We sat down with Mario Diez, Peer39 CEO, to look into what’s on the horizon for connected TV (CTV). Diez discusses the industry’s challenges when it comes to the channel and what we can expect to see over the coming year. Diez also expands on the power of contextual, as well as the tools which are helping advertisers streamline their CTV experience. 

What are the major challenges we can expect to see across CTV/video in 2025?

People are consuming a great deal of content nowadays, across a variety of different services. Alongside an increasing supply of content for consumers, we also have many new advertisers and buyers entering the arena. These players are coming into the market looking for signal – data points which describe the content of a video stream and the ads that appear in it – for optimisation and performance. 

While being quite exciting, this also exposes one of the biggest challenges in CTV: signal’s consistency when it comes to finding inventory that is relevant to the desired audiences, assessing factors like quality and adjacency, and verifying the right inventory is being bought. Contextual signals are emerging as a great toolset for all of this. Signals are something advertisers need, so with the influx of new advertisers and new buying methods coming in, publishers want to start pushing more of these signals into the ecosystem. Currently, I see this as both the largest challenge and opportunity. 

What is the state of inventory as it stands? Are we set to see a new programmatic marketplace boom? 

CTV audiences will continue to grow – I doubt that will be debated! There will continue to be more inventory, more data, and more advertisers who traditionally were not involved in video. A lot of these new advertisers will come into the video ecosystem wanting to apply the same digital native buying methods to CTV as they would have to linear, with the goal of getting more out of their ad spend. As more advertisers employ these methods and suppliers provide more signals, we’ll continue to see programmatic and biddable being a primary method for CTV buying. 

What products are helping streamline the CTV experience for brands?

Primarily, tools which improve visibility for advertisers, allowing them to quickly assess factors such as the quality of programming or inventory. Tools which give them insight into whether they are delivering their ads during prime-time, or overnight…signals they use to ensure – or discover – what other content is working for the audiences they are targeting. For the buyers using biddable and programmatic channels, who harness different signals to inform their buys, easy-to-access targeting tools and analytics, both for optimisation and post-campaign analysis, can facilitate much smarter media investment.  

As we move into an environment increasingly focused on signal – with more combinations of data including relevance, reach, and the message – I think we will see many advertisers further analysing how they can optimise and automate messaging specific to different data signals. This could look like using genre signals to push a certain creative which contains humour. As signals become more apparent, there will be more ways for advertisers to personalise their ads. 

Leading on from the previous question, how can the combined power of CTV and contextual help brands and advertisers compete for attention?

Relevance, message, and reach are an incredibly powerful combination. If you look at previous market segments, you can really see the power of creative combined with audience and content. It can have a significant impact on performance and engagement with consumers. 

We’re likely to see advertisers increasingly wanting to develop a better experience with their video advertising. The best way to do this is matching their creative messaging, or developing multimessage models, to identify how these run in adjacency to different types of content. At Peer39, we spend a lot of time assisting both advertisers and publishers in identifying how signals can be better attributed to different types of campaigns and creatives, helping them learn what’s working and what isn’t, which is why analytics are so important. I think we will see a lot more focus on the experience of CTV ads, and what signals can be used to ensure the highest level of attention is being captured.