screen could be near-zero.

• Viewability standards for OLV are extremely low (e.g., one pixel for one second).

• OLV may appear alongside short-form, poor-quality, or even no content.

• There are no content standards for OLV. (And for anyone tempted to argue that OLV is on par with CTV, don’t. You’ll lose that argument.)

Because of these factors, OLV is significantly cheaper than premium CTV. Blending in OLV and display within a “Performance TV” campaign serves one purpose: to artificially inflate CTV attribution. This is effectively a modern version of old-school “cookie bombing.”

Here’s how that works: If you're buying OLV at a $3.00 CPM and mixing in some $2.00 display, you bring down the blended CPM while still claiming all impressions as eligible for CTV view-through attribution. Naturally, your cost per outcome will look better — but only because it’s based on flawed measurement and dogshit tactics designed to manipulate CTV’s performance KPIs. They’re artificially lowering costs to increase ROAS.

This is a known issue in how many MMPs and non-transparent CTV companies handle attribution. And it's an easy way for low-tech “Performance TV” companies to cheat the system.

Why do they do it? First: financial incentives. Second: because doing it the right way is hard and expensive. Anyone can buy CTV. That’s easy. The hard part is building tech to make it perform to advertiser-declared outcomes.

At tvScientific, we've invested over $50 million in our TV Outcome Optimization platform. We’ve received six patents for our technology. We guarantee outcomes — in a fully transparent framework. It’s not easy, and it’s not cheap. But it’s the right way to do it.

So what can advertisers do?

Good news — this is a simple problem to solve:

1. Mandate 100% transparency into what media is being delivered within your Performance TV campaign. If you can’t get log-level data, fire your vendor. (They’re not a partner if they’re not transparent.)
   

2. Only buy wall-mounted CTV and streaming TV content delivered via OTT devices (including tablets). And make sure it’s verifiable with log-level data.

Two simple steps. Problem solved.

Tell your performance marketing friends: Friends don’t let friends buy OLV as CTV.