The Data Wall in CTV – and How to Break Through It.

As CTV moves from experiment to growth engine, digital publishers face a harsh truth: the single biggest drag on monetization isn’t distribution or content or user growth. It’s data. Or more accurately, the lack of usable, connected, decision-grade data across their increasingly complex operations.

At Switchboard, we work with some of the most sophisticated digital publishers and media owners in the market — from Dish Media, Estrella MediaCo, the Financial Times, Conde Nast, and retail media innovators. In nearly every case, the story is the same: leadership knows what they want to answer, but often they can’t get to the answer without weeks of manual work.

The Visibility Gap

The core problem isn’t the absence of data. In fact, most organizations posses large amounts of data, the challenge is that the majority of it is disparate and fragmented. CTV makes this worse. Inventory sits across owned and third-party apps. Monetization flows through a patchwork of ad servers, SSPs/DSPs, and OMS systems. Attribution is attempted using third-party vendors that don’t align on metrics or definitions. And where certain DSP integrations come with their own self attribution or device graphs, these proprietary methods may or may not be tied to another DSP’s attribution. Consequently, no one platform sees the whole picture.

One client, the COO of a fast-growing CTV network, put it plainly: “We just launched a new show. We spent millions. What’s the impact?” No clear view of demand. No real-time pacing. No ability to adjust pricing. That’s not just a measurement issue. It’s a business execution gap.

The Cost of Flying Blind

Without unified data:

• Inventory gets undersold because pacing and fill rates are unclear.
• Inventory gets mispriced as CPMs get negotiated down because you can’t prove performance. Perhaps more importantly, CPMs can’t be set higher or negotiated higher because there is no central understanding of the value of a specific impression.
• Client services teams spend hours building ad hoc reports just to keep buyers informed, often supported by other internal teams to compile these reports. Even then, most of these reports don’t come close to what buyers are interested in seeing.
  

This hits revenue directly. The opportunity cost of inaction is real. We’ve seen it with legacy broadcasters struggling to modernize their stack and also with newer digital players scaling faster than their systems can handle.

A strong example is our work with Estrella MediaCo. Before Switchboard, they struggled with fragmented data across streaming and ad systems. With the majority of reporting being manual in nature, each platform had to be logged into, individual reports extracted, then pivoted in spreadsheets to get the numbers lined up. This delayed revenue reporting and limited their ability to optimize. By unifying and automating their data workflows, they gained faster, more accurate insights that unlocked stronger monetization strategies and improved advertiser confidence in media performance. For example, by pulling together monetization performance for an advertiser’s campaigns across multiple SSPs and DSPs, the team was able to better prioritize supply partners and provide a large holding company with client-specific view of how their campaigns were pacing in real time. This led to an increase in spend from the holding company across multiple new regions.

What the Leaders Are Doing

Among our most successful customers, we’re seeing a pattern of pragmatic execution. It doesn’t start with an enterprise-wide replatform. It starts with business problems closest to revenue:

• At Dish Media, it meant enabling yield visibility and more accurate forecasting across addressable inventory, by bringing together and normalizing inventory and sell-through reporting across multiple ad servers and supply sources.
  
• At MediaCo, it meant consolidating data from FAST channels, ad logs, and rate cards to build a unified view of sell-through to quickly assess the impact of new content and delivery channels.
  
• At Financial Times, it meant automating the aggregation and normalization of dozens of disconnected data sources into a trusted, centralized foundation to support faster, more accurate reporting.

In every case, these leaders didn’t try to boil the ocean on day one. They started by automating the painful manual work teams were already doing, then expanded as they saw success. This move away from resource-draining manual pipelines toward fully automated, reliable data workflows is a critical first step – and one that can unlock faster, more confident decision-making across the business

How to Start Making Progress

1. Anchor on painful or manual operational use cases
Start with the questions revenue and ops teams already ask daily: Are we pacing to deliver? Which campaigns are underperforming? How do we increase fill rates? Which partners are delivering the best revenue?

2. Establish a Single Source of Truth
Before thinking about dashboards, solve the basics: is data centrally located, accessible, and trusted? Does your organization fully own it, or is it trapped in someone else’s silos? To make it meaningful, wow will we connect orders to ad units, impressions to revenue, rates to delivery?  Co-locating and cleanly joining across your OMS, ad server, and SSPs/DSPs, 1P and 3P billing gets you 80% of the way.

3. Win inside a single unit
Don’t try to solve everything at once. Pick one business unit, app, or vertical where data access is painful. Prove value there first, then roll out more broadly.

What’s at Stake

Getting CTV data, and thus visibility, right, is nothing less than existential. The growth of CTV depends on performance buyers, and performance buyers will demand ever-higher bars around data hygiene. Publishers must unify their data if they are to capture the growth in these buyers. Without clean, unified data, publishers are stuck guessing. Advertisers know it. Revenue suffers.

But for teams that can connect the pipes and bring clarity across their operations, the payoff is real: more effective monetization both at the top- and bottom-line, faster decision-making, and a stronger reputation as a trusted partner in a market still figuring out how to measure itself.

The infrastructure to solve this isn’t on the horizon – it’s already in use by teams who are eliminating blind spots and making better calls in real time.

Ready to break through your CTV data wall? Explore Switchboard solutions.