So, you bought “premium CTV inventory.”

You paid triple what you normally would for digital display. Your agency said it was the good stuff—TV but better. TV with data. TV with real-time bidding. TV with lasers and unicorns and “audience precision.”

You were told your ad was going to run before the next episode of The Bear, during Love Island, or maybe on the NFL but smarter. Instead?

Your beautifully crafted, brand-safe, strategy-backed ad ran on “Soothing Fireplaces: Volume 3,” sandwiched between a Flarp! commercial and an autoplay meditation app designed by someone’s cousin in Ukraine.

Welcome to the CTV economy: a system that promises champagne but delivers tap water—run through six middlemen who each took a sip before you ever got a drop.

Let’s break down the biggest lie in Connected TV.

Let’s not pretend we haven’t heard it: “This inventory is top-shelf. You’re buying Hulu. Disney+. Netflix! Real shows. Real audiences. Real outcomes!”

But what you’re actually buying most of the time? Long-tail filler content and shovelware channels uploaded by companies that have gamed the FAST system like it’s the App Store in 2009.

Ever watched 24/7 Cat Videos or TV Gold: Weather Screensavers of Arizona? No? Your audience hasn’t either—but your ad did.

The worst part? This inventory is often bundled with better content by SSPs and aggregators who know damn well that if they sold it on its own, it’d be worth less than expired potato salad.

And just in case you think this is rare—it’s not. It’s designed this way. The bundlers and resellers count on the opacity. You’re being sold mystery meat with a filet mignon price tag.

Yes, and I’m the Queen of Denmark.

SSPs (Supply-Side Platforms) were created to streamline the buying process. That’s the sales pitch. In practice, they’re more like a travel agent that books you five flights to get to New Jersey, and charges you full fare for each one.

You go in paying a $100 CPM, thinking it’s high because it's quality. But then:

By the time your ad hits a screen, the publisher might get $18. Maybe. If they’re lucky. And if you’re lucky, that screen is actually turned on.

And God help you if there’s a makegood. Now you're paying again to fix the mess you already got billed for.

It’s like buying a $200 Wagyu steak and being served a microwaved hot dog. Then being told the hot dog is “lean protein with nostalgic value.”

Look, let’s stop pretending that CTV is some kind of omni-channel performance unicorn. It’s not. It's still TV. It’s one-directional, non-clickable, non-engaging unless you’re measuring vibes.

And yet, every pitch includes some vaguely magical line like, “CTV drives measurable outcomes at scale!”

Measured how, exactly?

If you squint hard enough, that “outcome” is usually a sketchy brand lift study or a probabilistic attribution model that’s more fiction than forecast. One major holding company was recently caught using panel-based extrapolations to estimate outcomes for CTV buys—yes, extrapolations. As in, we asked 70 people what they remembered seeing and called it science.

Also, try explaining to your CFO why “Household Reach Uplift” isn’t the same as “Sales.” Go ahead. I’ll wait.

If you’ve never seen how a VAST tag works in CTV, let me paint you a picture:

You: “I want my ad to run on premium inventory.”
Ad tech: “Sure, just let me send this through 14 anonymous servers in 3 countries before it gets there.”

A VAST tag—ideally a simple XML delivery tool—has become a Kafkaesque nightmare of chained redirects, resold supply, undisclosed app bundling, and layered execution.

Diagram it out and it looks like Charlie Day explaining Pepe Silvia:

Advertiser
↓
DSP
↓
SSP
↓
Reseller
↓
Video Aggregator
↓
CTV App
↓
TV Manufacturer Middleware
↓
Publisher (maybe)

Somewhere in that spaghetti, your ad is playing to a smart fridge, a paused screen, or an empty living room where someone left their Roku on while walking the dog.

Not you. Not your publisher. And definitely not your customer who got served five back-to-back ads during a knockoff Bob Ross painting tutorial.

The real winners? The middlemen. The verification bros. The fraud vendors. The resellers. The “curators.” The cookie-less identity overlays that just guessed everyone was a 35-year-old woman in New Jersey.

It’s not a bug—it’s the business model.

How to Buy CTV Without Getting Robbed Blind
We’re talking private deals, forensic log-level audits, calling bluff on curated garbage, and naming the SSPs who still quietly let ambient screensaver inventory through.

Yes, we name names. No, we don’t apologize.

• “My rep said this was running on ESPN.”
• “Why is my ad playing during ‘Lo-Fi Rain for Studying’?”
• “The campaign had 300,000 impressions, but only 14 unique households?”

Drop a 🤯 if you’ve lived this. Or pour one out for your last media budget.

Stay bold. Stay curious. Know more than you did yesterday.

And if you’re not an ADOTAT+ member yet… now might be the time to stop getting played.

If you think your CTV ad buy is clean, think again. In the latest ADOTAT+ breakdown, we map the 14 middlemen slicing up your $50 CPM like it’s Thanksgiving at a reseller’s house.

Some of them add value. Most just add margin.

📉 Real CPM math:
You spend $50 → Publisher gets $8 → Everyone else takes a bite.

We’re not moralizing—we’re just showing the full receipt.

🔐 In this issue (ADOTAT+ only):

💥 This is the playbook nobody hands you at an upfront.

You can keep pretending your “premium” CTV buy isn’t routed through RelaxingLakeSoundsTV, or you can subscribe to ADOTAT+ and know exactly who’s profiting from your optimism.