For years, Connected TV has been the darling of digital media with a performance problem. Glowing screens? Check. Premium content? Sure. But when it came to proving outcomes—real, measurable business outcomes—it was all vibes and vapor. We were buying hope, not results.

Then something changed.

Quietly, and with little fanfare, a bold new promise entered the room:
Guaranteed performance.

Outcomes over impressions. Conversions or you don’t pay.
A model that sounds suspiciously like… search advertising.

And leading this movement? Platforms like TVScientific, MNTN, and a growing handful of others who are ready to put their margin where their math is.

It sounds like a revolution.
But is it actually one?

Let’s give credit where it’s due. TVScientific and others are not just iterating—they’re challenging the fundamental economics of how CTV has been bought and sold.

Here’s the pitch, stripped down to its essentials:

For an industry long addicted to CPMs and murky MMM models, this is radical stuff.

Gone are the prayers to the GRP gods. Gone is the spreadsheet alchemy that passed for attribution. This is TV—but with a calculator attached.

And that’s good. Really good.
Especially for performance marketers who’ve been waiting years for CTV to stop acting like a branding black box.

TVScientific in particular has leaned hard into this space with what they call “outcome-based TV.” It’s clean, it’s confident, and it’s incredibly appealing.

But part of our job at ADOTAT is to ask: what’s behind the curtain?

Let’s be honest: even with CTV-native platforms, attribution remains a beautiful disaster. Log-level data? Great. Third-party integrations? Sure. But the truth is that most CTV platforms still rely on a tangled web of IP matching, modeled conversions, and probabilistic guesswork.

TVScientific emphasizes their patented measurement and platform interoperability. And they do offer more transparency than most. But ask any growth marketer to connect those dots cleanly into Salesforce or Shopify, and you’ll hear the deep sigh of someone who’s been burned before.

Better than before? Definitely.
Perfect? Still a long way off.

Let’s talk fine print. TVScientific says over 70% of applicants qualify for their guaranteed outcome programs. That’s impressive—but it still means 30% don’t even make it past the front gate.

And it’s not hard to see why.
These models work best for brands that already have:

That’s a very specific slice of the market—mostly DTC, eCommerce, and app marketers who’ve already dialed in their funnel. If you’re a B2B company, a regional brand with offline sales, or running multi-touch campaigns? This isn’t for you.

This isn’t democratization. It’s actuarial marketing: curated guarantees for pre-qualified clients.

Here’s where things get murky.

TVScientific guarantees outcomes—but in most cases, the advertiser still controls the offer, creative, site speed, UX, and checkout process. If something fails, is the fault the platform’s… or yours?

In fairness, the platform can only optimize what it can see. But in a world where marketers still fight to unify basic ad and commerce data, the idea of guaranteeing a business result without owning the entire journey? It raises questions.

Are we splitting responsibility or deferring it entirely?

Let’s be clear: this is real progress.

TVScientific deserves credit for pushing the industry to rethink old buying models. This isn’t a gimmick—it’s a bold rethink of how TV can drive real business results. And for some advertisers, it will be a game-changer.

But it’s not a revolution for everyone.

This model still relies on selective qualification, fuzzy attribution, and favorable conditions. It solves for performance—but only when the environment is already rigged to perform.

In that way, it’s not unlike insurance:
The risk is pooled. The math is tight. And the odds are always just slightly in the house’s favor.

To get past the pitch decks and into the meat, we asked Jason Fairchild, CEO of TVScientific, the obvious question:

“Is this a real revolution—or a glossy reframe of the same old game?”

To his credit, Jason didn’t dodge. He gave us straight answers—without AI fluff, brand-safe soundbites, or a single mention of the metaverse.

Here’s what we learned:

If your campaign tanks—zero conversions, nada—TVScientific eats the media cost.
No backdoor billing. No “oops, we meant view-through conversions.” They underwrite each campaign.
Is that sustainable long-term? We’ll dig into that in Part 3. But for now: respect. That’s a real bet.

TVScientific doesn’t touch your assets. You get 100% creative control.
Which sounds great—until you remember: your funnel is now their liability.
Fairchild admits this is a “huge growth area” and that we’re still in the early innings of creative-outcome optimization. Translation: If your checkout process looks like 1997 eBay, that’s on you.

They’ll work with your preferred partner. They’re integrated with “most/all” attribution vendors.
But they don’t enforce one. You want clean validation? You bring your own measuring stick.
That flexibility is nice—but also means buyer beware. If you don’t ask the right questions, you might be reading your own reflection.

According to Fairchild, Guaranteed Outcomes isn’t just for skin-care startups and mattress kings.
He claims success across ecommerce, legal, higher ed, automotive, and more.
High-AOV? Long conversion cycles? Their model supposedly adapts. How?
They look at early signal curves—just like a studio projecting a movie’s box office after opening weekend.
“It’s just math,” he says. Sure. But as every CMO knows, math gets fuzzy fast when humans click things.

TVScientific says they’re not hitting ceilings.
No supply crunch. No attribution lag.
Everything’s automated. Everything’s fine.
That’s the claim. Whether that holds up at scale (or under multi-brand pressure) is a question we’ll tackle in a future issue. But for now, no alarm bells—just very confident automation.

We reached out to MNTN for their take on the rise of Guaranteed Outcomes.

They didn’t respond with a quote. Or anything.

I think they may have just responded with a high-res photo of Ryan Reynolds, smirking into the distance, like he just disrupted another industry without opening his email.

Yes, he’s very pretty.

No, that still doesn’t answer any of our questions.

Let’s get this straight before someone clips a quote for their Slack channel:

I’m not here to “expose” adtech. I’m not hunting for scandals or trying to score points by dunking on companies.

I’m here to ask one question, again and again: What exactly are you buying—and what are you being sold instead?

That’s the difference between ADOTAT+ and every polished blog post draped in gradients and buzzwords. I’m not rewriting press releases or “shaping the narrative.” I don’t have to keep sponsors happy.

I don’t have to make anyone look good in Cannes.

My only job is to make sure you—the media buyer, the operator, the founder, the quietly skeptical CMO—have the full picture before you hit "approve."

That’s all.

No one else is doing this.

Not because they don’t care, but because they can’t.

Most newsletters have revenue tied to the very platforms they’re supposedly covering. Try digging into a platform’s attribution model when their logo is in your footer.

Not the staged panels. Not the sanitized analyst decks. The actual levers being pulled behind the scenes.

So here’s what’s coming next:

🧮 “Guaranteed” Math, Deconstructed
We’re pulling apart the internal economics of outcome-based pricing—you’ll finally see the implied CPMs baked into performance claims, and why most vendors really hope you don’t run that math.

🔐 Clean Room Confidential
New scorecard coming: who’s laundering consent, who’s actually protecting data, and which CMPs are just permission slips for surveillance.

👀 Auditability Index
How "verifiable" is your vendor's attribution, really? We’re building the first tiered index—platform by platform—based on signal strength, log access, and methodology transparency. Prepare to be... disappointed.

🚫 The Quiet Denials List
A list of vendors quietly not offering outcome guarantees, and why. (Spoiler: it’s not because you’re “not ready.” It’s because their math doesn’t work unless you’re a unicorn.)

This isn’t theoretical. This is your budget, your Q4 planning, your reporting calls, and your bonus on the line.

ADOTAT+ is where the glossy claims get torn open and translated into operational reality. It’s where we trace the money, not the marketing.

If that sounds exhausting, good. It’s supposed to be.

You don’t need another blog hyping the next AI-powered data synergy. You need someone willing to say, “This smells like three-day-old attribution soup and here’s why.”

And if you’ve made it this far without a subscription?

Honestly, you’re flying blind—with a map drawn by the same people who built the maze.

Stay Bold. Stay Curious. Know More Than You Did Yesterday.